NOTES1 Corinthians 1:1. Called (to be) an apostle.—Only here and in Romans 1:1. For exact force choose between, (a) one of Christ’s “called” ones, who am also, in point of fact, an apostle; and (b) called specially to this, that I might be one of Christ’s apostles [q.d. perhaps, “Though at Corinth there are some who say that I was not so called”]. Both are true; the latter here more likely. The external call and ordination of the Church (Acts 13:1-2) coinciding with, and following upon, the internal and primary call of Christ Himself (Acts 22:17-21). By the will of God.—Shutting out, (a) man’s authority, (b) any personal merit in Paul. Sosthenes.—Not certainly he of Act 18:17, though Bengel believes the beating had the happy effect of making him a Christian; as, similarly, the impressment of Simon of Cyrene may have made him and his wife and sons Christians (Mark 15:21; Romans 16:13).1 Corinthians 1:2. Church of God.—So he calls it (but query the reading?) a little later (Acts 20:28). New Testament equivalent of Old Testament “congregation of Jehovah” (e.g. Numbers 16:3; Deuteronomy 23:2). In Corinth.—In Corinth, of all unlikely places! (see Homily). Sanctified.—Note the perfect tense. A sanctification of relation to God (as 1 Corinthians 7:14), established at a definite date in the past, continuing into the present. Called (to be) saints.—Parallel to Paul’s call to office (1 Corinthians 1:1). Call upon the name.—As Ananias bade Paul do, when he was becoming a Christian (Acts 22:16) [N. B. reading]. As Paul had heard Stephen do (Acts 7:59) [cf. Paul’s “I appeal (same word) unto Cζsar” (Acts 25:11). But this only illustrates a special case of the “calling upon.” Word covers whole range of Prayer, as in the Old Testament equivalent and LXX. parallels]. With all, etc.—Q.d. “I am not writing to you only, though to you primarily and immediately, i.e. my letter to you is also for all who invoke Christ in their prayers, everywhere and in all ages” [cf. Revelation 2:7, where what Christ says to Ephesus the Spirit says to the Churches]. Theirs and ours.—Most probably, “Their (Lord) and ours.”1 Corinthians 1:3.—Claudius Lysias (Acts 23:26), and even James (1 Corinthians 1:1) and the Council at Jerusalem (Acts 15:23), begin with “Greeting,” the ordinary secular phrase. Here enlarged and ennobled by the Gospel into “grace,” joined with the Old Testament “peace.” Note how, as matter of course, Paul makes Christ a concurrent and co-ordinate source of grace with the Father.1 Corinthians 1:4.—Dean Howson (Hulsean Lectures, Character of St. Paul, iv.) remarks upon this and many similar incidental indications of Paul’s tendency to break out into praise or prayer. “Pray without ceasing; in everything [even for the good in a Church so full of evils as the Corinthian] give thanks.”1 Corinthians 1:4. My God.—“My,” q.d. not only, “Whose I am, and whom I serve” (Acts 27:23), but also, “Whom I know, and call, and claim Mine!” (Philippians 4:19). “We belong to each other! I am His; He is mine. Note, “was given,” “were enriched” (R.V.).1 Corinthians 1:5.—“The grace,” namely this, that “ye were enriched.” Note, in Him” (R.V.). Cf. Colossians 2:9, “In Him dwelleth all the fullness, … and in Him ye are made full.” All utterance, all knowledge.—How glorious and serviceable, but rare, a combination of gifts! How “enriched” the man, the Church, who can speak in all needed modes of expression, all needed, or possible, phases of divine knowledge!1 Corinthians 1:6. Even as.—Q.d. your enrichment is after the glorious measure and fulness of the confirmation. The testimony.—Whose great, central subject and burden is Christ. Was confirmed.—A special instance of Mar 16:20. Other cases: Acts 2:4 (tongues), Acts 2:43 (wonders and signs), Acts 10:44; Acts 10:46 (Cornelius), Acts 19:1-6 (Baptist’s converts at Ephesus).1 Corinthians 1:7.—Q.d. “Whilst ye are, as the normal attitude of the Christian life, waiting for” (cf. 2 Peter 3:12; 2 Timothy 4:8; Hebrews 9:28).1 Corinthians 1:8.—It was confirmed; you shall be. Everybody and everything connected with the kingdom of God is “in power” (1 Corinthians 4:20). Note, “unreproveable” (R.V.).“Bold shall I stand in Thy great day;For who aught to my charge shall lay?”(Romans 8:33). “Shall not come into condemnation” (John 5:24).1 Corinthians 1:9.—Same connection of thought as 1 Thessalonians 5:24, viz. “Because He is faithful, He cannot but finish, by confirming you unto the end, what He began when He called you into the fellowship.” Fellowship of.—Your common sharing in and with (Romans 8:17) Him. So of and with are both in Hebrews 3:14. Note the solemn enumeration, at full length, of the names and titles of Christ. Paul a herald proclaiming the names and style of the King his Master.1 Corinthians 1:10. “Fellowship?”—Then what is this I hear about “divisions”? Divisions.—Schisms. Not yet four mountains; as yet one mountain with four summits (Evans). Joined together.—Medical word (“restore,” Galatians 6:1), as if suggesting, Not yet cut off from the body, but dislocated in the body. “Let the displacement be reduced, and all brought back to ease and peace.” .—1 Corinthians 1:1-3 Observe (I.) The Twofold Call: (A) Paul’s to Apostleship; (B) Theirs to Saintship. Observe (II.) The Twofold Holiness: (A) a. Ideal, b. Relative; (B) Real. Observe (III.) The Twofold Bond of Fellowship: (A) “Our Brother”; (B) “That call upon … theirs and ours.” Observe (IV.) The Twofold Blessing, with a Twofold Source: (A) “Grace and Peace”; (B) Father; Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 1:1-3. Observe (I.) The twofold call: (A) Paul’s to Apostleship; (B) Theirs to Saintship.—A. 1. He was “separated, even from his mother’s womb, and called through God’s grace” (Galatians 1:15). “No man taketh,” wisely, “this honour unto himself,” any more than did even the Great Apostle of our profession His Priesthood (Hebrews 5:4). How should he run, to any purpose, unless he be sent? 2. As we speak, conceiving of God’s thoughts and purposes and work with “before” and “after” and “after the manner of men,” this call to take up and fulfil Office is a thing more nearly depending upon “the will of God” alone than is the other call to assume and realize and exhibit Character. He seems to give no account of His ways, e.g., in an analogous case, in selecting, using, blessing, and perhaps thus setting aside, one Nation rather than another for some special purpose in His government of the world; or (e.g. Romans 9) in choosing to make the Life of the world depend upon the line of Isaac rather than of Ishmael, or of Jacob rather than of the elder Esau; or why, of all the fishermen in Galilee, Peter, of all the publicans, Matthew, or of all Saul’s family circle, himself, should have been selected for pre-eminent apostolate. It often looks as if such call were precedent to all qualification or grace. 3. And yet, not irrespective of natural qualification or grace. (But the “natural” is the ordering of the Author of Nature and the Creator of the individual Man.) Paul was a suitable vessel, as well as “a chosen vessel.” Are we to say “chosen” because “suitable”? In natural endowment, as well as by providential training, he was the very man to carry the “grace” (Romans 1:5), and to do the work of an apostle. A thorough Israelite, in mind, and education, and sympathy; and yet from Tarsus, a Gentile city, where he escaped something of the rigidity and narrowness of Palestinian Judaism, such as would have entirely disqualified him for approaching the Gentile mind and heart; a noble personal character even before his conversion; he was made for the work, and was only waiting the conversion and the call and the qualifying Holy Spirit. 4. A call to the ministry always presupposes: (a) Gifts. Without these natural points of fitness, not even grace can make the best man a successful minister. Given these, the rest is a question of prayer and hard work. Grace may always be had for the asking (James 1:5 : “If any man lack, … let him ask,” etc.). Conversely, the possession of the gifts may set up a fair presumption that their possessor is designed for their complementary work. He should hold himself in readiness for the definite “call.” (b) Grace. Grace may fail to get married to gifts; they may be divorced through unfaithfulness, sloth, or sin. May not even an apostle fall from his grace? Is there only one Judas, an apostle who never fairly began his special work? The unfathomable mystery of the twin problems of Evil and of Free-will of course lies all around and beneath. But as matter of practical conduct, are there no men designed by natural equipment for apostleship, for the ministry, for honourable and blessed Church office who have turned aside from the “call,” or by early giving up self to sin or the world have barred the call which might else have come? Or, short of this, are there none in the Church designed for higher service than what they actually fulfil; who are blessed in their business, but were meant for the ministry; who honour God, and are honoured by Him, but who hold only a second-best place, and receive only a second-best blessing? (c) Fruit. Have they, upon experiment made, found the natural equipment and the added grace fruitful in “turning (Acts 26:18) some from darkness to light”? If this never follows—though “fruit” is hard to judge of, it is so many-sided, and sometimes so obscure a thing—then there has been a mistake somewhere. A physician of souls, who never heals anybody—however he may be diplomaed—has missed his “calling.” (d) Happy for the “apostle” if there be the concomitant, complementary, independent, clear calls, within from the Master, and without from the God-directed Church. (See Critical Notes, 1 Corinthians 1:1, supra.) Happy, if he can say to many, “The seal of my apostleship are ye” (chap. 1 Corinthians 9:2). Happy, if the “call” never become to an unfaithful steward of it (chap. 1 Corinthians 4:2) a condemnation and a torturing memory. B. 1. Every call involves in the response to it both Responsibility and Blessing. The call to Office throws up most prominently the Responsibility; the call to Saintship the Blessing. It is a perpetual invitation. Observe in 1 Thessalonians 5:24, “Faithful is He that—not called, but—calleth you, who also will do it,” viz. “will sanctify you wholly,” etc. 2. The call to take up the life of the Christian has always this at the heart of it: “Be ye holy” [“Ye shall be holy”]. But it comes in many shapes, according as the ear and heart are ready, or not, to catch and respond to this, its truest meaning and purpose. To the weary, sin-sick, world-sick, unsatisfied life: “Come to Me; I will give you Rest!” To many a God-fearing Israelite, bound under a yoke of multiplied and vexatious prescriptions, “a yoke which neither he nor his fathers were able to bear” (Acts 15:10), the Gospel came as a call “to liberty” (Galatians 5:13). And such have their sympathising analogues in every generation. To souls at lower levels and of duller ear the call has to come, thundering, “Escape for thy life! There is ‘wrath to come.’ ” 3. And, as many forms, so many methods, of the call. A friend stricken down by the side of a Luther “calls.” The invisible seems suddenly to break in upon a sense-bound, world-narrowed man, he hardly knows how or why. He is looking into an open grave, and finds himself gazing into eternity; he is gazing blankly, stunned, at a letter lying upon his office desk, telling him of a great loss, and even the letter and the immediate loss fade away and disappear; he finds himself, “very inconsequently,” pondering, “What shall it profit a man?” etc. He is having one of many, oft-repeated calls. As before a worldling, man or woman, in the very whirl of the world’s life, there suddenly rises up a fair and lovely Ideal of a holy life; strangely the heart goes out, approvingly, longingly, toward it. Not always responded to, but there is the call. And even the man who responds only to the call of his fears of wrath and hell, finds when he enters upon the new life [and there is no “seeing” the kingdom of God” without “entering” it, John 3:3, compared with 5] that he has begun to “follow” not chiefly after safety and heaven, but “after holiness” (Hebrews 12:14). 4. Every man “had his calling” (chap. 1 Corinthians 7:20). The secular station and business is by the call of God, and therefore holy. And conversely, holiness is the calling, the business, of the spiritual life. “A Christian? Yes; but he is not working much at it,” is the reason of so many ineffective, unsatisfied Christian lives. They “grieve the Holy Spirit” who calls them, and would help them, to holiness. It is an interest of their lives, but should be the main interest and business. They are called to be saints; but being saints wants attending to, seriously and diligently, as a holy “vocation.” [The preacher may notice and use: (a) The distinction between κεκλημένος, e.g. Matthew 22:3-4; Matthew 22:8, the Supper parable, and the κλητοί, here and in the similar passage, Romans 1, ad init. The κλητοί are the new people of God, the new Israel; their calling being ideally complete. In κεκλημένος (perf. part.) we see the actual, historical calling of individuals being carried on. (b) The calling is in the root of ἐκκλησία=Church.] Observe (II.) The twofold holiness: (A) a. Ideal, b. Relative; (B) Real.—(A) They are sanctified in Christ Jesus; (B) They are called to be saints. A. 1. Every great, leading Idea of Revelation, that of Holiness, like the rest, was revealed “in divers portions and in divers manners.” [So God, in the ordering of the historical, physical unfolding of His mind and purpose in creation, led up to Man by preluding hints and anticipatory forms, revealing Man “in divers portions and in divers manners,” until at last Adam stood forth the complete utterance of His thought, toward which He had been working all through the ages. Yet He had a still grander Word to speak forth, which is heard, seen, in His Incarnate Son. Perfect, ideal human nature and human life are there (Hebrews 2:8-9); a sinless Humanity in perfect fellowship with the Divine. All such subsidiary, partial revelations of God’s thoughts, as that about Holiness, follow on the same lines, obey the same law of disclosure, because they are really sub-sections of the greater disclosure. Their progressive unfolding is part of the greater progression and unfolding.] He began with a holiness of relation to Himself. “Holy” days, not physically in any way different from common days; “holy” ground, not distinguishable from the adjacent soil; “holy” garments, neither finer nor more costly than ordinary ones; a “holiness” which might belong to the firstborn produce of a flock, or a field, or a family, and even to the “brass” of the censers of Korah and his associates;—in all these the “holiness” was only separation, from common use and human ownership, that they might be devoted to the exclusive use and worship of Jehovah. [So, in the Polynesian groups, the order of a chief might make food, or property, or persons, tabu, and exclusively for himself.] In the Mosaic code such embodiments and presentations of “holiness” abounded. But this was only an elementary lesson, given to a nation which had barely passed childhood in spiritual knowledge. In the mind of God, to speak humanly, all these looked forward to, were the first steps in a path leading human thought and practice toward a real holiness. Separateness is by no means the only, and the final, meaning of “holiness,” in either the Old Testament, or (certainly) in the New Testament. “Separation is here [story of Balaam: ‘The people dwelt alone’], as throughout the Old Testament, the symbol of sanctity, the outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace, the grace which impels men and women to the pursuit of a pure and unworldly life, and makes righteousness … their chief end and highest good” (S. Cox, Expos., 1883, p. 205). [The separateness is the first, and for some time the only, thing our children can see or appreciate about, e.g., the holiness of the Sabbath. The intrinsic value and the deep meaning of the day comes long after, and only fully through the perceptions and experiences of the regenerate life. They, in fact, begin, each of them, where Israel began centuries ago, and rapidly run through and summarise in their own learning the lessons and the process distributed over centuries in the education of mankind.] “We may be made partakers of His holiness” (Hebrews 12:10) shows that separateness of a relation to God is not the only or the chief idea, but a personal quality. Historically this is the final point reached in the Revelation of Holiness; really, if we may so speak, it is the first, the full, the originating point, as mapped out in God’s purpose. Looking back over the completed series of Divine teachings, we can now see that, starting from the idea of character, a holiness of quality which is like God’s own holiness, will, in a fallen world, whose life is affected at every point by sin, inevitably work out in a separateness of conduct and of relation to God. [In what God’s holiness consists is a profound question. Is the One Absolute Right, right for all worlds, and ages, and creatures, and for their Creator—Truth; the One Absolute Wrong, for Him and them, Falsehood, or as John says, “A Lie”? Can we be made “partakers of His holiness,” in any sense in which He will be a partaker with us, except that of Love, Life, Truth?] 2. Israel was ideally a people both personally holy and relatively holy. In point of fact, the personally holy individuals were very few in any age, and their holiness was often extremely imperfect. Yet the whole nation was “separated” in a hundred ways from all other peoples. It was the “people of” Jehovah’s “possession,” peculiarly His in a world where all peoples are His. Their King repeatedly saw in them, and in them dealt with, an ideal people, rather than with the actually fickle, rebellious, faithless, idolatry-loving nation. Honours, protection, knowledge, a distinguished regard showing itself in many ways, were given to the real Israel for the sake of the Ideal, and not withdrawn, even in days of deep or widespread national unfaithfulness; not until the time had come for a new Israel, a new “peculiar people,” a new “Church” [for the old, hear Stephen, Acts 7:38], indeed for a new Race to spring from a new, a second Adam. The localisation in one special land was to pass away; the restriction to one special nation was to be abolished; not national birth (John 1:13), but “new birth,” birth “of God” [ib.], was to be the principle of succession and evolution, as between generation and generation. The new Israel has stepped into the separated position of the old, and stands in the old speciality of relationship. At its most unworthy, worldly, depressed point the Church of Christ is still the separated people of God, “sanctified” as the old was. 3. “In Christ Jesus”. As Abraham and his seed through Isaac and Jacob are for many purposes to be regarded and dealt with as a great Unit of reckoning [e.g. Hebrews 7:5; Hebrews 7:10; Galatians 3:16-18; and N. B. how Isaiah goes back to this, Isaiah 51:2], and are “Abraham” in the transaction; so “Christ” stands, a great Unit of reckoning, for Christ and His people, God’s new people, sprung from Him, their new ancestor. He and they are taken together (Galatians 3:16; 1 Corinthians 12:12). His clients are in favour, for His sake, and along with Him. Indeed, they “are not,” do not count as existing, until they believe “into Him” and live “in Him.” There is no “sanctified” Israel to-day except the persons who are “in Christ.” [The relation of Christian baptism to this relative sanctification will come up later, chap. 1 Corinthians 7:14. B. 1. This is great honour and great responsibility. Each member of it is called to realise in himself the separateness, the relative holiness of the whole; and to realise in his character the likeness to God which underlies the separateness, and without which, indeed, the separateness becomes a mere empty conformity to certain codified restrictions and observances, mostly worthless, unless as expressing or assisting a life within, a conformity which will not long survive the extinction of the life within. “They will go out from us,” and merge themselves in the general mass of mankind, laying aside their separateness and “sanctification,” that they may be manifest that they “were not,” or had ceased to be, “of us” (1 John 2:19). 2. The separateness for God, and so from any use which cannot conceivably be included in life for Him, will be the only sanctification of which their body is capable. It is matter, morally neutral; its powers and appetites, necessarily in themselves morally neutral, may equally well be made the “instruments of righteousness” or “of unrighteousness” (Romans 6:13). It is for them to see that tongue, or hand, or foot, or eye, or ear, are always ready for use by God, and are never employed for anything incongruous with His mind and law; always held at His service and disposal; always denied to the use of Sin in every shape. The body can only be holy as the brass of the censers was holy. 3. So, too, imagination, curiosity, judgment, reasoning powers, will, etc., may be lent to sin, or may be kept for God. “May,”—they must. “Holiness unto the Lord” must be written across them all, in all their exercise. 4. And all this not merely by means of regulations imposed from without, but in obedience to a new law of life within. The indwelling Holy Spirit will be a new life, and a new power to the will. Love to God will exert “the expulsive power of a new affection,” and cast out with growing completeness every opposing motive. The same love will carry with it in willing subjection all the exercise of every faculty, and make all tend toward God; the self-centering of life, which is the highest form of Idolatry [the “Man of Sin” exhibits his culminating wickedness in this: “Himself set forth as God,” 2 Thessalonians 2:4], will be exchanged for a convergence of every line of feeling and action upon God as Centre and Object and End. “Separated for God” will be the instinctive, inevitable, happy expression of life within. 5. This will be perfect spiritual health, “life which is life indeed,” man’s life as in the original conception and intention of God in creating Man; and there will be the perfect correspondence between ideal and fact, the perfect self-consistency and internal harmony, which in its highest exemplification is the Truth of God’s own Character and Nature. 6. The very fact, then, that a man is of the Church, and “in Christ Jesus” is “sanctified,” speaks to him, “calls” to him, reminding Him of God’s purpose, and of God’s claim upon him. The Spirit, if he will keep an open ear, will be continually reminding him of the significance of his place in the new Israel, and be offering His own instruction, and leading up to a higher and ever higher type of Christian life. [The very world, in a way, calls him to holiness; for no one is more exacting, more just, in its expectation that Christians should be holy men than they, or has a higher standard of Christian separateness and holiness than the men “of the world.”] Observe (III.) A twofold bond of fellowship: (A) “Our brother” (the brother, Gr.); (B) “That call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, in every place, their (Lord) and ours.”—A. 1. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” were to our fathers’ ears associated with Unbelief and Revolution. Yet they are all, especially the last, ideas derived from the Gospel of Christ. They are not natural to the human heart; when its tendencies reveal themselves in simple openness, they emphasise Self and Class and Pride. The long experiment of antiquity showed that even a common manhood in the race was no native idea to the human heart; brotherhood was unheard of. The stranger in old times was, even as a point of vocabulary, also the enemy; Pascal remarks sadly on the persistency of the feeling, making this slope of the Pyrenees to be the home of “friends,” and the further slope the home of “enemies.” Shame that the preachers of Unbelief should have seemed often the louder, bolder preachers of “Fraternity,” whilst the Church of Christ, in some temporary, local embodiment, seemed to stand by the class distinction, the iniquitous privilege, the wealth as against poverty. If the Church hold its peace, the stones must needs cry out and preach the gospel of “brotherhood.” 2. “Barbarian, Scythian, bond, free, circumcision, uncircumcision, male, female, all one in Christ Jesus,” was the keynote of the new social system of Christianity. Neither sex, nor race, nor religion, nor station, carried privilege or prejudice as to status before God and access to His saving favour. In the early Church the slave and the master would sit at the same Lord’s Supper; it might even happen that the office-bearer was a slave, the private member the freeman. See how honourably prominent women are in the Roman Church, or the Philippian. Paul’s letter to Philemon, for the slave Onesimus, “the brother beloved” of his master Philemon, has always been significantly compared with a letter of Pliny the Younger to Sabinianus his friend, on behalf of an offending freed man, as revealing the utterly diverse conceptions of the relation between man and man on which the pagan and the Christian writers rest their pleading. In Philemon all hinges upon “brother.” Paul addresses his “brother.” Philemon (1 Corinthians 1:20), for his slave “brother” Onesimus (1 Corinthians 1:16). Given that a man were a Christian, early Christian literature lets us see him passing from Church to Church, from city to city, with his “letters of commendation” (2 Corinthians 3:1), receiving hospitality, finding every fellow-Christian ready to be his “host,” asking and receiving assistance in the business on which he was travelling (Romans 16:1; Romans 16:3; 3 John 1:5-8). 3. That Church is losing one of its crowning honours, and losing sight of one of the main points of that Magna Charta of the Kingdom of Heaven, upon which its existence and policy rest, which does not practically work out “a brotherhood” in its membership. Church life must be a Family life, and every member must feel at home. However men may be estimated outside, even as between Christian and Christian, within there should be no such invidious recognition of rank or wealth or education as shall prevent worth carrying a man to his true place in the brotherhood and its work and offices and honour. At the Table of the Elder Brother, above all, must all be forgotten but this, “Brother.” B. 1. The physical and mental unity of the race lies deeper than the surface divergencies which a century ago were made to argue multiplicity of origin—many “Adams” for as many great, originally distinct races of mankind. Indeed, the evolutionary drift of most modern science so far sustains Scripture teaching as to insist strongly upon the unity which is the natural basis of “brotherhood.” Paul’s argument on Areopagus is cogent still (Acts 18:26). 2. The moral unity, the oneness of heart and conscience, of sin and moral defect, of aspiration after God, is a yet stronger ground for claiming and according “brotherhood.” The same sinful heart in similar conditions brings forth the same crop of sins. The Bible is a universal book; every age and race finds it describe their case with equally correct fidelity. The same Gospel and its remedy awaken the same response, and exhibit the same happy results, in all hearts which give it fair trial. The operation of the soul-medicine is constant in every case. Peter’s unanswerable argument justifies still the broadest brotherliness: “God gave them the like gift, as He did unto us” (Acts 11:17). 3. The “Alliance” and Unity is “Evangelical,” not merely natural. They come to the same God, using the name of the same Christ. All have their access (Ephesians 2:18) through the same door, by the same “new and living Way.” A grand unity! On both sides of “the Pyrenees,” in the tents of two opposing armies, in the council-chambers of opposite political factions, in races as widely apart as Esquimaux and Fijian, as Englishman and native Australian, are found men closer together than ever blood-relationship made kindred by nature. Throughout all ages, and races, and countries, and churches, and ranks are distributed men, women, children, with this one mark in common—they use “the name of Jesus Christ our Lord” in prayer. Indeed, they agree in this, and hardly in more than this, that they pray to this one and the same God-man, who died equally for them all, and who lives on the throne of government for not man only, but for the universe, wearing the nature which belongs to them all. Every man of them feels that his Head is Christ. [Two Christian natives, of different tribes and language, once met at a South African mission station, and found the linguistic barrier insuperable, until one with a bright thought looked up and said, “Jehovah!” The other “caught on,” and responded “Jesus!” “Hallelujah!” said the first; “Amen,” the other. They had then exhausted their stock of Christian language, but “Jesus” had proved their brotherhood.] The world is every day girdled by a succession of praying hearts, who join the Mahometan, the Jew, the Theist, in drawing near to the same God as they, but who are differentiated from even these fellow-worshippers by this, that they “call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” One Baptism, one Supper, one Prayer, one Mediator, one Object of prayer and worship—Christ. [The hymnologies of the Churches, largely common to them all, the identical experiences of all the hearts in them all, who love Christ, vindicate the Church-wide brotherhood. Let them begin to worship, let them begin to talk of the inner life, and they understand each other. Their common bond is “the Name.”] “One Christ died for us all. We all live ‘in’ the one and the same Christ. We all rely on the same Saviour. We all pray to the same God-man. We are diverse enough, to say that we are all ‘Christians’; we are not too friendly with each other; but our common convergence upon Him, our common use of His name in prayer, stamps us one; we are ‘brethren’ of that Brother, ‘theirs and ours.’ ” Observe (IV.) The twofold blessing, with a twofold source.—A. “Grace and Peace.”— 1. “Grace” is the Greek, Gentile, secular word, originally. “Peace” is the Hebrew, sacred, Biblical word. 2. The free and spontaneous and entirely voluntary character of the bounty lay in the secular use of the Greek word, and fitted it to be a vessel capable of receiving new, Gospel contents and meaning. [Might not God almost have said to the Greek language, “Thou art a chosen vessel unto Me, to bear My Name,” etc.?] Gospel “grace” originates with God, in the mere self-suggesting love of His heart. There must be no claim upon God, and no merit belonging to man, “otherwise grace is no more grace” (Romans 9:6). 3. The whole bounty of God to Mankind is Grace. The distinction between Providence and Grace often drawn, is too sharp and at bottom unreal; at least there is no actual separation in their practical working. God is gracious in His Providence—it is mere undeserved bounty for Christ’s sake to a lost race. The purpose of His Providence in our life is not merely or chiefly temporal, immediate relief, convenience, profit, happiness, for even His children; but all these as part of a great scheme of a gracious education in holiness and “conformity to the image of His Son.” Every incident of “secular” life is in God’s view ethical, in ours is gracious. 4. Thus “grace” is one of the correlatives of “sin,” in language and in the facts of our life. It is more than bounty to need; it is free, undeserved bounty to sinners. 5. The Gift is one whole bounty; but we approach it on different sides, we draw upon its contents for the special supply of special needs of our fallen or of our regenerate life; at different stages we appreciate different bearings of its provisions upon our case; we therefore distinguish between grace which freely forgives, and grace which sanctifies, and grace which enlightens or delivers. But really the gift was given at one giving, when Christ was given. In a sense the Holy Spirit is the grace par excellence of the New Covenant; yet the gift of Christ carried this further gift within it. To give the One Comforter involved and carried with it as certain, necessary consequence, exsequence, the gift and coming and indwelling of the Other Comforter. Every operation of this gift upon a sinful heart, first and last, is grace. Every fruit of His redemption and of the indwelling of That Other, grace. All good, all Godward movement within us, from the first and faintest to the fullest and deepest going out of a saint’s heart after God, all grace. The “natural” goodness of so many children, the “natural” goodness in a few heathen, the early tenderness of conscience in those, the more or less of light and moral sense in these, all grace, the first workings of the universal gift of the Spirit for the sake of a universal Redeemer. 6. To the fallen race the grace is Redemption; to the individual sinner it may become Salvation; to the Church, at Corinth for example, what? One form of the answer will be “Peace.” No Peace, if there had been no grace; no Peace for a soul or a Church, if grace were sinned away and forfeited. The “God of all [= all forms of] grace” is for one thing the “God of peace” (1 Peter 5:10; 1 Thessalonians 5:23, etc. [where the relation between corporate perfectness and peace is very close]). Peace and Grace are “a twofold blessing,” but, more profoundly, one.— 1. What is “Peace” to a Church? When we “pray for the peace of Corinth,” what do we ask? A very pregnant word. Two Orientals to this day meet and greet each other with, “Peace be with thee.” The “Salaam,” universal in the East, becomes a word of customary compliment, like that of our own which once was “God be by you.” Peace meant all possible well-being to the man saluted. The Saviour bade His disciples cross a house-threshold with the salutation, “Peace be to this house”; and the peace was all possible family good, and all possible personal good to every inmate. Hardly needs saying that “peace” to a Church is much more than rest from foes outside and factions within. 2. Peace without sometimes a doubtful blessing. Peace within there must be, or a Church cannot prosper. Zion is always a besieged city. The siege is not always prosecuted with equal vigour, but it is always proceeding. The enemy, never far from the gate, finds his opportunity when the garrison quarrel among themselves. Nothing so much weakened Nehemiah’s hands as the traitors within the walls. In the last terrible overthrow of Jerusalem, from the moment that faction and strife amongst the defenders were added to the awful list of horrors which pressed upon the guilty city, capture by the Romans became a certainty. “As much as lieth in you live peaceably with all,” is counsel more urgent in regard to our dealings with the Church than even with the world outside. Peace within [cf. the factions at Corinth] indispensable. 3. Shall ask for peace outside, with some reserve. The infant Church of Palestine “had peace, and was built up” (Acts 9:31). The chief persecutor was converted. The active enmity and attention of other Jews was diverted by some mad doings of Caligula. The Lord of the Church chose outward peace, in view of their weakness, so that in the lull of the storm the new-made converts were instructed and grew strong. Yet when He has chosen to permit persecution and pressure, it has not been unqualified evil. A common danger has drawn men closer together. At such times the unity is more felt after, and made more evident than the diversities. The testing-time sifts out unfaithful members. Faithful ones become more thorough, as a necessity of their own safety. The walls are often built most diligently and securely in “troublous times” (Daniel 9:5). The Church may not pray for it, but many a worse thing for the real peace of a Church may happen than unpopularity or even persecution. There is no peace when the World and the Devil leave the Church alone, and can afford to do it. 4. A slumbering city by night is at peace. There is peace of the most profound in the streets swept by plague till not a living soul is left. “Peace” to Corinth must not be slumber or death, but wakeful health and life. A Church may have a peace imaged by the decorous quiet of an English town, once foremost in the country’s history and commerce, but now a stranded vessel forsaken by the changed course of the current of modern business or trade; the sluggard peace of honourable history and inherited traditions, of exceeding present-day respectability, but of slow decay. The true peace of a Church is rather the tumult and throng of busy thoroughfares; of an increasing roll of citizenship; of an eager, active population and a vigorous, honourable record of to-day. 5. The peace of a Church, as of a city, means citizens who have this “peace” at heart; of broad view, of great public spirit, of large heart; ready to put the corporate interest of the Church before their own comfort or convenience or preferences; all, in diverse ways, self-denyingly seeking the good of the whole. 6. Most deeply of all, Peace to a Church means Holiness. Its people are a holy people. Its well-being is the sum total of the well-being of them all. Sin is its, and their, weakness; holiness its, and their, well-being and peace. Wealth may pour into the treasury; influence, of a sort, may be increasingly wielded; even numbers may multiply; and yet upon a Church, as upon a man, God’s verdict may be: “There is no peace to the wicked.” For a sleeping, dead, indolent, apathetic, unholy Church there is always the peril that “the things which belong unto its peace should be” for ever “hid from its eyes” (Luke 19:42). B. The “Father,” and “Christ.”—As the twofold blessing is fundamentally one blessing, so the twofold source is fundamentally one Divine Source. 1. In the fullest form of the Pauline salutation we have “grace, mercy, and peace” (1 Timothy 1:2). In the earliest we have “grace and peace” only, without even the indication of their source (1 Thessalonians 1:1.) An interesting piece of doctrinal development for our study; as though, with ripening years, and ever fuller knowledge and clearer insight—the Spirit of God presiding over the process of mind and heart, guiding into real, if partial, truth at every stage, adding detail, filling up the earlier outline, completing the revelation in its historical disclosure, as the letters of the apostle’s last days are written—Paul had at last found a formula which was adequate to contain all he could ask, all God could give in Christ, to His beloved “children” and converts. Perhaps, also, one may see the Spirit of God making the ripe, final, fullest form of a Christian wish, or prayer, a not uncertain echo of the threefold high-priestly formula of benediction (Numbers 6:24-26), and impressing upon it—as in some Epistles, notably the Ephesian, it is impressed upon the very form of whole paragraphs and their underlying thought—the significant threefold form, so wonderfully persistent all along the course of Revelation, and belonging to the worship of the angels and the Church in heaven also, as well as to the experience and theology of the Church on earth. 2. Yet it would be overpressing the words of Scripture to allot Grace to the Father, Mercy to the Son, Peace to the Spirit. And here the two members of the one clause do not so correspond to the members of the other clause, as that Grace should come through the Father and Peace through Christ, exclusively in either instance. The “Grace of God” and the “Peace of God” are, equally, Scriptural, guiding, terms. The Son is invoked as the source of Grace in the concluding benediction of our two Corinthian letters. 3. The old theologies spoke of an “Economical,” or a “Redemptional,” Trinity. They were endeavouring to express the all-important, much-solving truth that we see Father and Son [and Spirit] not in their absolute, internal, relationships—a veil scarcely ever lifted lies upon those—but in their united working, and distinctly apportioned departments, so to speak, in effectuating the Redeeming purpose of the Grace of God toward a lost world. The Son is carrying out the will of Him that sent Him “about His Father’s business”; He is humbling Himself to be the channel, the essential condition, through which alone the grace of God can take blessed effect upon a sinner’s heart. Communication between God and man is opened up in Christ, and in Him only. [This the true point of the “So” in John 3:16, which is not “so much,” “so greatly,” but “thus,” in this manner: “God loved the world, and loved it thus, viz. that He gave …, in order that the love might mean eternal life to every man believing in Him.” All God’s communication with mankind has presupposed His grace, His loving, spontaneous, active goodwill to them. It is in the background of every approach towards man from His side. And the grace has reached us, can only reach us, through one conduit and channel—Christ. All starts and originates in grace. Peace, like every other expression of this basal grace, has reached us through Christ. 4. If a man therefore refuse Christ, or neglect Him, he can never see peace. This not as any arbitrary, isolated decision of God in his particular case, but because he puts away the Indispensable Condition of communication between God and man. He breaks down or refuses the only bridge over the gulf between them. He shuts the only door against himself, or seeks to find or make some other rather than this. We hardly know how to say that the Son conveys to a soul, or a Church, grace which is the bounty of the Father. The very co-ordination here, the two bracketed, as it were, under one “from,” forbids that. 5. Consider the place which Jesus of Nazareth has come to take, by this early date, in Christian language, thought, life. Could we conceivably associate thus any creature, were he never so exalted, as in any sense the giver of grace and peace concurrently with the Father, Jehovah? 1 Corinthians 1:2. A Church in Corinth: A Wonder.— 1. (a) John once gazed in astonishment upon a “Wonder in heaven” (Revelation 12:1). The “Woman” was the Church of God, in its external aspect as an historical fact, a community, out of which, midway in its continuous (Jewish and Christian) existence, arose the Man-Child (ib., 1 Corinthians 1:5). (b) That Church—in the preincarnation preparation for its Christian stage; in the fitness and the “fulness of the time” (Galatians 4:4) at which its Incarnate Head intervened in the earthly history of its growth; in the “manifold wisdom” (Ephesians 3:10) displayed in all the arrangements of God for creating a new Human Race, redeemed, saved, drawn without distinction from amongst Jews and Gentiles alike, and all finally gathered as a Church, a Family, into the House of its God and Father, every member of it a replica, even in their “bodies of glory” (Philippians 3:2), of the Head and Elder Brother—is all through the ages a Wonder proposed for the instruction and adoring contemplation of “principalities and powers in the heavenly places” (Eph., ubi supr.). (c) That Church is the standing wonder of grace, of historical origin and preservation, of effect upon the world’s life and thought, in all ages. The Redeemer, its Head, stands, not only before the throne of His Father, in the day of the thankful consummation of His triumph (as in Hebrews 2:13), but before the gaze of the successive generations of mankind, and at the bar of their judgment, and borrows the words of the ancient prophet (Isaiah 8:18): “Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me are for signs and for wonders … from the Lord of Hosts.” In the occasional, temporary, embodiment of the principle of “miracle,” the age of miracles has ceased. But, in a deeper sense, it has never ceased, for the Church of Christ is a continuous Miracle. It is a Sign (John’s word, ubi supr.), i.e. it is a fact significant of much more behind, a fact with an Argument in it. Frederick the Great’s chaplain gave a compendious argument for the truth of Revelation: “The Jews, your Majesty.” The origin and history and work of the Christian Church are a similarly compendious argument for, e.g., the verity of the Resurrection of Christ and His actual life to-day in Heaven. The Church on Earth is a Wonder. 2. A Church in Corinth is a Wonder. In Corinth, of all places! Remember (a) Its Surroundings. This was Roman, rather than Grecian, Corinth, which latter had been, even in the ancient world, a proverb of costly, highly organized, luxurious vice, but which, like the polluted Whitehall of Restoration days in England, had, a hundred years or so before, perished in the flames of national overthrow and of Divine wrath, Memmius, the Roman conqueror, like Titus afterwards at Jerusalem, being the unconscious avenger of God’s outraged holiness. But Roman Corinth was corrupt enough; it had all the vice of a seaport town, the convergent point of the traffic and the traders of half the world. Heathenism, too, tends to corruption everywhere; where it does not directly make vice into worship and a source of revenue to idolatry, it has no power or motive for restraining the crude naturalism, the animalism, to which human nature gravitates always. In almost every epistle Paul had to speakplainly and strongly against everyday, open, customary, “fleshly” sin. The very phrase, “the flesh,” is more historical than ethical in its first force and use by him. The city specially of Venus (Aphrodite) was a strange setting for the jewel of a Christian Church. Remember (b) Its Difficulties. For the members every-day life bristled with them. The most elementary Christianity meant a sharp disseverance from many most ordinary practices of heathen, and even Jewish, life. Municipal, family, social, mental, artistic, life—men touched Heathenism, Idolatry, in them all. E.g. “Meat offered to idols” was a large part of the provisions at every public, civic banquet; creating many a difficulty for a Christian citizen. Men could hardly touch anything without handling the “defiling pitch”; every step was near a pitfall. “Conformity to the world” was obviously incongruous with any inward “transfiguration by the renewing of their mind.” Yet, the wonder of it! a Church arose and grew and throve amidst such difficulties. Remember (c) Its Work and Purpose. Christ proposed by this little Church to regenerate Corinth, its morals, its faith, its life. It is a lump of the “salt,” which is to arrest further corruption, and to impregnate the whole life of the city with something of its own gracious savour. It is the housewife’s mass of leavened dough, which is to assimilate to its own condition and characteristics the whole larger mass around it. Like similar Churches which were beginning to dot the map of the empire here and there, this was the first appearance of a centre of holy fermentation, which, with the chemistry and life-processes of grace, was to break up and rearrange in healthy, renewed, order, the corrupting material around it. And yet, wonder of wonders! remember (d) Its own Material. (1) Socially, hardly anybody of any status; slaves, artisans, more women probably than men, Roman colonists, Corinthian Greeks, and Corinthian Jews. “Not many noble, not many wise,” etc. (1 Corinthians 1:26, sqq.). A Rabbi like Paul, or the great Gamaliel, was an important personage amongst his fellow-Jews; but neither he nor his learning counted for anything with even the second-rate representatives of that aristocracy of mind which had been the glory of Greek philosophy. A ruler of the synagogue could be beaten by the Greek mob before the very tribunal of the proconsul (Acts 18:17), without the courteous Roman gentleman thinking him worth rescue or notice. Gaius, able to act “the host” to the Church, or (perhaps) Stephanas, whose household “addicted themselves” to the service of the saints, may have been a little wealthier than their brethren. But such occasional, and comparative, eminence within the Church was lost in a dead level of social insignificance when looked upon by the great people outside and above them. (2) Then, personally, factious, proud, boastful, suspicious; the Greeks among them intellectually vain, without real knowledge to support their pretentions to be philosophically minded, and worst of all, hard to wean from the heathen evil of their old lives and of the surrounding world. Of such a people God is about to make a Church, and with such Churches to save the dying, or dead and corrupting, ancient world! 3. The Coming Wonder is the success of God’s method. Such Churches did save the world, and infuse into it a new life. It has never been God’s method, nor must it be ours, to wait vainly wishing for material and systems and workers, such as are ideally necessary or desirable, before attempting anything for Him; still less to do nothing unless our personnel, and doctrine, and methods commend themselves to human reason or the natural human heart. “The best” may in that way be “the enemy of the good.” “Imperfect” characters, “imperfect” work, “unreasonable” doctrine,—we will find the best we may,—with such much real work for God may be done, and has been done. The difficulty was, not the surroundings of the Church, nor the conditions of society, but the evil within the Church. “If the salt lose its savour, wherewith shall ‘the world’ be salted?” 4. A Church, a Christian, could live in Corinth, and might be a “saint” there; was “called to be a saint” there, and nowhere else. Obadiah can live in the court of Ahab, if need be. “Saints” may live saints in even Nero’s household. In fact, in greater or less degree, every steady, consistent, persistent, Christian is “a sign unto his generation.” He is sometimes a very Jonah kept alive in the dark “belly of hell.” If there is an Apology for Christianity in the continued existence and success of the Christian Church, there is as true an Apology for it in the life and faithfulness of the individual Christian, in Corinth, or elsewhere. He also is “a fact with an argument in it.” Of the same flesh and blood, of like passions, with the same liabilities and dangers,—what is it makes him so different, calm under trial, patient under persecution, able to forgive his enemies, fearless in the presence of death, and, not least, “keeping himself unspotted from the world,”—what is this Religion, what is there in it, that it can work this continuous miracle of fifty, sixty, seventy years of a holy life? Christians are “men greatly wondered at” (Zechariah 3:8). .—1 Corinthians 1:1-10A. “To me to” write “is Christ.”—So we might make Paul say, almost on the strength of this paragraph. George Whitefield once said, toward the end of a letter to some correspondent, on some indifferent or business topic, “I must have something of Christ in all my letters,” and thereupon proceeded to subjoin some religious talk. How these verses bristle with “The Name” (3 John 1:7, R.V.). The lines are embroidered, wrought throughout, emblazoned, with the name. The Epistle closes in a white-heat of passionate, intolerant devotion to Christ (1 Corinthians 16:22). Here we might not have supposed that Paul had yet “warmed to his subject.” But he never needs “warming” to this subject. He is ready at a moment’s notice, not only to break out into thanksgiving (1 Corinthians 1:4), but to mention his Master’s name. Or without notice, for it is the instinct and habit of his thought. The page is emblazoned with “The Name,” and indeed with the names. Paul is an ambassador (2 Corinthians 5:20) introducing his business with a proudly solemn and stately announcement, in all due and ceremonious form, of the style and titles of the King who sends him. Paul is the bearer of the mind and will of a Son—God’s Son,—a Son unique of this sort,—whose full name and style is, “Jesus—Christ—His Son—His Only Son—Our Lord.” “Take notice of my Master’s name!” [“My God,” in comparison with the stately array of names and titles of his Master, seems quite homely, and touchingly, trustfully, familiar.] No wonder that the clever wit-mongers, the Antiochians, hit off so happily in their nickname the characteristic of these Nazarenes. Their preachers were ever talking of some one known amongst themselves and their hearers as “Christ”; you could not listen long to their uttorances before His name occurred in their discourses. Did men overhear two of these strange people conversing together in the street, or anywhere else, they were sure before very long to bring in His name. [Cf. the Rabbinical rule: “Let not two Israelites meet and separate without a word about the Law.”] He seemed always a topic welcome to their lips. What should they be called? The Antiochians would surely not let them go long without a sobriquet; it would be a reflection on the reputation of their city to let these people slip by unnamed. “Call them ‘Christians’!” Here Christ is in all; touches all; the whole Church, each individual member; every gift; all the fellowship; and gathers up to Himself all hope and desire. Past, Present, Future, all are linked with Christ. B. I. The Past was full of Him.—As they look backward along the perspective of the Past they see that with Him all the lines of present life and blessing have originated. He is their radiant point. From the first, all the “grace” and gifts which now so enrich them, that they “come behind in no gift,” were all long ago given “in Him” (1 Corinthians 1:4). Potentially every gift was in that first Unspeakable Gift” (see under 2 Corinthians 1:20). II. The Present is full of Him.— 1. He is the basis and bond of their fellowship.—Besides the great, deep cleft yawning between Jew and Gentile, there were divisions of race dividing Gentile from Gentile; divisions of sex; divisions of station, slave from master, poor from rich: but out of this medley material a new Unity was being created, a new Communion, “The Fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.” Outside of Him they may either be separate and independent units, or may group themselves on other lines or round other nuclei of opinion or object in life. Their common relation to Him gives them a relation to each other. “Friends of the same Friend are friends of one another” here, though on all other grounds they be strangers from the ends of the earth. Only in the One whose manhood was, in the truest sense, of no nationality, though He sprung from one special branch of the great human family—only in the One who was so entirely “The Son of Man” that no race, no sex, no rank, no age, has ever felt Him a Jew, or alien from itself—could there be a basis for a world-wide fellowship. Only such a Brother and Redeemer of all men alike, could draw together and hold together the diverse elements which were included within the sacred circle and family bond of the “fellowship.” Take the Second Adam away, the new Race, the new Humanity, the Church, resolves itself into its units again, with their isolation and perhaps their antagonisms. Their fellowship is realised as they worship. The world over, prayer and praise are going up to God, the Great Object of worship; but Christian worship converges to the throne through one Door and Avenue of approach—Christ. The differentia of Christian worship, its “note” of unity amidst all its diversity, is that “all in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.” Christian worship, all Christian intercourse with God, passes through Him. He has made it possible. 2. He is the beginning and the continuance of their holiness.—They were sanctified “in Him,” with a relative holiness, from the beginning, and all realisation of this ideal, all their “confirmation” in their holy status, is distinctly His work (1 Corinthians 1:8). And this stands closely connected in fact with another “confirmation”, that of “the testimony of Christ.” The strength is from no outward support merely or chiefly, but from within. [The weak spine may be “confirmed” by the iron supports strapped on outside the patient’s body. The best “confirmation” would be that within, the strengthening of the spine itself.] They stand strong, four-square to all blasts, firm amidst all assaults, until “the End” (1 Corinthians 15:24, perhaps), not alone, nor most of all, because He directly and from without upholds them, but because within them “the testimony is confirmed.” Every point of the witness, both of the Holy Spirit and of Apostles, concerning Christ is verified in their experience. They know that He is a Saviour, and Divine, for He is that to them. There is no promise, implied or expressed, whose root is in Him, which they may not prove, and are not proving, to be true. They stand “confirmed” because they take Him to be “Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification, Redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30). In the fullest sense they find the pledges of His very Name, “Jesus,” abundantly redeemed, and are kept with a continuous Salvation. The external testimony answers point by point to the internal experiences. It is “confirmed in” them by the very same facts of grace which together make up their “confirmation” also. There is no believer in Christianity like the man in whom its great facts have become experiences. Ought we to say that there is no real believer in Christianity except such a man? And the testimony is “of Christ.” 3. What Paul and his fellow-workers had to offer to Corinth and the world was a “testimony.”—They were witnesses, not philosophers; reporters, not authors; they handed on what was first given to them, and did not propose for acceptance what they had themselves in any sense devised. It is true that the testimony has passed through their own mind; each of them puts his own individuality upon the form of delivery; each of them is entrusted with only part; to some is given more than to others, but to each probably just that which he could naturally best appreciate. [The burner gives its own size and shape to the jet of burning gas which it passes. The jet of the fountain also gives shape to the stream of water issuing from it. A group of burners, passing out the gas from one common supply-pipe, will give each its own shape and size of flame, whilst contributing to the one light. (Such illustrations are of course not to be pressed far).] Yet they are witnesses, and no more. As to the great fundamental, historical facts in which Christianity rests, they speak as bearing testimony. When they preach doctrines which are the superstructure upon or the consequences of, the facts, these are not their own inferences, or deductions, or speculations. They are reporters of what the Spirit of God has told them. This narrowed range of work and function—simply witness-bearing—was their strength; as it is still the strength of the preacher and worker. Every great religious awakening affords many examples of the power of testimony, even when that testimony is nothing more than the story of the speaker’s conversion and his “present experience.” It has often been from rude lips a mighty power with cultured people. The facts of the Gospel story, told with freshness and reality, and with the power of the Spirit of God, have, from Pentecost onwards, been very effective preaching,—the most effective. Christian speculation has its time, and place, and value. There is a philosophy of Christianity. But the working force, the real lever-power, of it lies in its “testimony.” That “confirmed” “confirms” Christians. Noteworthy is the summary of all Apostolic messages: “the testimony of Christ.” Comparing this with 1 Corinthians 2:1, “the testimony of God,” we are guided to the conclusion that in the latter case God is regarded as the Proprietor and Source, in the former Christ is regarded as the great Subject. Indeed, as the One Subject; for He summarises the Gospel. All its topics are “broken lights” of Him. He is the Topic. A scheme of doctrine, a sermon from a Christian pulpit, which does not clearly show the relation of any and every topic to Christ, is not a Christian scheme or a Christian sermon. [That is no Christian religious life in which He is not central.] As a matter of notorious, and often verified, result a “Christianity” (if it borrow the name) whose Christ is not Divine, and therefore not the dominating Name and influence a Divine Person must of necessity be, is not a Christianity that moves the world, though for a time it may give satisfaction to a few. The men who move the masses and “confirm” the Church are “witnesses,” and witnesses who report what they see and know in Christ. They exhibit Him. He is the great Subject of all that preaching which is the instrument of strengthening the religious life. III. The future is full of Christ.— 1. He is the convergent point of all the perspective of the years to come.—At the end of the vista of the personal life, His people see Christ. They “depart and are with Christ.” And the end of the vista of history is to them the blaze of the glory of His “revelation,” and the dread solemnities of His “Day.” The “call” of the Past was into fellowship in Him. The “confirmation” of the Present is in Him. The “waiting” for the Future turns toward Him. [Is the “Revelation” for His people, His “Day” for His enemies?] The “Day of Christ” is, most broadly stated, a period with its historical contents, extending from His first Coming to His second. Within it are several subsidiary “days of Christ,” each of which reproduces in miniature the features of “the Day” on the largest scale. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/phc/ NOTES1 Corinthians 1:11.—“I hear; for, though you have written me about many things (1 Corinthians 7:1), yet you said nothing about this!” Them of … Chloe.—The bearers of the Corinthian letter? Or residents in Ephesus, who had heard from Corinth? Cannot be decided.1 Corinthians 1:12.—“To speak plainly, I say that,” etc. Every one of you.—“You are all involved, all to blame.”1 Corinthians 1:13.—Retain the question, “Is Christ [the personal Christ, not the mystical] divided?” For the exact meaning, choose between, (a) did each party claim the whole, and sole, possession of Christ? or (b) did they, less uncharitably, so rend Him in pieces among them [cf. the connected word used of His garment, Matthew 27:35] as to allow that all did possess a share, but proclaiming their own to be largest and chief? We may hope the latter. But the figure should not be overpressed. Paul crucified?—Contrast the holy horror here with the grateful recognition in Galatians 4:4, “Ye received me … as Christ Jesus,” i.e. “You could hardly have made more of me if I had been Christ Himself.” Paul too popular with one party!1 Corinthians 1:14.—“It so happened that,” etc. “God so ordered it that,” etc. “I see now why. Thank God, only two of you—yes! [Stephanas and] his family also—can say, “Paul baptized me!”Crispus.—Acts 18:8. Gaius.—I.e. Caius (Romans 16:23), from whose house the Epistle to the Romans was written and sent. Two men whose conversion was of exceptional importance in the history of the work in Corinth, and so Paul baptized them.1 Corinthians 1:16. The household of Stephanas.—The first souls he won in Corinth; the first handful of his harvest in that field, as he gratefully remembers that “Epænetus my beloved” was in that of Asia Minor (Romans 16:5). No happier memory for a minister than that of his first soul! No wonder that Paul did baptize Stephanas! [i.e. presuming that he did; he does not say so expressly].1 Corinthians 1:17. Words.—Connect or compare with “utterance” (1 Corinthians 1:5) and “word” (1 Corinthians 1:18); same word, in singular number, in all three. Of none effect.—Void (R.V.); “emptied” of its power. If the words overlay the cross and hide it, if it be wrapped in, as it were, a non-conducting envelope of “wise” putting and rhetorical expression, the only real power in the message is nullified. (See the Homily for this, and more.) Note, Are being saved (R.V.). .—1 Corinthians 1:10-17I. There may be an over-valuation of men [ministers]. II. There may be an over-valuation of baptism [representative in this, perhaps, of Christian ordinances generally]. I. Men over-valued.— 1. All these deserved much esteem and consideration and affection at the hands of the Corinthians. Certainly Paul did, and his successor Apollos. To these, particularly to Paul, very many of the Corinthians “owed their own selves also” (Philemon 1:19). No other man can ever take quite the same place in a Christian’s memory and affection as does he who led him to the light, and to Christ. It is no wonder that the man who finds the ministrations of an Apollos—“eloquent, and mighty in the Scriptures,” and greatly filled with the Spirit—to be very effectual in the sustaining and education of his religious life, should set his Apollos on a high place in his thought and prayers and love. The grateful, intelligent love of those to whom a ministry is a perpetual grace and assistance, is a help to the minister himself, and a reward not to be despised, next to the smile of his Master. Even Cephas did a real and glorious work for the Church; in many respects complementary to that of Paul. No need to exalt Paul by disparaging Peter. All this affectionate, loyal bonding of ministry and people is a great blessing and a great help to both preacher and people. Paul very gratefully remembers in Galatia, with a remembrance not without a pang as he thought of the manifest and rapid change, “Ye received me … as Christ Jesus” (Galatians 4:14). If, that is, he had been the Master instead of the servant, he could scarcely have had a warmer welcome. [This loyalty and affectionate devotion may, similarly, and within the same limits, rightly be extended to the special branch of the Christian Church to which a man owes the awakening and the cultivation of his spiritual life. And, by a very natural application of the same principle, the special form of “Gospel,” or the special type of Truth, “under” which a Christian man has grown up to his present knowledge and strength of Christian character, may well call forth and gather to itself a devotion of grateful support, until a man proudly and affectionately ranges himself under the denominational banner of Calvin or of Wesley, of Cephas or of Paul.] 2. But they were receiving more than their due; though probably Cephas was as blameless as were Paul and Apollos, and not more responsible for the sinful partisanship which chose his name for its banner, than were they for the use made of their own. Certainly not even Galatians 2 gives any warrant for supposing any sort of personal feeling between the two men. That the Galatians should have welcomed Paul almost as if he had been Paul’s Lord, was one thing; that the Corinthians should exalt and fight for him or for any other human teacher as if it were for the very Lord Himself, was quite a different matter. It had been innocent and natural affection which, with a stretch of language easily understood, he had recalled so gratefully when writing to the Galatians. The partisan devotion which he so strongly rebukes at Corinth was such as could hardly have been greater if (horrescit referens) Paul himself were their crucified Saviour, or if their baptism had pledged them to him in covenant bond. 3. It was idolatrous.—No, there is but one HEAD and KING, ruling over all alike; “Christ is not divided.” There is but one PRIEST, He who is Priest and Victim, Ambassador and Intercessor, in unapproachable, incommunicable, dignity; “Paul is not crucified for them.” There is but one Teacher, into obedience to whom they were baptized; Paul and the rest are only teachers at secondhand, witnesses, reporters, of what they have first heard from Him. The special theological system of one’s Church, the favourite, or distinguishing, doctrine of one’s best-loved teacher, must not be exalted into unchallengeable, Divinely authoritative, dogma. It must always be held subject to its accordance with the teaching of the Highest Authority. Neither over the intellect nor over the conscience has any man the final authority which belongs to Christ alone, speaking in the Word and through the Spirit. And if belonging to any particular Church, or accepting its creed, and “sitting under” its orthodox ministry, should subtilely become to the soul almost a ground of hope or even of assurance of salvation, it would go perilously near to trusting in a “Paul crucified.” A faithful and wise minister of Christ will point his people to Christ and away from himself; he will stand clear of everything like strife and partisanship, even though he be innocently the cause of it, and an exaggerated desire to honour him be the occasion; he will keep the great object of his calling steadily in view, and not even “baptize,” if that be made to mean too much by over-zealous and very ill-advised friends (1 Corinthians 1:13-17). [One’s Church and one’s creed in like manner must be helps to Christ, and may not arrest on the way, and detain for themselves, devotion and allegiance which belong of right to Christ alone.] [Note how the Baptist was content to be nobody—only “a Voice.” “Listen to me, but look at Him; go to Him. Behold the Lamb” (John 1:23; John 1:36). “We preach Christ Jesus as the Lord; ourselves as your servants” (2 Corinthians 4:5).] [Note also that there may be a partisanship “for Christ,” forsooth, which is as narrow and unholy as that for Paul or Apollos.] [Allegiance to Christ unites the Church (1 Corinthians 1:10); allegiance to man divides it.] II. Baptism over-valued.—The possibility of this is a matter of inference from what Paul states had been his own line of action. That man may be over-valued is matter of direct assertion. But it may be fairly gathered from his own declaration that he very rarely baptized a convert, that to him the ordinance did not occupy the place which some would give it—a thing necessary to salvation, and only to be administered by a man belonging to a special order. [Peter did not himself baptize the souls he had gathered in the house of Cornelius. “He commanded them to be baptized” (Acts 10:48). Indeed, they were hardly of his ingathering at all; the Spirit fell upon them and did His work, before Peter had scarcely more than begun his address (Acts 10:41).] For an incidental and purely personal reason, indeed, Paul actually “thanks God” that not many at Corinth could say that his hands had administered baptism to them. It must not be under-valued. Paul would not have left his converts unbaptized altogether. From no New Testament writer do we learn better and more fully the covenant theology which underlies baptism, and especially that of the children. It must neither be exalted into a necessary means of a real salvation, nor emptied of all significance except that of a mere dedicatory service with an element of thanksgiving. “Baptized into the name of Paul” (like “baptized unto Moses,” 1 Corinthians 10:2) would, if such a thing had been possible, have meant much more than that. The startling suggestion of such a parallel case may serve to expound what “baptized in the name of Christ” would mean to Paul. Every Jewish, or Mahometan, or heathen, father understands very well that to allow his child to be baptized means more than a simple dedication to the God of the Christian worship. Between the Lord of the Covenant and the subject of the ordinance it sets up a covenant bond, binding on both sides, officially recognising the rights, and (so to speak) registering the claim, of the baptized one to all the grace of the Christian scheme. The Master had said, “Go ye and make disciples … baptizing them … teaching them,” etc. Both are obligatory. But at least Paul clearly ranked the teaching before the ordinance, if for any reason (as was, in fact, the case at Corinth) choice must needs be made. He relied for tho fulfilment of the “marching orders” of the Church, for the execution of his own part of the work, rather upon securing the response of the intelligence and heart to the instruction and appeal of the preacher. A mere baptism of the unconscious infant or the indifferent adult, and much more the wholesale baptism of Saxons or Indians, are no fulfilment of the Church’s commission. No ordinance, however binding, or significant, or precious and really helpful, can take the place of such a “preaching of the Gospel”—in all the round of that by no means “simple” function!—as secures the attention, and wins the assent, and conquers the heart. 1 Corinthians 1:17. The Kenosis of the Cross.—[Literally, “should be made empty”; same verb as in the important Philippians 2:7, “He emptied Himself” (in connection with which see how Paul, for his own salvation’s sake, “emptied himself,” Philippians 3:4-10). See also the thought of this second member of 1 Corinthians 1:10 expanded and homiletically dealt with under chap. 1 Corinthians 2:1-5. Paul folt the danger of— I. Scholastic preaching.—[Which met the demand of “Greek” type of mind for “wisdom.”] 1. Such as aims at the intellect rather than the heart; and gives no satisfaction to the man who wants practical direction and help how to live righteously; and deals with speculations and discussions “which minister” [provide and excite further “questions” and discussions in endless evolutionary succession] “questionings, rather than a dispensation” [var. lect., for “edification”] “of God which is in faith” [1 Timothy 1:4]. 2. Such discussions of “the Cross” and Christianity have their time and place and value. As things are, Apologetics are a necessity, and the apologists need to be furnished with all wisdom of words and thought. As men’s minds are, oven “the saved” will speculate in reverent pondering upon themes which indeed touch them most closely where the Christian system tells of, and brings to them, immediate safety, peace, holiness for a guilty, unholy man, but which also in other directions broaden out and reach away into regions of almost illimitable vastness. At one end the Gospel answers promptly and distinctly the urgent question, “What must I do to be saved?” At the other it touches questions wide as the whole created universe. [E.g. What is the relation of the Incarnation and of the Cross to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places, to the unnamed and unknown (possible, probable) inhabitants of other worlds than ours? (Ephesians 3:10). How widely has Sin diffused its effect? (“Peace in heaven,” Luke 19:38, may only have been a not very intelligent or significant cry of the populace. But Colossians 1:20 speaks expressly of “reconcitation” of “things in heaven.)] 3. The urgent matter is salvation. To the preacher and to the sinner this must stand first. The wisdom of scholastic preaching “makes void the Cross” when it takes the first place, or is the only thing offered by the preacher, or desired and welcomed by the man. [Illustration.—A company of Israelites in danger, or actually bitten by serpents, though not yet feeling much of the effect of the deadly bite, are standing around the serpent uplifted by Moses in the wilderness (John 3:14). They ask, “Tell us, Moses, what is the exact connection between that brazen thing up there and these serpents down here, and between it and the poison in our system, which is to be healed by looking at it. Tell us, analyse for us, the modus operandi of our looking and of the curative action of that up yonder.” (They want “a theory of the Atonement,” and an exposition of “the connection between faith and pardon or holiness.”) “Tell us something about this poisonous substance which has been injected into our veins. What is its action? How did the serpents secrete it? Where did the serpents come from? Why did the Creator make or tolerate such creatures?” (They want “a Doctrine of Sin,” and to hear something about “the Origin and Permission of Evil.”) If Moses had gratified this intellectual curiosity, and engaged in long, subtle discussion in the direction of their desire, there would have been the danger that his hearers should have dropped one by one and died, at the very foot of “the pole,” died in sight of God’s symbol, and pledge, and means, of Victory over death, and of Healing for the poison. Thus they and Moses together would have made “the Uplifting of the Serpent of none effect.” (Cf. the related thought, not word, in Galatians 2:21, “then Christ is dead in vain,” gratuitously.)] “Look to the Cross first, and be saved; then speculate to your heart’s content, if only it do not divert your attention from the Cross.” 4. For the danger is not at an end when the soul has been to the Cross and found salvation. The natural heart loves the discussion and the speculation. [See how the Samaritan woman at Sychar was no sooner closely pressed about the sins of her past life, than she turned off the conversation to a speculative topic, an interesting matter of discussion, which this “prophet” could perhaps resolve for her. “Ought men to worship on Gerizim, or ought we all to go to Jerusalem?” (John 4:18-20); anything rather than sin, her own sin, its guilt, its peril!] And whilst the work of faith and of the Cross is only begun when the soul has first found it “the power of God unto salvation”; whilst “salvation” is a continuous thing, needing a continuously renewed efficacy of the Cross and its atonement; there is ever the danger lest the heart should fly off to speculations and inquiries which please the intellect, and do not offend the pride of the sinful heart, or disturb its peace. The professor of apologetics, the student of that Christianity which is the grandest of all philosophies, “the widsom of God,” may do their work, and may lay it under noble contribution for the service of the Gospel. But the preacher has in hand a narrower, more immediate and urgent, affair. He dares not ordinarily deal with such “wisdom of words,” lest he keep his dying sinner speculating, instead of believing, as he stands at the Cross, and so the Cross and its Offering for sin have been for that man “emptied” of all efficacy. Bishop Butler, with his Analogy and even his Sermons, are wanted. They strengthen the faith of those who do believe, and turn aside for them many an intellectual assault, giving them the helpful knowledge, moreover, that they are not believing in some scheme of teaching unworthy of the mind of man, not to say, of God. But Bishop Butler must not arrest the sinner on his way to the Cross, nor steal away his attention and interest in it, after he has found his way there. [It is hardly within any fair extension of Paul’s thought, to take in the very real case where the Cross is “emptied” of its meaning as a reconciliation, or a propitiation, or a vicarious sacrifice.] II. Rhetorical preaching.—[Such as meets the demand of the “Jews” type of mind for a “sign.”] 1. Paul knew his Corinthians; he knew man’s heart. There is something not unworthy about the Intellectual, Scholastic preaching, though it may ensnare souls and hold them back from making the most urgent use of the cross of Christ. It does at least bear witness to a Godlike capacity, which is the honour of man, and to which it endeavours to make response. But the preaching that is only words, words, words, beautiful words, words which please the love of beautiful sound, words which are the lovely clothing of perhaps a meagre or imperfect Gospel, or even that clothe very beautifully nothing; the craving for beauty of presentation first, and at all events, whether the thought be true, or poor, or perilous; both are distinctly on a lower level. He is snared by the very nobility of human nature whom “wisdom of thought” turns away, or keeps back, from the cross of Christ. But he is of smaller calibre to whom little or nothing matters if only the preaching be “well put.” Never mind what the song is all about, if only the preacher “have a pleasant voice, and can play well on his instrument, and the song be lovely” (Ezekiel 33:32). They have no serious purpose to “do the words.” Woe to the preacher of the Cross, who to please them, or to please himself, makes more of the manner than the matter; who never presses home the lessons of the hearers’ sinfulness, but is content if he can engage their attention, and please their fancy. He may even so “preach the Cross”—not by any means leaving it out altogether—as that the one thing which makes impression upon his hearers is the beauty of his preaching. [So Louis XIV. shrewdly discriminated between his two great pulpit orators, one of whom made him think of the preacher, whilst the other made him think of himself.] Few preachers will deliberately lay themselves out thus to win applause for their sermons. But all should keep in view the danger to their unsaved hearers. And the danger to themselves also; for the preacher’s own heart would naturally love the reward of human applause; it is more pleasant to have men’s good word and goodwill, than to hear that they say: “He is too good, too earnest, too strict for me. He is always preaching about sin. ‘I hate him, for he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil’ (Ahab, of Micaiah, 1 Kings 22:8).” Every man will use his own gift; but an Apollos will need to take care that himself never stands before and obscures Christ, or arrests on the way to Christ the soul which urgently needs “the Cross” and its salvation. Intellect and oratorical gifts, both may indeed be gloriously used as consecrated means to a sacred end. But the human heart tends, in preacher and hearers, to make them the end, and to ask for no more, but to rest in these. [“The wisdom of which St. Paul speaks appears to have been of two kinds: speculative philosophy, and wisdom of words—eloquence. Men bow before talent, even if unassociated with goodness; but between the two we must make an everlasting distinction. When once the idolatry of talent enters, then farewell to spirituality; when men ask their teachers not for that which will make them more humble and Godlike, but for the excitement of an intellectual banquet, then farewell to Christian progress.… St. Paul might have complied with the requirements of his converts, and then he would have gained admiration and love—he would have been the leader of a party, but he would have been false to his Master—he would have been preferring self to Christ” (Robertson).] [This is no new danger: “In an age of decadence the form of the idea is esteemed far more highly than the idea itself. The surfeited soul, like the surfeited palate, craves the piquant, the highly dressed.… The noblest thoughts pass unheeded, unless surcharged with ornament. The Fathers of the Church have repeatedly pointed out this intellectual epicurism as one of the great obstacles to the progress of Christianity. The noble language of the pagan philosophers seemed to Justin Martyr a bait which would decoy many souls to death. Celsus … heaps his most biting sarcasms on the vulgarity of the form by which, according to him, truth is degraded in the Gospel, on the incorrectness and barbarisms of the style of the Sacred Writings, and on their want of logical force. He exaggerates, … yet he represents the repugnance of the ‘Greek’ to a book, which, like the lowly Redeemer whom it revealed to the world, made no pretence to the glory or excellency of human wisdom. Greece had drunk draughts too intoxicating to appreciate the purity of the living water. Those only who were thirsting for pardon and peace drew near to the Divine fountain. It had no charms for the epicureans of philosophy and art” (Pressensé, Early Years. The Martyrs, 7, 8).] Christ emptied Himself that He might save. Paul emptied Himself that he might be saved. Scholastic preaching may so empty the Cross of meaning, or divert attention from its meaning; rhetorical preaching may so deaden all the force of its appeal; that the Cross cannot save. NOTES1 Corinthians 1:19-20.—Isaiah 29:14 (nearly as LXX.), and a free imitation of Isa 30:18. For.—Sustains the general drift of 1 Corinthians 1:17-18, not any particular clause. “The cessation of Rabbinical wisdom was to be one of the signs of Messiah’s coming; and that this was foretold in Isaiah 33:18 was believed among the Rabbis. (So Stanley.) Also, “The heathen oracles are dumb,” silenced since Christ came. Remark, “age” and “world” used together here (in the Greek).1 Corinthians 1:21.—Difficult; but probably, “In God’s wise ordering of the history of the world and of human thought, the result of all their experiment and inquiry is this: ‘An unknown God.’ ” Paul came fresh from his address at Athens (Acts 17:23) to Corinth. Still, worth considering this reading: “By means of and from the wisdom of God displayed in ‘the things that are made’ (Romans 1:20) the world did not arrive at knowledge of Him; He now therefore will propose what the world thinks the folly of His Gospel of the Cross. Will they know Him through that? They who believe will, and do, and the knowledge is salvation.”1 Corinthians 1:22.—Notice, “Jews,” “Greeks,” q.d. men of the Jew-type of mind and heart, and of the Greek-type. There are such in all races, religions, ages. Signs (from heaven) suit the Oriental, the childlike, emotional type; wisdom the Western, harder, manlike, logical type. The Jew wanted to see the finger of God; the Greek wanted to explain all by philosophic theory.1 Corinthians 1:24—Power for the Roman; wisdom for the Greek. Power and wisdom, meeting the moral weakness and moral darkness of the fallen humanity. The age-long experiment of the Jew ended in the knowledge of man’s moral helplessness; that of the Greek race, his moral ignorance.1 Corinthians 1:26. Your calling.—Choose between, (a) “they who called you,” and (b) “those who are called.” Probably the latter. But both are true, and both are included, as particular embodiments of it, in the great fundamental rule which God has followed “in His manner of calling you,” viz. “not many,” etc. Not many.—Always a few, as Crispus. Can almost count, however, the exceptions in the New Testament on one’s fingers, and hardly any of them counting for much in the world’s estimation.1 Corinthians 1:28. Base.—Of no special honour of birth. Are not … are.—“Nonentities,” “entities” (Evans).1 Corinthians 1:30. Are ye.—Q.d. “Now were, and still are, nothing and nobody, in the eyes of the world. But before God, and in Christ, you are indeed something and somebody, with a life of important, eternal reality.” (See Homily).1 Corinthians 1:31.—Jeremiah 9:23. .—1 Corinthians 1:18-31 Grouping the topics of the paragraph around 1 Corinthians 1:29, we have:— I. A great principle of God’s government consistently carried out. God alone must be exalted.— 1. In threefold reiteration here. “That no flesh should glory,—or literally, “that all flesh should not glory,”—“in His presence” (“before God,” better reading, 1 Corinthians 1:29); “He that glorieth … in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:31); and the triumphant laugh in the face of the world’s wisest ones, “Where is the wise?” etc. (1 Corinthians 1:20). Paul stands by the cross of “the Lord of Glory,” and casts his exultant glance around. The Cross of Christ has been planted, like God’s Royal Standard, in the midst of the battle-field. Now the field is clear. Beaten, discomfited, discredited, by God’s “foolish” method, the competing “wisdoms of the world” have vanished, or are vanishing, leaving the cross of Christ in possession! [So in the Day of Questions, the last day of the Lord’s public ministry, every typical world’s-wise-man assailed Him. But He held His own, and one after another slunk away beaten, until at last He Himself completed the rout by turning questioner, and finally silencing every opponent with His problem about David’s Lord and David’s Son (Matthew , 22).] 2. The Old Testament origin of Paul’s quotation, here and in 2 Corinthians 10:17 (from Jeremiah 9:23-24), carries back the principle into the earlier dispensation, and shows that the Spirit guided him with a sure and right instinct to lay his hand upon a great and perennially valid principle of all God’s rule and administration of His government; one that must obtain wherever there are creatures capable of knowing Him. In no world can it be conceived that this great law should not be in force. He is the One and Only Being who can make Himself the centre and object of all intention and activity, and who can claim that all other life than His own should converge upon Him as its Object and End and Goal. In us such self-centering is of the very essence of Sin; it is our root-rebellion against our God. It is a prime and simple necessity of His position and character and very Being. To ask less, to permit less, to man or to any other creature, were to abdicate His position as God. The Bible sets Him forth abundantly full, full to the overflow, of love; His mercy is eagerly ready and “forward” to bless; the first advance to union between Himself and sinners has always come from His side. His ear is always open to the cry of the feeblest, bowing Himself to the man of contrite and trembling heart; indeed, loving to “dwell with” such a man (Isaiah 57:15; Isaiah 66:2). Yet the condescension is never exhibited at the expense of the majesty. “He is God and none else. His honour will He not give to another.” To compare great and small, and with all reverence: men hear from time to time of our Queen performing acts of kindly condescension and of simple womanly kindness, to the sick and poor and aged. But if any presumed upon this to exercise undue familiarity as to an equal, she would be the first to draw back. To allow another on some state occasion to occupy the throne in her presence, would not be condescension, but abdication. The Creator and the creature can never with His consent even seem to change places. The world’s “wisdom” is rooted in the pride of human nature in itself and its powers of discovery. No field can be supposed beyond its exploration; no height, or depth, or vastest extension of truth, but it can take in all. If God hide Himself, then there is no God; this wisdom can find none. If His ways pass its systematisation, or do not commend themselves to the world’s judgment or “moral sense,” they are evil or folly. Over all that pride of intellect He must win a victory. To men the perpetually attractive temptation is, “Ye shall be as God, knowing.…” Human intellect must lower its high-borne pennon in the presence of the Royal Standard of God’s wisdom. The proud intellect which will acknowledge neither limitation nor error, the proud heart which will own no weakness or sin, must alike bow in the presence of God. It is true of the whole arrangements for the spread of the Gospel; it is true of the provisions in the Gospel for the salvation of the individual sinner. II. Seen in the arrangements for the spread of the Gospel.— 1. Hardly necessary to point out the once current, customary misconception of Paul’s words, “the foolishness of preaching.” Even an English reader of the R.V., with its margin, may now see that the “folly” lay in the matter of the preacher’s message, and not at all in that particular method of delivering it (1 Corinthians 1:21). Vivβ voce instruction and appeal is one of the aptest methods of winning attention and securing conviction. For appeal, whose aim is to secure immediate results, whether of conviction or action, the living voice of the man speaking face to face with his fellow has better prospect than the writer, whose written or printed page lies cold and silent before, perhaps, a listless eye. Every true preacher is, first of all, a public speaker; the natural basis upon which is superinduced his special grace, is the same as that of the speaker upon any secular theme, the lecturer, the parliamentary orator, the very demagogue. He will cultivate it, as part of its consecration, and will learn his very art in order that he may the better win the ear of his listeners, and thus find for his Master a way to their hearts. God has often glorified Himself by using “very poor speakers” to deliver His message. Wisdom of “words,” if made by preacher or hearers a thing aimed at for its own sake, or for the applause it may bring and the pleasure it may give, may “make the Cross of none effect” (1 Corinthians 1:17). Yet foolish preaching is no thing to praise or value, or (as it were) to cultivate. The speaker will seek to be at his best, for God. But all this is quite away from any thought of Paul here. Any supposed “poor preaching” is not, in itself, one of the illustrations of God’s method which he adduces. 2. The message itself seemed foolish.—“Jews” and “Greeks” (1 Corinthians 1:22) are not only historical names, but generic and typical. There are always “Jews” and “Greeks” amongst the men to whom any Paul addresses himself, in every age, in any country. They are two variants of the natural mind, under the influence of the natural heart. And we “who are called” (1 Corinthians 1:24), and have made the “call” a reality [see the tense, as compared with that in 1 Corinthians 1:2], both from our memory of the old days in our own life, and from the very nature of the case, can see how “foolish” the “preaching of the Cross” must seem to such. Here is proposed for man’s acceptance a system of “truth” whose Teacher is a man hanged publicly on a gibbet, on a thing whose whole associations were those of our gallows, but aggravated in their painfulness and shame. “We are being saved” by it (1 Corinthians 1:18), and know its “wisdom” and its “power.” To us they are worthy of God; they carry their own credentials. But “to those who are perishing” such a story may well seem “foolishness.” Apart from the power of the Holy Ghost in it (1 Corinthians 2:4), it would be a message with which to send men only on a fool’s errand. To tell the Roman masters that the hope of the world was in a Jew, rejected by His own people, hanged publicly on a gallows by a Roman quaternion and their centurion, at the instigation of Jewish religious authorities,—Gallio well reflected the temper with which the best of them would receive such a tale. He cared nothing indeed for the rioting; he could afford to ignore a petty Jewish squabble, though under his very eyes. But the same lofty, “gentlemanly,” if not supercilious, contempt would have been his answer—a Roman answer—if the “preaching of the Cross” had been fairly submitted to him for his judgment. The Jew was stung to the quick when Pilate’s “title” seemed to offer to the nation a crucified peasant of Galilee as its King and Messiah. The “Jew” of all ages who wants “signs,” who demands, in order to belief, unmistakeable self-disclosures of the Unseen, Supernatural, Order, who wants to see his God, will hardly bear to be pointed to Jesus of Nazareth crucified. “Such foolishness!” The “Greek,” looking for his Ideal Man, feeling after God, requiring of everything proposed to him for acceptance that it shall fit into some beautifully ordered, symmetrical, closely articulated scheme of philosophic thought, was hardly to be won to attention by this story of a Divine Man dying on a gallows. That the supreme revelation of God? That the supreme form of the Beautiful, the True, the Good? On Mars’ Hill attention ended in an explosion of mocking laughter (Acts 17:32). “Foolishness!” Sensible men, not to say philosophers, to give serious attention to such a story! Not even the learning of Paul, or the eloquence of an Apollos, could make such a story anything else but a “folly” and a stumbling-block. If it kept the field, then, and drove out all competitors, there must be something in it not of man. The most successful preacher “may not glory in His presence.” “This is the finger of God.” 3. Look at the men who bore it.—(For they are fairly included in the unfinished sentence of 1 Corinthians 1:26. R.V. margin is not too broadly comprehensive. What was true of the first converts was true also of the first preachers.) They were not reclaimed reprobates, indeed; nor by any means wanting in native common sense or shrewdness. Their “baseness” (1 Corinthians 1:25) only means that they had no advantage from what with men gives prestige. Yet manifestly they were not the men whom human wisdom would have chosen to confront the “scribe” of the Jew, or the “disputer” of the Greek market-place (Acts 17:18). Men would not have chosen the equivalent of a little company of Whitby or Peterhead fishermen, with a farm labourer or two, and a subordinate collector of Customs, even though joined afterwards by a graduate of the theological school of a small and uninfluential sect, to be the men to clear away religions deeply rooted in the popular life, or consecrated by hoar antiquity. Paul was the best educated of them all, yet his strictly “Hebrew” home (Philippians 3:5), though in the Greek city of Tarsus, would not permit to him much acquaintance with any ordinary secular literary knowledge, and his learning was mainly in that Rabbinic lore which seems to us, as it would to his Gentile contemporaries, so largely trivial, and indeed often contemptible. Humanly speaking, he was by no means the man to put forward as the best representative of the new faith, to discuss it on Mars’ Hill, or in the Agora of Athens, with the heirs of the philosophy of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. From the standpoint of human prudence, it would have seemed to be the very best method of handicapping the message and lessening its chances of reception, to commit it to such men as its apostles and promulgators. Precisely. But God’s foolishness was God’s way. Such “weak” and “base things” put the world’s wisdom and strength and prestige to shame. The success justified the method, and justified the use of such messengers of the cross. And the method obviously secured this end, that “no flesh”—certainly not the successful messengers themselves—“should glory before God.” 4. Look at the first converts.—In Corinth even the “chief ruler of the synagogue,” the Crispus whom Paul had the joy of receiving as a Christian, soon after he had transferred his labours to the house of Titus Justus, was a man of no account except amongst the Jewish community. The Gentile mob dragged before Gallio his successor in office, Sosthenes, with very scant respect. A few converts may have been won from the descendants of the Roman colonists with whom the city had been repeopled. But, as usual, the artisan and the slave, the small trader and the sailor, would form the bulk of the Corinthian Church. It is just one of the touches of “foolishness” in God’s plan that, though the “noble, the mighty, the wise after the flesh” need the Gospel of the Cross as much as do the “foolish, and weak, and base,” its reception has seemed to be made distinctly more difficult for them than for others. The exceptions in the New Testament to Paul’s statement are few. In Philippi the first to be won for Christ were a purple-seller and a gaoler, not the magistrates. Jerome boasted in after years (on Galatians 3:3), “Ecclesia Christi non de Academia, et Lycζo, sed de vili plebecula congregata est” (Farrar L. of Chr., i. 197). But it was long a standing matter of scorn that the adherents of the new faith were almost exclusively from lower grades of society. Not that the Gospel has any republican prejudice against, or dislike for, the rich or the aristocratic. [“Not many,” but always some. “How I thank God,” Lady Huntingdon used to say, “for the letter m! If it had been ‘not any’!”] The exceptions to Paul’s statement in the New Testament can almost be counted upon one’s ten fingers. But the exceptions are there. [And possibly the percentage of the “wise and noble” has been as great as that of the far more numerous lower classes.] The Gospel met the case of Nicodemus; of Sergius Paulus, the proconsul of Cyprus; of Dionysius, a judge of the sacred court on Areopagus; of Erastus, the city-treasurer of Corinth itself (Romans 16:23); and these were but the precursors of a noble few, who are nobler because position or wealth or learning were consecrated to the service of the Gospel of a crucified Jesus. But these were not saved because of their social standing; as it was no prejudice to them, so it gave no advantage; and they joined a company of people, humble and often rude, who could impart no social consideration, and in company with whom they lost that which they already had. 5. And yet these arrangements of God’s plan have been crowned with success.—The foolishness of God is wiser than men; the weakness of God is stronger than men.” Here is plain matter of historical fact. Such preachers, bearing such a message, winning mainly such converts, “have turned the world upside down.” Such messengers have evidently no ground to glory in their success, as if it arose out of their own qualifications or abilities. To win such converts brought no glory in the eye of the world. The converts themselves could not suppose that anything in themselves drew out any special mercy of God towards them. To join the “sect everywhere spoken against” brought no credit. Looked at on any side, the arrangements for the spread of the Gospel were such as to debar all pretence of “flesh” glorying in the presence of God. 5. All this not only historically, but generally, true.—All Christian workers—and by no means preachers alone—need to remember that God proceeds on the same lines still. The “wise” and the “scribe” are not extinct. Their judgment is that of the natural heart always. They would say: “Convert the men of influence among the Roman masters of Corinth. Catch Gallio, and the whole city will go with him.” [It was a bad day for the world when, not of Christ, but of Constantine, it could be said: “The world is gone after him!” (They who said this so bitterly of Christ, knew not of the glorious fulfilment of their words symbolised in the very next verse, when “the Greeks”—the first “ears” of the harvest of the Gentiles—came to “see Jesus,” John 12:19-20).] “Convert a philosopher or two, or a rhetorician, amongst the Greeks; these will carry their disciples with them.” The critic will dishearten the Christian Church as he points out that, in the mission-fields of the world, or, indeed, in the Churches at home, the bulk of the converts and membership belong to the middle or the working and lower classes. The divorce between Culture and Christianity is distressing, but it is not novel. It is nothing new or surprising if a Church reaps a more abundant harvest amongst the pariahs or the aborigines of India than amongst the Brahmins. God always has lighted His fire from the bottom, [and first ignites the slight material!] He began with the fisherman, and the fallen woman, and the publican, and the slave. Often does He begin with the servant maid or the child to-day, when He saves a family. “The poor have the Gospel preached to them,” whilst it does reach and save culture and birth and wealth. These need “to become fools that they may be wise” (1 Corinthians 3:18). “That no flesh should glory.” 6. No man may be a successful winner of souls who disregards this rule of God’s procedure.—If God have “given the tongue of the learned,” that he may know how to speak “a word in season to him that is weary” (Isaiah 50:4); if to natural gifts have been added opportunities of culture; if the ready tongue and warm heart are used to win many to the story of the Cross; if the Spirit of God make his gifts nobly auxiliary to the work of pulling down strongholds, and bringing hearts to the obedience of Christ; then he needs to remember that these are gifts, and that he is only an instrument. The axe may not complacently dwell upon its temper or edge, nor count up proudly the stout trees it has been used to fell. Every victory must be laid simply at the feet of the Lord of the battle. In the day that God’s labourers begin to “glory in His presence,” in that day will they be laid aside. “Things that are not,” they will revert to their original nothingness. 7. The humble may hear hereof and be glad.—The “weak” and the “foolish” are the very instruments God can best employ. He will have no joint saviours of “them that are perishing.” He wants men and women who will be content to offer themselves, and all the glory of any success, to Him. 8. So also the message must not be tampered with. The Gospel is significantly summarised as “the preaching (the word) of the Cross” (1 Corinthians 1:18).—To conciliate the pride of unsanctified intellect, the Sufferer on the cross must not be hidden behind the Babe in the manger, and still less behind the gentle, tender Healer of disease, and of the Teacher who—account for it, and for Him, as we can—spake as never man spake. [Calvary, and not even Bethlehem, is the true Kiblah of the Mecca of the pilgrimage of a sinful world, in search of rest to heart and conscience. Even on Christmas morning, the Christian preacher will also say, “Let us go even unto Calvary.”] The message must be characteristically, whatever else it includes, the word of “Christ, and Him,” too, “(as) crucified.” As a simple matter of often verified experiment, “foolishness” though this be, it has satisfied the needs of human hearts better than any “other Gospel” (Galatians 1:9). All great revivals of the life and vigour and progress of the kingdom of God in the world, have been in the closest association with this specific type of teaching; they have demanded it, and have produced it. It may be “a stumbling-block” (also in Galatians 5:11); but it may not be dispensed with. As matter of experiment it has been the foundation stone, of “God’s own power and wisdom,” on which effectual teaching and practical holiness of life have age after age been securely built. Try anything else, whether upon the world’s “wisdom,” or upon its sin and misery; the result will only be another verification of 1 Corinthians 1:20; if the Church will confront the world’s wisdom with the like worldly wisdom, God will make even His own people’s effort to end in manifest “foolishness” The “argument of the Cross” [so Evans, bringing into close connection with the same word in 1 Corinthians 1:17] best secures that “no flesh should glory before God,” and it therefore best succeeds.] III. Seen in the provisions of the Gospel for the salvation of the individual sinner (1 Corinthians 1:30-31).—(See also Separate Homily.) 1. For the overthrow and shaming of the imposing “entities” of the world, God has chosen to take and use “non-entities,” “things that are not,” have no existence [making His new creation out of “nothings”]. And, as truly, for their own salvation He has taken care that, if “they now are” at all, and are anything, or have anything—“wisdom, righteousness, holiness, redemption,” every man shall “glory only in the Lord.” Only “in Christ Jesus” have they, or are they, anything. “He is made” all these things to them. Apart from Him they are foolish, guilty, unholy, lost—nothing! 2. In this fact, that the Gospel does nothing to conciliate either the intellect or the proud heart of man, does it stand very sharply distinguished from all other religions. In varying form, but with substantial unity, these exalt human nature, not abase it; if in any degree it needs elevation or recovery, the sufficient force is said to be within the man himself. In Stoicism man could be his own saviour; he must be self-reliant, and independent of all men and all things in his struggle after good; pride was indulged on principle. And in this it was but a special and philosophic formulating of the thought and feeling of human nature, even at its best, everywhere. That Gospel can hardly be of human origin, which even conceives of attaining success in a totally different direction. It tells a man that of himself he has nothing to recommend him to God; that he can do nothing to win His favour; that, whether “by wisdom” (1 Corinthians 1:21), or by works, he can attain to no knowledge of God; that all he gets is “of God,” purely and simply, and for the sake of Christ; that even in the faith which lays hold of all, there is no merit—it is exercised in the strength of grace. As the Gospel has been seen above to be “a stumbling-block” to the natural understanding, so it is also an offence to the natural heart. All is of grace. Men, even the “Jew,” the “Greek,” the “wise,” the “scribe,” the “mighty,” are “perishing” together. There is now only one fundamental classification: “them that are perishing,” “us who are being saved.” No matter how high may rise the edifice of a Christian’s life and holiness, at the foundation of all, lies the fact that the grace “of God” “in Christ” has in the first instance made him who “was not” into a saint. After long ages of heaven’s perfected “redemption,” it will still remain true that Christ Jesus is “made redemption” to him. He is in that world only as a man “redeemed” “of God” “in Christ.” 1 Corinthians 1:18. The Preaching [the Word] of the Cross.—Observe the connection between this and the preceding verse. Paul is jealous over himself as a preacher, and over his hearers, lest he should lay himself out to use, and they should desire to hear, “the wisdom of words”; he is jealous lest “The Cross should be made void.” For “the Cross” is the summary, and the very heart, of another “word” which God has spoken; the very strength of it, and the secret of its effectiveness, are there. It is God’s “argument,” set over against man’s “arguments.” [So Evans.] Its whole force lies in the fact that it is not a theory, or a philosophy, but a fact; and that fact a “Cross.” Christianity, the Gospel, God’s latest revelation of Himself, alt gather themselves up around this startling sight, a Cross and a Crucified One. The effectiveness of this “Word” must be guarded at all costs; therefore the “wisdom of words” must be watched or banished altogether. Observe then— I. A wonderful fact about Christianity: the prominent place given in it to “the cross of Christ.” 1. The Russian painter Verestchagin a few years ago in his exhibition of paintings hung side by side three pictures: A Russian Nihilist being executed by hanging, in a thick-falling snowstorm; Several wretched sepoys of the Mutiny of 1857, writhing helplessly, and in terror, as they stood bound to the muzzle of the guns whose discharge was to execute the sentence upon their revolt or treachery; The crucifixion of Christ. Three executions! The realism of this last was exceedingly great. No doubt it was very true to what was to be seen outside the walls of Jerusalem on a certain Friday morning of April, in the year 30, by one of the visitors come from foreign lands to keep the Passover. No doubt an execution, the execution of a strange man of Nazareth, of whom there had been a good deal of talk in the country for some three years past, was what was discussed at the gatherings for the Supper in upper rooms in Jerusalem that evening. If there were, as an early Christian apologist asserts, an official report from Pilate to Rome, it would be the matter-of-fact report of an execution. How comes “an execution” to be the central argument of God’s message to mankind? Why is this crucifixion of the Author of the new religion so vital to it? One of the preachers of the new faith, Peter, was himself crucified, like the Master whom he served. But the cross of Peter has never affected the world’s religion and civilisation and history like the cross of Christ. Why not? Of the hundreds and hundreds of Jews who were crucified by Roman hands outside and upon the walls of the city in the day of its capture and destruction, not one has left his name, or by his death made any such perceptible mark on the world’s life and thought, as this other crucified Jew has done. Nobody would die for Peter because Peter was crucified. Thousands of spectators are year by year profoundly stirred by the pathos of the Oberammergau dramatisation of the scenes of Calvary; yet the emotion stirred by the intense realism of the death of Josef Meyer is of another older altogether to the stirring of hearts all over the world caused by even the mental contemplation of the dying of Jesus upon His cross. Why? If any heart is really “blessed” at Oberammergau, if by chance any life is changed by a real conversion in consequence of what is seen and felt there, manifestly it is not the crucifixion of the man Meyer which has effected the change, but the cross and death of Christ, which perhaps then was made for the first time to have any reality, and so any power of appeal, to the spectator’s heart. 2. The relation of the death of Christ to His Gospel is close, and uniquely close.—The death of Peter might have been, like Paul’s, by decapitation, for all that it would have mattered to the substance of his teaching and to the issue of his life’s work. It is an accident of history merely that Socrates died by the poison-cup, rather than by any other method of execution. Neither the fact nor the mode of the death of Buddha or Confucius is of any importance to their system of doctrine. Pascal lays his satirical finger upon the fact that, whereas the plan and the success of Mahomet meant the death of others, to the plan and success of Christ His own death was essential. [So Talleyrand’s well-known reply to Le Reveilliθre Lepeaux, who had read before the Institute in 1797 an essay upon the re-establishment of Theophilanthropy. “I have but one observation to make. In order to found His religion, Jesus Christ was crucified and rose again. You ought to attempt as much” (Guizot, Meditations, pp. 1, 2).] It would be impossible to exhibit Christianity, except in a mutilated form whose identity had become doubtful, if no stress were laid upon the fact that Christ was crucified, or, above all, if that fact were left out altogether. As Christ identifies Himself with His Gospel, and with Truth, so here Paul brings into solitary prominence this one fact, “the Cross,” as practically the sum and substance of Christianity. Without the story of the crucifixion of Christ, or with it, if that be only an accidental fact of the history; if that death were only an unfortunate, unintended, premature conclusion of the ministry of Christ—of Jesus; then His work and His works would perhaps long ago have faded into indistinct history or myth. At any rate, His teaching would at the utmost have been a beautiful code of ethics, the most beautiful the world possesses, but hanging, as it were, in mid-air, and weak, just as all the noblest systems of morals are all weak, in having no adequately efficacious working power. He would have been just one among the world’s greatest and choicest names; the best loved of them all, perhaps, but not the present-day personal power He is, not only to a few cultured people who can realise the past and be influenced by it, but to the masses who must live, and must be raised, and must be saved, in the present. 3. The guilty conscience and the burdened heart feel and know why Christianity meets them with a unique helpfulness and sufficiency.—Whatever be the reason, the fact is certain that it is the Cross which makes Christianity the religion of every heart. John Bunyan was not merely casting Puritan or any temporary phase of theology into the form of a story; he was not merely generalising from his own experience; he was summarising universal experience; when he takes his Christian to the Cross, and there, and not till then, makes his burden fall off, and the man set forth with a new freedom and lightness of heart. The sight of the Cross made the burden fall. So say all guilty souls. They push on past the manger of Bethlehem; they have no ear for the name “Immanuel” until they have been to Calvary. When their heart has there been disburdened of its load, then first is that heart at leisure to come back to Bethlehem and learn the lesson of the holy manger. But the profundities and mysteries of condescension and love in the Incarnate Babe need a heart to understand them which has first seen the Crucified One “made sin for us.” No New Testament writer, not even John, contributes more than does Paul to what light we have on the Incarnate Son; but the centre of gravity of Paul’s scheme of the Gospel, “my Gospel,” as he calls it often, will be shifted, if the Incarnation and the Birth become, more than the Death and its Atonement, the objects of attention, the subjects of preaching. It is a glorious Gospel, truly, which lies in the very name “Immanuel,” God with, instead of against, us; it has in it all the possibilities of life (Romans 8:31). The race now is made up of “men of God’s goodwill. “But how? Why? How is the individual, conscious of guilt in the past record, and more deeply conscious still of an inward, deep-seated heart aversion from God and from gτod, to enter into the Name “Immanuel”? Has the word reached him too late, since he has sinned, and is a sinner? The answer is at the Cross, or it is nowhere. It would not be fair to make the Incarnation merely one step in a chain of arrangements leading up to the Cross, and existing for its sake. Really each is in some points for the sake of the other. It is plain that if the Incarnate Babe exhibits and proclaims the reconciliation, the Cross makes it. “He hath reconciled us … by the death of His Son” (Romans 5:10). We can date the death on Calvary within narrow limits. We cannot date the true Reconciliation; we read mysterious things of “a Lamb slain before the foundation of the world” (1 Peter 1:20). But when God would make plain His heart to guilty, lost man, He chooses to emphasise the word of the Cross, not “the word of the Manger.” Reconciliation is the first step back to peace. Christian speculation on the meaning of the Incarnation, and its possible relations to the whole creaturely universe, has been fruitful in noble thinking. But Christian preaching which is to touch even “the base things,” in the most unworthy sense of “base,” has always, as matter of experiment, found in the Cross a better help for souls, and the best appeal for the use of the winner of souls. At the Cross he has found his ποῦστῶ, from which to lift the world. II. “The Cross” is a summary of Gospel preaching.—Of course the interpretation of this phrase of Paul will depend on our whole reading of the entire New Testament. It is one of those single words into which is condensed, and in which is assumed, all the customary belief and teaching of a man’s lifetime. “How much do you mean by ‘the Cross,’ Paul?” “How much? Ask them which hear me constantly, ask them who read me most closely; behold, they know what I mean!” But at least it is manifest that Christ Himself made it central to His Gospel. The Gospel lies within an ellipse, of which these are the two foci (and the two are fundamentally one, the central Truth of a circle): 1. A cross for the Master; 2. A cross for each of His disciples. Midway, or thereabout, in the course of His three years’ ministry, in the few days of retirement to the neighbourhood of Cζsarea Philippi (Mark 8:27-38), for the first time did Christ speak definitely to His disciples about death as the issue of His ministry, though not as yet precisely specifying that this should be by crucifixion. The news, so startling to a Jew, that this should be at the hands of the revered and representative men of his nation, and so saddening to a loving disciple, Peter was for hushing back, and, indeed, would have had His Master entertain no such gloomy thoughts: “Be propitious to Thyself, Lord (Matthew 16:22, literally); be kinder to Thyself than that!” Quick and sharp the cry broke forth from Jesus, “Behind Me, Satan!” Had the Adversary himself retained Peter on his side, the disciple could have said nothing more thoroughly according to his mind. Such a suggestion—to delete the cross from the programme of the Saviour’s earthly sojourn and its work—was the very desire of the Devil. [It had been his proposition long before that the King should make a “short cut” to His kingdom, avoiding the cross, Matthew 4:8-10]. The voice was Peter’s voice; the thought was the thought of Satan. There must be a cross for the Master, or His work would go undone; there would be no Gospel of redemption. A few days after, as the little company, Jesus leading the way, the twelve “coming after Him,” were slowly moving through some village of the neighbourhood, the villagers stood gazing at the little company of strangers, and Jesus stopped, and calling them to Him, said “unto them all” (Mark 8:24; Luke 9:23), what Peter was not for hearing even for his Master, “Every man must take up his own cross”—as I do Mine; “daily”—as from the first I have done Mine. What Peter would not hear of for his Master, he and every disciple must hear of for himself, else there can be no discipleship. The whole Christian host, the Captain and the rank and file, all carry their cross. There is no Christian who does not. To himself and to his Lord the Gospel is “the word of the Cross.”1 Corinthians 1:21. Seeking and finding God. Introduction.—Some striking and suggestive turns of phraseology here: 1. “The world” is seeking “to know God.” Of the “believers” who are brought to the goal which “the world” misses, it is not said that they “know God,” but, what at first seems a very much smaller thing, that they are “saved.” “Is that all?” “Yes; and a very glorious attainment too. It is, in fact, the reward and goal of the world’s search.” “To know God” and “to be saved” were long before closely linked (John 17:3). “In knowledge of whom standeth [consisteth] our eternal life.” (I.e. as in the ancient collect, “Quem nosse vivere est.”) 2. The world seeks for God by the way of “wisdom.” They who find this salvation which is the knowledge of God, find Him by the path of “believing”; another path altogether, which nevertheless justifies itself as the highest wisdom (1 Corinthians 2:6) to those who are brought by it to the goal. 3. Are we to press the distinction between “in the wisdom of God” [taking the customarily accepted turn of thought as that of Paul] and “it pleased God”? Perhaps not too strongly or too far. Yet it is true that it is no “good pleasure” of God to see His world groping after the knowledge of Himself in vain. [Acts 17:26-28 is very explicit: “He hath made … that they should seek … if haply they might find Him.”] It may be His “wisdom” that they should not “by wisdom find Him out”; but He loves to be found and known and loved. We have, then, I. The world’s inquiry. II. God’s answer. I. 1. The heart and the intellect of man do inquire after the knowledge of God.—Man’s mind and heart will not be forbidden to inquire after God. Of no avail to throw doors open—invitingly open—and to solicit exploration, in directions to which admittance is given by gates inscribed “To Science,” “To Music,” “To Philanthropy,” “To Truth and Right,” and to shut up Religion-gate, or to build up the door leading out towards the road “To God.” This fact in itself goes some way towards, and has someworth as, an answer to the question, “Is God knowable?” It were strange if the instinctive, or at least the ever-recurrent, inquiry of mind and heart, “O that I knew where I might find Him!” were a mere lying, deluding impulse, driving men to search endlessly after what could not be found, or after One who did not choose to be found; or if the idea of a God were only an ignis fatuus leading into mere bottomless bog and darkness. There can be no demonstration of Him, as there can be no demonstration that there is no God. But if the very constitution of man’s mind be not a contradiction and a lie, then the unceasing quest after God witnesses to a possibility of a real knowledge of Him. Not a complete one—that is out of the question, by universal consent; but a real, if incomplete, knowledge, sufficient, moreover, for regulative [though not merely regulative] purposes. [The child “knows” the father, even though the man’s life, and the particular character of its own parent, be in their whole round far beyond its present comprehension. 2. Man is morally a strange contradiction in this matter.—The natural heart is averse from God, “and desires not the knowledge of His ways” (Job 21:14); yet the famous sentence of Augustine is the summary of the universal human experience: “Tu excitas, ut laudare te delectet; quia fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.” (Conf., I. i. 1.) “The fool says in his heart ‘No God,’ ” but, as Bacon quaintly puts it: “It is not said, ‘The fool hath thought in his heart,’ so as he rather saith it by rote to himself, as that he would have, than that he can thoroughly believe it, and be persuaded of it; for none deny that there is a God, but those for whom it maketh that there were no God” (Essays, “Atheism”). It is a lesson which the “fool” must say over and over to himself, to be quite sure: “No God, No God, No God.” David never heard of an atheist by professed creed. [Another David, David Hume, avowed at the table of Baron d’Holbach, that he had never met with an atheist. “Allow me,” said his host, “to introduce you to thirteen,” indicating his guests.] Long ago Cicero pointed out that no nation of atheists had ever been found (De Nat. Deor., i. 16). It is another thing, and capable of ready explanation, that now and again peoples have been found, few in number and low down in the scale of civilisation, in whom the very idea of worship seemed almost or quite extinct, and their life and thinking reduced to the narrowness of the animal existence. Yet the vague sense of a supernatural is hardly ever absent, and the idea of a God can always be called out again in even the most imbruted and degraded. Every man is capable of it, as no noblest animal is. As matter of history, belief has ever been before disbelief; belief has seemed natural, disbelief and denial have been induced, and matters of education. Man “cries out after God, after the living God” (Psalms 74:2). “This inquiry and search after God is the origin of all religion, and the truth even of heathenism” (Luthardt). And yet man is a prodigal who “goeth into a far country,” where his Father may be out of sight and out of mind. It is the dislocation of God’s order seen everywhere in His creation; man, like the rest, is “out of joint,” as the result of a moral confusion in God’s “very good” world and its order. 3. The intellect starts on its quest on some four great lines of argument, four great highways, as it hopes, to the assurance that there is a God and to some knowledge of Him. A few, capable of such thinking, have argued that, because man can have the conception of a Perfect Being, there must be somewhere a reality corresponding to the conception; that there must be an Infinite Substance, of whom [or which] Time and Space must be “accidents”; that the ideas of the Infinite, the Absolute, the Eternal, must have their root and basis somewhere; “the thought of God implies the existence of God.” Often discredited, argued out of court, criticised or refined away, dismissed, buried, but with a wonderful resurrection power about it, the “No effect without a cause” argument has been a path along which a far larger class of minds—“practical people”—has set out to find God. Wider still in the field of its appeal, a broad way at which many—most—have gone in in their search, is the argument from Design, which is not really affected even if modern “evolutionary” science makes good all its claims, and turns every hypothesis into certainty; it would only be a revolutionising of our knowledge of the method, by which the Creator had effectuated and carried out His design; however the result has been brought about, He is still there, directing the processes, guiding the whole, from inception to conclusion. [Said Newton: “Hζcce compages solis, planetarum, et cometarum et stellarum, non nisi Consilio et dominio entis cujusdam potentis et intelligentis oriri potuit.”] “Every science without exception shows that the order and [concurrent] adaptation and harmonies of nature are such as to make the chances no less than infinite against the supposition of Chaos, or the absence of the designing intelligence.” Said Bonaparte in Egypt, after listening to the atheistic talk of a group of officers and savans, gathered at his tent door under the lustrous stars of a sub-tropical night, “All very well, gentlemen; but who made all these?” [There is even in the Sublime and the Beautiful in Nature, secured as so much of it is by the very same properties of matter—mechanical, chemical, or other—and their combinations, as secure the more utilitarian results of Design, a concurrent “design argument,” which leads many minds towards the Mind, towards God. (See this popularly accessible in Pres. Day Tracts, No. 20, R.T.S.] The common agreement of the vast majority of the race, account for it how men may, has always been to some a promising line of quest after God. “Where all the world have turned their steps, surely in that direction He is to be found.” So men have said, nor without justification. 4. The heart and the moral nature have contributed to all the inquiry. The heart, as well as the intellect, has had its own “wisdom” by which it has sought “to know God.” And its wisdom has been the wisest. It has, indeed, affected the search after Him, in every line of quest. Very much according as their heart and moral condition have been, so have the inquirers valued or disparaged the paths by which the reason sought after Him; so have they hoped or feared that the path might lead them to His throne; so have they been urged onward by desire or dragged forward with reluctance, towards the place where perchance He might reveal Himself to the searchers. But the moral nature of man reaches out groping hands after Him. The sense of wrong and right has looked eagerly if it might see a Supreme Lawgiver somewhere behind “Right” and “Wrong.” Conscience has intimated a moral world and its Ruler. The personal manhood has given supreme testimony to a Person with whom it may have fellowship, and the sense of dependence has reinforced the argument. “The same heart in man which trembles before an Authority above him yearns to be able to trust in Him.” And the inquiry of the heart after God is the more earnest when the sense of guilt, so strange, so unreasonable, so inexplicable, and yet so completely justifying itself to the man who passes through its experiences, presses home the question: “How may I find God? If I find Him, what kind of God shall I meet? Will there be any pity, any mercy, any pardon, any love? Can there be? Can He show any?” Man can give no satisfying peace. The sinner has no authority to speak peace to himself. Nature is not without analogies which may suggest forgiveness; she has healing herbs for wounds and diseases, occasioned by violations of her own laws. But the guilty heart wants to know the Lawgiver, and His mind towards itself and its sin. 5. Abundantly clear from the history of human thought, philosophical or theological, that by any of these roads, or by all combined, the race has never come to any satisfying certainty about God. “His eternal power and Godhead” have not always been understood by the things that are made (Romans 1:20). All these arguments have always been open to all, to study and use. They none of them depend upon Revelation. The wisest wisdom of this world has exercised itself upon them. Yet there is not one of them which is so demonstrative in its force as to compel assent or to give certainty. [There is not one which may not be frittered away by over-subtle criticism; not one from which the intellect cannot find a way of escape, if sore pressed by it in controversy.] There is not one which brings absolutely and infallibly to God. Phenomena and the Finite have not necessarily suggested an Infinite Subsistence. The unity of design is as consistent with the operation of one of two, or of one of many, workers left to do as he wills, as with the operation of One Only Worker. He must be very and sufficiently wise and powerful, but not of logical necessity all-wise, all-powerful. “Is number finite or infinite?” asked a believing French savant of some atheistic men of science. “Finite.” “Then the universe had a beginning.” But the argument does not of necessity shut men up to a Creator. Men of “wisdom” have, in fact, held an Eternal Matter, or a self-originated Universe. Endless have been the ancient and modern, Oriental and Western, variations upon the Pantheistic theory of God and the world. A personal God, who is Creator, has not always been a God of providential rule over, and care for, His creation. Polytheism has been the belief of large sections of the race in all ages. The inquiry of mere wisdom has always, in point of fact, left men without just views or settled convictions. “The various apprehensions of wise men,” said Cicero long ago, “justify the doubtings of sceptics, and it will be time enough to blame these when others agree, or any one has found the truth” (De Nat. Deor., i. 10, 11. See Note at end of Homily). “(The wisdom of this world) does not deny Divine existence, though a good many persons are coldly doubtful and ‘agnostic’ on the subject. But as in the first century any effective conception of God was wearing out of thoughtful minds [Emperors, not only like Augustus, but like Tiberius and Nero, were deified. On the other hand, all the vilest, meanest, Oriental or African gods and cults were being welcomed at Rome], … so now there are mere vague and high-sounding phrases about the Almighty current among the worldly-wise. He is a force—personal or impersonal, no one knows; where seated, why operative, how directed, none can tell. Or, He is a dream of Ineffable Beauty, and a fountain of Ineffable Pity; but how to reconcile this with the more severe aspects of nature and life baffles all the wisdom of the world. The sages are puzzled; the multitude know not what to think; and so ‘the world by wisdom knows not God’ ” (Dr. Donald Fraser). “Anima naturaliter Christiana,” cried the old apologist; but his word is both true and untrue. The anima Christiana truly finds reason enough to believe that in the design of its Maker it would “naturally” have known God. But there has been a blinding of the eye that looks for His traces; it cannot read aright the teachings of (say) nature. [It is “the pure in heart” now that alone “see God.” The Sir Galahads, not the Lancelots, see the Holy Grail.] In some lines of argument the evidence also has got confused; it cannot be read with absolute confidence; [the pieces of the puzzle have got jostled, and some perhaps are lost; it is not easy to discover the design which would lead to a Designer]. The altar “to an unknown God” in Athens is confessedly a symbolical fact in a representative city; man’s wisdom with all possible advantages avowing a result so incomplete as to be a defeat of any search “by wisdom” only. The wisest minds need God’s pilotage if they are to reach Himself. Science does not find man in man’s body, nor God in God’s world. The most modern thing is to take the confession of failure and wear it as the badge of superiority: “Agnostic, we!” 6. And this was “in the wisdom of God.”—The whole moral history of earth and mankind may probably be a great object-lesson in sin, its meaning, its mischief, its misery, and in grace, its manifold wisdom, and infinite fulness, for the teaching of other worlds and other races. The failure of mere fallen, darkened reason, even in its wisest, mightiest, most industrious examples, to “come at” God, “though He be not far from any one of us,” may not be the least instructive detail in this great Didactic of the story of our race. However that may be, with regard to “principalities and powers in heavenly places,” and however the question may be decided whether, if sin had not darkened man’s reason and perverted his heart, and confused and blurred some of the clearest evidence for a God, man might then “by wisdom” have known God, [if, indeed, he would then have had any need to search; man is seeking now a lost vision and knowledge]; as things are, this world-wide, age-long result all falls in with the great principle of 1 Corinthians 1:29; 1 Corinthians 1:31, that all pride of human intellect should be utterly excluded, made impossible by its utter failure to “find out God” (Job 11:7). The knowledge, when it comes, is to be through a “Salvation,” and salvation is for “those who believe.”II. God’s answer.— 1. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in” the midst of Israel, so God has “lifted up” His Son upon a cross in the midst of mankind, groping with blind eyes, and outstretched hands, and yearning heart after Himself. The central Figure of history is Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God. The central Fact of the history of the Christ is the Cross. [The wise men from the East asked, “Where is He that is born King of the Jews?” Thirty years after Pilate gave the answer, putting upon the cross, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”] The world for ages had been asking, “How, where, may we find and know God? Is there a God to know and find?” The answer given by the “preaching” of Paul and his fellows and their successors is, “Look at Jesus Christ, and above all at Him crucified, and see and know God.” 2. All we need to know, perhaps all we can be made to know, about God, we hear from Jesus of Nazareth; indeed, more truly still, we see it in Jesus of Nazareth. “He that hath seen Him hath seen the Father.” [As we say of a boy whose father is unknown to an inquirer who, nevertheless, is acquainted with the lad, “Well, he is his father over again.”] What He said and did, and above all, the reasons, the principles of judgment and action, which underlie all He said and did,—we may transfer them all to God, and say, “Thus and thus does He act and judge.” His relation, e.g. to prayer and to sin, is exhibited in Christ. His requirement of faith in Himself in order to sight and health and blessing, is a revelation of God in this respect. We have a record, attested by historical evidence, sufficient when the nature of the case is taken into full account, of a Person and His character and teaching, starting with which we gain, at the least, a crucial and probative instance that there is a “supernatural” Order, which in that one case at least has broken in upon, and manifested itself in the midst of, the natural. The world of God and of things spiritual disclosed itself in Him, His life and work. It is an ascertained fact, and level to the apprehension of the simplest. And when, moreover, it is understood that the whole Written Word is the word of Christ the Revealer, then all its teachings about God become those of Christ. And, as matter of fact, the only certain and satisfying knowledge of God has been that which is given in the Word of God; the Written and the Incarnate are for this purpose one. 3. But Paul singles out again and again the Cross as the central point of the revelation. A knowledge of God is, in his view, given there which does not even come through the three years’ ministry. [When Moses pleaded, “Show me Thy glory,” and God made His goodness to pass before His servant, it was not even a partial refusal of his request. His “goodness,” “pardoning iniquity, transgression, and sin,” is His “glory” to sinners’ hearts (Exodus 33:18 to Exodus 34:7).] It is interesting in the last degree to hear the confession of even secular students of history that the cross of Christ is the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the modern; that all ancient history, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, all led up to it and converged upon it, whilst all the life of the modern world radiates from it; interesting to see how typical was the simple fact that in the very inscription on the cross were gathered up all the best history of preceding ages,—Hebrew, Greek, Latin—Religion, Wisdom, Law—Worship, Speculation, Government; profoundly interesting to see how Christianity meets the “Jew”-type, “requiring a sign” of the nearness of the Supernatural [“for outward, visible wonders”], and of the “Greek”-type, asking for the True and Beautiful and Good [“for inward completeness of system”]; meeting the one in the failure of his moral quest, and the other in the failure of his intellectual inquiry. But the “base” and “despised” and guilty want first and most urgently an answer for the conscience. And, once more it may be said, that the Cross has, age after age, given a satisfaction on this point found nowhere else. “Theories of the Atonement” have not always been consistent or wise, or duly considerate of all the facts; the analysis of the way in which the holy Justice of God was displayed at Calvary, as well as the Mercy, may sometimes have been mechanical and overdone. Much of all this has, moreover, been beyond the mass of seeking souls. And, apart from it all, by “believing” they have at the Cross come into a “salvation” which has meant “knowledge of God.” Their faith in Christ has been crowned by a gift of the Spirit, whose indwelling has restored more and more perfectly spiritual vision and judgment and power. They have been put by Him en rapport with spiritual things. There has come a “demonstration of the Spirit,” which has given evidence and proof and certainty. God reveals Himself to their “spirit.” They understand the reason of the failure of the search “by way of wisdom.” “Wise” or “foolish” after the mere intellectual standard of “the world,” the “saved” “know,” and they are saved at the Cross by “believing.” NOTE.—Plato complains how hard it is to discover the Father of the universe. Socrates held it to be the greatest possible happiness to know the will of the gods, but did not believe this discoverable by principles of reason, and recommended divination [Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Chr. Belief, pp. 78, 79. He, with others, says further:] Men never found God as personal, as holy, as Creator. Plato’s God oscillates between Nature and a Divine Idea. Aristotle made Him personal, but limited by primordial matter, and only a Demiourgos. The utmost attained to by the race was an intermittently shining, half-obscure presentiment, but not that God is and can only be One. 1 Corinthians 1:30. Christ our Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification, Redemption. I. Wisdom.—In two senses. Not even in Paul’s, or in God’s, could we be “wise” if there were no Christ to know, and unless He helped us to know Himself. He is the great Fact to know which is Wisdom. He gives the faculty for knowing, and the Spirit who exhibits Him to our awakened perception. He is Himself the Revealer, the Sum of all Revelation, and the giver of the “Spirit of wisdom and revelation” (Ephesians 1:12). Like the “world” at Corinth, the “world” to-day makes no account of such “wisdom.” But “knowledge” and “ignorance,” “wisdom” and “folly,” are all relative terms. Measured by one standard, placed in one set of circumstances, judged by one purpose, a man may be wise. With no change in himself, but with another set of conditions, in other circumstances, for another purpose, he may be a fool. To be really wise he must have the knowledge just then required and must know how to apply it. On a certain voyage, for example, so long as all went well, the ship’s surgeon was the wise man of the company. Besides his medical skill, he knew everything which could make the tedium of life on shipboard pass agreeably away. He easily carried the palm for popularity, and for being the universally clever man. The ship was wrecked on a desolate island. It became a question of finding shelter, of finding and cooking food, and here the many-sided man was utterly at fault. The common sailors, with their experimental knowledge of a thousand-and-one odds and ends of practical convenience, despised the doctor as a helpless hindrance. There was a curious reversal of the position. He had been a hero, a little god, on board; now he was a fool who wanted feeding and could find no food. The only wisdom known to the Book of God is Divine knowledge, and that is all bound up in Christ. No Christian will wisely undervalue mere natural wisdom or culture. The wide knowledge of the facts of the universe and their laws—Science; the wide mastery of the facts of the past and the great principles underlying them—History; the full-stored knowledge of the human mind, and of its laws—Philosophy; literary lore; the accumulations of the linguist; all these are noble and ennobling possessions, elevating, widening, as well as furnishing the mind which is enriched by them. All due honour even to the “wise man after the flesh.” All highest honour to such Wisdom when she becomes the handmaid of Divine truth. But all this is only fair-weather knowledge. The storm is coming, the wreck of the present order of things; the day of peril and of judgment, when the great question will be Eternal Life or Eternal Death. Even now all mere human knowledge is of things that “vanish away.” Knowledge and the objects of knowledge both are in ceaseless flux; a shifting, ever-changing knowledge of a shifting, ever-changing world, a partial knowledge perpetually under revision, correction, or enlargement. The one unchanging Fact is God in Christ. When, in “the new heavens and the new earth,” our science, history, literature, language, art, shall have been made obsolete, or shall have become mere curious memories, the knowledge of God will abide, true as ever, important as ever. “Can you tell me about God?” is a question which somehow the human mind cannot let alone. “Tell me about man, about myself. What is the meaning of the strange conflict always going on within me, between a higher and a lower self? What is the voice I sometimes seem to hear within me? and why is it so often a voice of self-reproach?” And then, when sin is understood, come the great questions: “Tell me whether there is any way of peace with myself and with God? Is He good? But that only makes me the more sadly wrong. Do not tell me what you hope, or think. Has He spoken? What are His terms of restoration?” Up to Paul’s day the wisest man of this world never answered such questions with any finality of satisfaction. The world’s wisdom has no final answer to-day. The very simplest Christian has an answer—an answer which, in ten thousand instances, has “worked” well in practical life. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/phc/ NOTES(For many points, see Homiletic Analysis.) 1 Corinthians 2:1. I.—Slightly emphatic; q.d. “I was myself also in complete harmony of spirit and method with the lines of God’s procedure” (as set out in 1 Corinthians 1:17-31). This verse takes up the personal thread from 1 Corinthians 1:17. Speech.—Lit. “word.” Compare with 1 Corinthians 1:18, 1 Corinthians 4:20, inter alia. Proclaiming.—No more; that is his function, simple and restricted. Testimony.—Notice the striking and influentially supported reading “mystery,” which, if accepted, is a thoroughly Pauline thought. Retaining “testimony,” then preaching is not theorising, speculation, imagination; not what we fancy, or our heart says “must be”; but the “testimony of God.” Not even our systematised deductions from the Word, unless these can be shown to be the “testimony of God.” To this the heart responds; cf. 1 Thessalonians 1:5.1 Corinthians 2:2. “And that Jesus Christ as crucified;” an additional restriction imposed upon himself, knowing well all the while that it would be an additional difficulty to the reason and heart of man. (In strict grammar the “not” belongs to “determined,” and not to “know.”)1 Corinthians 2:3.—Not to be illustrated by the A.V. of Acts 18:5, which, with the true reading, means “was under a sacred pressure that made him give himself more earnestly than ever to the preaching of the Word.” The weakness “was ethical, not physical” (Evans). So Ellicott. But Beet, “Any kind of inability, including bodily weakness caused by sickness.” He adds, however, “This sense is suggested in Galatians 4:13. But there is no hint of it here.” This is too strong. Stanley sees allusion to 2 Corinthians 10:10; 2 Corinthians 11:30; 2 Corinthians 12:5; 2 Corinthians 12:9-10. Should we not add 2 Corinthians 12:7-9? Also, does it do honour to the promise of Mat 10:19—which surely extends beyond any mere case of forensic apology—to speak as if the address at Athens were a mistake in topic and form, and had sent Paul to Corinth burdened with a sense of “failure”? “The Apostle preached Jesus at Athens, as well as at Corinth, Acts 17:18” (Ellicott). Certainly in preaching there the Resurrection he had not sought to conciliate human reason. It is not suggesting anything unworthy of Paul to notice that the special vision vouchsafed to him by Christ (Acts 18:9-10) was the Lord’s assistance of His servant in the face of such “blasphemy” and “opposition,” as might well fill him with “fear and trembling” whether he should be adequate to the demand of the work in Corinth, in the face of all its difficulties. Cf. 2 Corinthians 7:5.1 Corinthians 2:4. Preaching.—The matter, not the act, of preaching, as in 1 Corinthians 1:21, which means not the method, “preaching,” but the matter, the thing preached. Enticing.—“Persuasive,” seeking by argument to gain the assent of the intellect, and by rhetoric the suffrages of the heart. Demonstration of the Spirit.—See Separate Homily. The Holy Spirit. Choose between, (a) “The miracles wrought by the power of God through the agency of the Holy Spirit” (e.g. Beet, with Origen); and (b) “The conviction of the truth, wrought through my plain preaching of the Cross in the hearts of my hearers, whose spirit was touched by the Holy Spirit” (e.g. Evans or Ellicott). Choose (b), and compare the words of Longinus, that “paul of Tarsus was the first who maintained positive assertion without elaborate proof.” See how the method of mere “positive assertion,” accompanied by the “power” of the Spirit, carried conviction at Pentecost [well expounding John 16:8-11]. (a) narrows down to the special method for a few Churches in one century, a Divine method applicable, and exemplified, and vindicated, universally.1 Corinthians 2:5.—God’s “wisdom” and “power” are together in 1 Corinthians 1:24.1 Corinthians 2:6. Perfect.—In (the customary Pauline) opposition to “babes” (1 Corinthians 3:1). Evans says: “No contrast here at all between Reason and Revelation, as some think, but between … the philosophy of God and the philosophy of the world. [But this runs up into that between Reason and Revelation.] It is not true that Christianity, in setting forth the bare argument of the Cross unto the salvation of believers, has no interior philosophy of its own for the few receptive of it. But observe that a contrast … is [also] indicated … between the deeper truths or higher wisdom of Christianity and the rudimentary lessons of it. This second contrast … brings to view two corresponding classes of believers, the full-grown and the infants; and, in addition to this, two corresponding modes of instruction. In fact, the Apostle had hitherto preached to his hearers in Corinth such broad facts of the scheme of Redemption as were level to their low apprehension; he had not dared to spread before them the treasures of the higher ‘wisdom’ meet only for the ‘perfect’; to such pearls they in their crude state would have been swine.” [But this latter part is rather exegetical of 1 Corinthians 3:1 than of our verse.] Princes of this world.—Evans: “The leading men of the Jews and of the Greeks, the Gentile potentates, including Hellenic philosophers and Hebrew doctors. Such ‘come to nought’; these luminaries with their vain lamps pale and go out before the day-star of Truth when it dawns from on high.” “That gradual nullification of all real and enduring potency on their part which was brought about by the Gospel” (Ellicott). Any reference to Ephesians 6:12 can only be remote; these “rulers” did not, in any sense germane to Paul’s argument, “crucify” Christ (1 Corinthians 2:8).1 Corinthians 2:7.—Connect, not “we speak … in a mystery,” but “God’s wisdom in (couched in [Evans]) a mystery.” Our glory.—“All have come short of” (Romans 3:23), but in Christ we now “rejoice” again “in hope of, the glory of God” (Romans 5:2). Christ is “the Lord of the glory” in 1 Corinthians 2:7. It is His to give to all for whom it is prepared (Matthew 20:23). “Christ in us” is “the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). See His prayer (John 17:22; John 17:24). “Our glory,” then, is our whole recovered estate, as redeemed and saved through Christ; seen in a life of grace, and of holy fellowship with God here as His children (1 John 3:1); broadening into the life of glory in heaven. The recovered image of God is the glory of human nature, as God meant manhood to be.1 Corinthians 2:9.—Note the more exact rendering in Quoted, somewhat ad sensum, from LXX. of Isaiah 64:4, with perhaps some influence of Isa 52:15 and Isaiah 65:17. What God does for His people in such national and temporal deliverances as were in the view of the prophet, is done on the same lines as all His dealings of every kind with and for them. They are always beyond their expectation and hope. He shames their faith as often as their fears. The “waiting” is the “waiting” of “love”; full, therefore, of faith and patient trust. Also the unloving heart “waits” in vain, if it wait at all. It can see and know and receive nothing of all these “prepared” things. Note “prepared” (R.V.), carrying back thought to the original plan of God.1 Corinthians 2:10. (Hath) revealed them to us by His Spirit.—Makes it quite certain that, however true in such a connection the mere words may be, Paul is not thinking in 1 Corinthians 2:9 of “heaven.” “Heaven,” moreover, is not one of those things internal, so to speak, to the being of God which “the Spirit searches.”1 Corinthians 2:11.—The analogy is not a perfect one; but notice how like God man is: made in the image of God’s self-conscious personality.1 Corinthians 2:12. World.—Here κόσμος; in 1 Corinthians 2:6-8, αἰών. Liddon, Bampton Lectures, v., note, as to κόσμος, quotes from Bishop Martensen: “If we consider the effect of the Fall upon the course of historical development, not only in the case of individuals but of the race collectively, the term ‘world’ bears a special meaning different from that which it would have were the development of humanity normal. The cosmical principle having been emancipated by the Fall from its due subjection to the Spirit, and invested with a false independence, and the universe of creation having obtained with man a higher importance than really attaches to it, the historical development of the world has become one in which the advance of the kingdom of God is retarded and hindered. The created universe has, in a relative sense, life in itself, including, as it does, a system of powers, ideas, and aims which possess a relative power. This relative independence, which ought to be subservient to the kingdom of God, has become a fallen ‘world-autonomy.’ Hence arises the Scriptural expression ‘this world.’ By this expression the Bible conveys the idea that it regards the world not only ontologically, but in its definite and actual state, the state in which it has been since the Fall. ‘This world’ means the world content with itself, in its own independence, its own glory; the world which disowns its dependence on God as its Creator. ‘This world’ regards itself not as the creature (κτίσις), but only as the κόσμος, as a system of glory and beauty which has life in itself, and can give life. The historical embodiment of ‘this world’ is heathendom, which honoureth not God as God.” [For the distinction between “world” and “age,” see chap. 5, § D, of Homiletic Analysis, Appended Note.] In the prevalent reading two words are used for “knoweth” here, perhaps “slightly distinguished” (Stanley), as in John 21:16-17. See 2 Corinthians 5:16. Freely given.—One word; germ of the thought afterward expanded so largely in Romans 5:15 sqq. Note in 1 Corinthians 2:10-13 the order: The Spirit searches in God, what then He brings and imparts, along with Himself, to us; and then next speaks out to others through us; again finding acceptance for them in their case by His own demonstration and power. First and last, and at each intermediate, point it is all the Spirit! God’s thoughts, as the Spirit discloses them, spoken in the Spirit’s words!1 Corinthians 2:13. Spiritual with spiritual.—Exposition, not Grammar, must decide here between, (a) “Comparing [“combining” (R.V: margin), “matching” (Evans)] spiritual things with spiritual things,” and (b) “Interpreting spiritual things by spiritual things,” or (c) “Interpreting spiritual things to spiritual men.” (a) and (b) approximate. Stanley supports “interpreting” by the usage of the LXX. in Genesis 40:8; Genesis 40:16; Genesis 41:15; Daniel 5:12; Daniel 5:15; Daniel 5:26. Evans supports “matching” by 2 Corinthians 10:12; and also prefers “matching spiritual truths with spiritual minds,” which suits well 1 Corinthians 2:6; 1 Corinthians 2:14. In reality the sentence is almost gnomic in form and fulness of application. (a) is only a special case of (a); the “comparing” “of (a) may be for the purpose of the “interpreting” in (b). [We are reminded of the loud exclamation of the minister in the early Church, just previous to the “consecration” of the bread and wine at the Lord’s Supper, “Τὰἅγιατοῖςἁγίοις.” “Holy (things) to holy (persons)!” In like manner there are “spiritual things” which can only congruously go with “spiritual words,” or “things,” or “persons.”]1 Corinthians 2:14. Discerned.—Lit. “examined”; same word as in 1 Corinthians 9:3; as if the “natural” man questioned the “spiritual” thing; but it would not yield up to him its secret (Genesis 32:29; Judges 13:18; Isaiah 9:6). So in 1 Corinthians 2:15; 1 Corinthians 4:3-4. Cognate word also with that for “comparing,” 1 Corinthians 2:13.1 Corinthians 2:15.—Ellicott gives, as examples of these spiritual judgments, the wise, clear, far-reaching decisions in 1 Corinthians 6:1-4, 1 Corinthians 7:1 sqq., 1 Corinthians 7:20 sq., 1 Corinthians 9:3 sq., 1 Corinthians 14:34 sq., 1 Corinthians 14:6 sq.1 Corinthians 2:16.—LXX. in Isaiah 40:13, here quoted, uses “mind” (νοῦς) for “Spirit” (ruach in Heb.). Paul follows what serves his purpose, with perfect fidelity to the truth of the matter discussed. Mind.—Not at all in the vague, loose sense of “character,” or “temper,” or “disposition.” “We know, the knowledge is in our possession, what God in Christ designs and desires for His people; we are taken by the Spirit into the deeps of His redeeming thought toward our race.” [In the same way “spirit” is never in New Testament used for characteristic temper, or style, or prevailing idea. 1 Corinthians 2:12, e.g., means almost certainly a personal spirit.] .—Whole ChapterA contrast runs throughout. I. There are two types of men.—“Natural,” “spiritual.” And so— II. There are two worlds of facts; one being “the things of God.” Correspondent to these there are— III. Two ways of getting to know; one being by the “demonstration of the Spirit.” And further there are in close parallel— IV. Two ways of preaching the Gospel. I. Natural men and spiritual men.— 1. The former word is suitably, truly, descriptive. In any extreme development of the type, they are men as men are by nature; they are what men might have been, what men do again become, apart from the “free gift” of the grace of “the Spirit of Christ” (Romans 8:9). The unregenerate life, and the backslider’s life after regeneration, tend to revert to type. In fallen human nature, per se, “dwelled no good thing” (Romans 7:18). There is not actually found the unrelieved blackness and darkness of mere human nature, but all modifying goodness and light are grace, not nature. Perhaps noble men, but “natural.” 2. But “natural” is not the equivalent of Paul’s word. Nor is “carnal” in, e.g., 1 Corinthians 3:1, though it is with equal truth descriptive, and is set in equally strong contrast with “spiritual” men. 3. His word is Jude’s word, where we have “sensual” (Jude 1:19), expounded as equivalent to, or at least consequent upon, their “not having the Spirit.” James, too, designates by it the wisdom of the “natural man” (James 3:15; “sensual”). 4. The word, like that for “spiritual,” is one of a pair of correlates of “soul” and “spirit.” [1 Thessalonians 5:23; but also consistently distinguished by Paul throughout his terminology of human nature; and, whatever be the nature and value of the distinction—a very difficult question—it is one preserved and observed in Old Testament Hebrew as consistently as in New Testament Greek.] As Paul observed men, a deep cleavage separates them into two sharply definite classes. The cleavage begins with the opposition between “soul” and “spirit,” but runs through all the life of men. [It is coincident with the line which parts “them that are perishing” from “them that are being saved” (e.g. 2 Corinthians 2:15). The line lies between those out of Christ and those “in Christ”; between those who are “the world” in John, and in his Master’s terminology, and those “born again.” “Soulish” has been proposed as an equivalent for Paul’s description; or “animal,” but this is in many cases misleading; “animal-souled” is a compromise, fairly acceptable and useful.] It should be noted that the underlying opposition is not between the Spirit of God and the “soul” in man, but between the human “spirit” and the “soul” in man. [Though the “spirit” of man is so constantly dealt with as under the gracious influences of the Spirit of God, and the two are so nearly allied, that in fact, and in the exegesis of particular passages, it is often hard to keep them apart.] 5. Some “natural men” live a really “animal” life. To satisfy the body’s need of food and sleep, to gratify its passions, seems all their life. “What they know naturally as brute beasts, in these things they corrupt themselves” (Jude 1:10). There are many of a higher type, in whom is much that is loving and lovable; they are tender, affectionate parents, firm friends, faithful servants, good masters; in business diligent, honest, honourable. In many the powers of mind are cultured to a high degree, [though it is the witness of fact, in ancient and modern culture, how the highest cultivation of the intellect and the tastes may coexist with utter selfishness, and even with the crudest sensuality]; the mind is well furnished, and the tastes are refined to an extreme of delicacy. Yet there might almost be no God and no Godward side to their own nature, for anything that appears in life, or motive, or principle. At their best they are highly developed types of the uttermost of which “body” plus “soul” is capable, save that personality still remains, a trait of God’s image not altogether lost. 6. The “spiritual man” may be of very humble origin and station, he may be only scantily educated, but in Him the “spirit” is awakened and dominant. [Language cannot be very exact on this topic, but] it is as though there were a something in him akin to God who is a Spirit, a something capable of looking God in the face, and knowing and being known; susceptible of, responsive to, the activities of the personal Spirit of God; and this no longer, as it were, dormant, overlaid, buried, or only awake to struggle in vain against the dominance of the “soul.” The quickened “spirit” and its powers are now the potent factor in a life which is thus made “new.” Take all of which man is capable apart from the distinctive work of the Spirit of God, and develop it to the highest degree, the man remains a “natural man.” Awaken the “spirit,” ennoble it, enthrone it as supreme, by the indwelling of the Spirit of God, and—culture or no culture in the ordinary sense—you have the life, higher or lower, of the “spiritual man,” often with a very real culture due to the supremacy of his Godward life. [Cf. pp. 49, 51, antea.] 7. On one side of his line of cleavage Paul ranges “princes of this world,” on the other “perfect” men in the Church. “Princes;” for an early current understanding of Psalms 2 saw it fulfilled when “Herod and Pontius Pilate,” and their helpers, “gathered themselves together against the Anointed” One of God, the “Lord of glory” (Acts 4:24-27). Yet these are only representatives of other “princes,” intellectual, social, financial, literary, the leaders of fashions of thought and speech and opinions and morals; often more really than the titular and hereditary ones the rulers of the life of “this world” of “natural men”; the men who make their “age,” just because they are of the age, neither behind it, nor too violently and extremely in advance of it to make it march with their step and dance while they pipe. Great men; and yet less than the men whose measure and whose outlook is adjusted to the scale of a larger Ζon, the eternal, already ever around and with us, and yet “to come.” They are “of the age,” and according to its pattern, and measure, and mind, only. They, and it, and their “wisdom,” all vanish and “come to nought” together. 8. The “perfect” men are the large men; the men—no longer babes, but arrived at, or fast approaching, the prime of moral manhood, in its stature and its trained and experienced capacities. The very “princes” have but a maimed humanity; the dormant, dead, forgotten “spirit” is an integral part of human nature. Human nature is an incomplete, “lop-sided” thing if the spirit be undeveloped. These “princes” may, Saul-like, overtop by a head or more, the average of their “world,” but their feet stand on its level. 9. The “perfect” are only comparatively so. There is no absolute perfection save in God, and to it He does not make progress; He has never had less than perfection in its absolute measure. The perfection of the creature, and even of the “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17), is relative, always becoming, never reaching finality. To a creaturely perfection which could not grow into a higher perfection the next stage would be Death. Still, the contrast is so great and so definite, between the childhood of the “spiritual man” and his adult manhood, that this latter is regarded as a distinct perfection, already reached by the men of whom Paul thinks. The man who has reached his physical majority does not, in many senses, cease to grow still, to the last. In the spiritual life there is no “last”; the growth of the “perfect” goes on in glory. The “princes” are all “natural men,” some of them being the best specimens of these. The “perfect” are all “spiritual men,” with a new life and its equipment of new faculties, and with the knowledge of a new world correlative to these. II. Two worlds of facts corresponding to the two types of men.—“Spirituals match with spirituals,” as Evans renders 1 Corinthians 2:13. (See Critical Notes.) “Natural men” in like manner match with, and are themselves examples of, the things of a “natural” world. The cleavage extends here also. The one world is that of “the things of the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:14). [Note how these are not exactly the same as “the things of God,” “the deep things of God.” These are mainly the purposes and designs and the facts of the very Being of God. They are paralleled with “the things of a man.” If the thing may be said, they are the world within the Self of God; in some degree analogous to the world within the self of a man, which unless the man please to disclose it, no other man can “know.” As a man can, so God can keep Himself a Secret, unknown, unknowable, except to His own Spirit, which “searcheth all things, even the deep things of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10-11); His inscrutable Being, the counsels and purposes of the Divine mind and heart.] These “things of the Spirit of God” are a world revealable and knowable. They are, in part, knowledge and blessedness “prepared for those that love God.” [So Paul gives the sense, gladly availing himself of the words of the LXX. in Isaiah 64:4. They have been—even Gospel privileges and a hope for Gentiles—a “mystery” (1 Corinthians 2:7). They had been the secrets of God’s mind and heart towards mankind; long concealed, or only revealed gradually, as God had spoken “in many portions and many manners to the fathers” (Hebrews 1:1): but now the time has come for the veil fully to be drawn back. The secret may at last be told, the “mystery” be a mystery no longer; the blessings may be given and may be enjoyed. God designs that they shall; they have been all along, “before the world,” “ordained unto the glory” of the initiated ones, the illuminati (? Hebrews 6:4), the “perfect,” that “love” God. They now cry, “O how great is Thy goodness which Thou hast laid up for them that fear Thee!” (Psalms 31:19). And it is not only goodness but “wisdom” which moves their adoring, grateful wonder to a praise that becomes more and more fervent, with the growing disclosures and the larger impartations and enjoyments of this new world of the “things of the Spirit of God.” And when at last the correspondence between the “spiritual man” and his “spiritual” environment is complete; when his body is “a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44), lending itself as a perfect organ and vehicle to a life ruled by the “spirit” in him; when his world is wholly that of God and spiritual things—Heaven; then his word will be, “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom … of God!” [Romans 11:33; where note, too, the quotation of Isa 40:13, which also appears, in the same connection, in our chapter (1 Corinthians 2:16). We are on one of the familiar heart-tracks of Paul’s meditations, and pass the same landmarks of Scripture quotation and of inspired speculation.] There is “a wisdom of this world,” but it is of no avail here. These things are reserved for those that “love” God. It is not, either here or in Romans 8:28, any “favouritism” towards His children, which reserves exclusively to them the knowledge and enjoyment of the world of “things spiritual.” If “all things work together for those” only “who love God,” and if the things unseen by natural eye, unheard by natural organ, unthought of and undesired by the natural “heart,” are also the heritage of these alone, it is no arbitrary narrowing of the range of availableness and privilege. Just as in the closely connected declaration of John (1 John 3:2), “It doth not yet appear what we shall be,” there is no arbitrary concealment. In that case it is simple impossibility which bars the way to disclosure and knowledge; the earthly life presents so few analogies to the heavenly, that it gives no terms into which to translate the heavenly into earthly language or thought, or intelligibly to express to us any but the barest information about that life. [The Father, like the Son, had rather tell than conceal all that may help His children (John 14:2).] In this case it is because only love is capable of knowing; such “love in the Spirit” (Colossians 1:8) as binds God and His “spiritual” ones together. Even the “little children know the Father (1 John 2:13). But the fulness of the “wisdom” is only for the ears, or the knowledge and experience, of the up-grown children—“the perfect.” Two great facts of this spiritual world, thus sealed to the natural man and his best-trained faculties, are “the Lord of glory” and “the spiritual man.” In John’s words again, “The world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not” (1 John 3:1). The inability to “know” us is not only parallel to the inability to know Him; it is the consequence of that inability. God “reveals His Son” in the soul (Galatians 1:16); He is the central Fact of the new world, and, He once known, all else becomes clear. In an ignorance that was condemning, but still in ignorance, they “slew,” as Paul had himself once persecuted, the “Lord of glory” (Acts 3:17; 1 Timothy 1:13). How shall any man “call Jesus Lord but by the Spirit”? (1 Corinthians 12:3). He is unknown even to those “natural men” who write, some of them, Lives of Jesus, and very confidently estimate His position in the history of mankind, and amongst the religious teachers of the race; or His personal character; or the “originality” of His teaching; and the like; pronouncing the most confident verdicts, to which nobody listens with more amusement than does the man who really knows “the Lord of glory” as his Saviour and Friend and Life. [The friend, the brother, who has lived with a man for years, smiles at the biography and portrait done by a stranger.] “The spiritual man” himself also is a fact outside the knowledge of “the natural man.” They may live together in every-day, close, intercourse, but impervious spirit to spirit, the spiritual man quite an inexplicable person to the natural; they may have many topics and interests in common, yet they are in different worlds. “The spiritual man knows all things,”—“the natural man” amongst the rest; but “no man” naturally “knows” him. The analogies of the natural world are true in their suggestions here,—the higher always understands the lower, but the lower cannot know the higher. The poet understands what it must be to have no poetry, but the man devoid of a sense for poetry does not understand the poet. The educated man can understand the uneducated, but the uneducated cannot understand him. Breadth understands narrowness, but narrowness cannot comprehend what it is to be “broad.” [In the railway-cars there is passage from first-class to third-class, but not from third into first.] The father understands the child; the child does not understand the man. The man understands how many limitations narrow the life of the brutes; they do not even know how many possibilities the man has. The “spiritual man” understands the world he has quitted, the “natural” life he has left behind—he was “natural” himself once; the “natural man” cannot read him in return. The sources of his life; his enjoyments; his motives, even when doing what is outwardly what they themselves do,—all these are a life hid, as Christ is hidden, hidden in God (Colossians 3:3), from the “natural man.” Different worlds! Hence— III. Two kinds of knowledge.— 1. He who is of the world may know its “wisdom.” If he be one of its “princes,” then his cultivated talents, his advantages of position, his friendships, his library, his industry, his money, may enable him to master it all fully. There are practical limitations to encyclopζdic knowledge; but there is no necessary and inevitable barrier between a “prince of this world” and all the “wisdom of this world.” Indeed, are we to go further? To do so is not in the direction or temper of our time and its thought; even the religious thought of our age tends to minimise the amount of the supernatural which it postulates, or admits and reckons with. Yet men may “receive the spirit of the world,” and so arrive at knowledge. 2. Are we to connect this with the fragments of knowledge given to us by pure revelation on this theme, which speaks of one who is “the prince of this world” (John 12:31; John 14:30; John 16:11), who is indeed its “god” (2 Corinthians 4:4), a “spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2)? Must we carry out the principle, which everywhere holds throughout Scripture, of a parallel, a counterfeit, a parody, of the facts of the kingdom of light by the kingdom of darkness, and so see suggested a personal “spirit of the world” set over against the personal “Spirit which is of God”? The strongly definite opposition is at any rate here in Paul’s inspired language, and strongly suggests that behind the world’s maxims and principles and habits of thinking and life, the “spirit of the world” in the modern, vague, but not Scriptural sense, there is a personal source of its activity and predominant character. 3. The spiritual man certainly “receives the Spirit which is of God.” Natural powers and their use, “the eye, ear, heart,” may make a man know the natural world; it is his appropriate and natural setting and environment; there he is at home. He is part of it. “The spiritual man” is part of the spiritual world, and gets to know of it as one detail of the consequences of the grace of the Spirit in awakening his “spirit,” and quickening its faculties into ability and activity. In the new world of Divine things Life brings in its train Knowledge. Born into it, the spiritual man is at home there. 4. That Spirit of God is “at home” amongst “the deep things of God.” The whole meaning of that “mystery of God”—that secret purpose of the Divine mind and heart which, in summary, in aim, in goal, “is Christ” [Colossians 2:2, in most critical editions of the New Testament]—has now become, so to speak, His property,—“the things of the Spirit of God.” He only could know; He only can reveal and impart. He mediates between the mind of God and the mind of man. What He “searches” out and knows there, He discloses and imparts here. He has these truths and blessings that they may “be freely given to us” as if “by God” Himself. He knows, and by His intermediary office and teaching we have, the whole “mind of the Lord.” “The Lord?” Why not go further and say “the mind of Christ,” for “in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead” (Colossians 1:9; Colossians 1:19)? [ 5. Very profound and far-reaching are the suggestions of this interchangeableness of language: “the deep things of God” passes over into “the mind of the Lord,” and this again becomes next “the mind of Christ.” Father and Son have no counsels or desires for man which are not shared by both; never do They work or think for man on any independent, or possibly divergent, plan. And then, again, when these “deep things” of “the mind of the Lord” pass, as it were, through the hands of the Spirit as gracious gifts to our spirit, they become His own “things.”] 6. The man of the world peremptorily, or even superciliously, dismisses all we profess that we have and know, as “foolishness” (1 Corinthians 2:14). To him it is; to us it is “wisdom,” “hidden (wisdom)” (1 Corinthians 2:7), wisdom that shall abide when all his “comes to nought.” No wonder! He knocks in vain at the door of the shrine into which we are led, that we may be initiated into these Divine secrets. When he finds entrance impossible, he turns away and declares that within, from all he can hear, or see, or make out from these “spiritual men,” there is nothing but “foolishness.” 7. We do not come at our knowledge in virtue of any conquest of the spiritual world. We had no eyes, nor ears, nor heart for it, any more than the “natural man” has. But we “received the Spirit,” we “received the things of the Spirit”; we know just as much as was “freely given,” and as we took (1 Corinthians 2:12; 1 Corinthians 2:14) He gave us eyes, ears, hearts, new powers for the new world of our new life. IV. Hence two ways of teaching may be conceived of and attempted.— 1. How will you approach and convert these “natural men”? Speak “spiritual things” to “natural men”? Try it, and fail. They do not comprehend you. Speak “natural” knowledge to them. Certainly they will understand that. But that is not the office of a Christian teacher. No doubt, if he speak of the things of their world in terms of their thought, and with human artifice of language, he may win himself audience and reputation. 2. But Paul is a model, who “determined” that he would “know nothing” of “the world’s wisdom,” when he came to Corinth. Let the “natural men” teach “natural men” “natural” thoughts! Paul will begin, and will end—but that there is no end to the Theme—with “Jesus Christ”! Of all “the deep things of God,” of all the now revealed secrets, the “mysteries of God,” He is the chief and the Sum. Inexhaustible as a subject, inexhaustible as a possession of the soul! Paul did not on Mars’ Hill, a few weeks before, begin with Him—perhaps prudently and rightly, remembering his audience. But, at any rate, when he came to speak of Jesus Christ and judgment “some mocked.” Now, in beginning work at Corinth, he had settled beforehand upon this plan of operations, and “Jesus Christ” was both to be central to it and to fill up all the circle to its uttermost circumference. He would be deaf, blind, dumb, in every direction but Christ! Would see nothing, hear nothing, speak nothing else. The Jew would be staggered, offended, perhaps turned aside. What if the fish would not look at his bait at all? These would-be philosophic Greeks of Corinth; these busy, wealthy, mercantile men; these artisans and sailors and slaves,—what of them, if he preached the Godhead and Resurrection of a man hanged on a Roman gallows, outside the walls of Jerusalem? Suppose these, too, should refuse even to listen to the “foolishness of” such “a preaching” (1 Corinthians 1:23)? “If the people will not listen, the preacher is a failure at the outset.” So “human wisdom” would suggest to him, as it does to the teacher now. And had he not better be prudent, and catch the attention and tickle the fancy with “words of man’s wisdom”? Plenty of teachers of rhetoric in a Greek city (Acts 19:9), if he needed teaching. No! But at least would it not be the right and sensible thing to cast his “testimony” [according to the old reading in 1 Corinthians 2:2] into some quasi-philosophic shape, or to use “persuasive words” (1 Corinthians 2:4, R.V.)? No! He would not decorate his “speech”; he would not adapt his “preaching.” He dares not. His function is only to “proclaim” (1 Corinthians 2:1). He has nothing to do with the matter of the message, but to speak it out, as he is first told it. Whether it seem “wisdom” or “folly,” that is not his responsibility. He is only the messenger; let the Sender and Author of the message see to the rest. “You have it as I get it, unmixed, uncorrupted.” The “thing preached” (margin) should be in its plainest form; the “speech” should be a dress as simple for the simple thought. To do otherwise—to wreathe the cross with flowers of thought and rhetoric, till men could find no Cross, no Sacrifice, and no Blood; to take an atoning sufferer from off it, and nail to it an amiable, noble, pure, wise, unselfishly loving sufferer—would not be faithful to his Master, or do honour to the Spirit. Who was Paul that he should even leave the way open, supposing such methods to have succeeded, for any man to say, “Paul’s preaching attracted me; Paul’s way of putting his Gospel convinced me. I am of Paul”? No man should think, or say, if he arrived at belief, that his “faith stood in the wisdom of man.” God forbid! 3. It would be unfaithful to Christ, dishonouring to the Spirit, and, moreover, it would be useless. Corinth is not to be taken by that method of attack! No way into the human heart by that road! The simplest form of the message, in the simplest language,—“Jesus Christ,” and “He a crucified Jesus” in addition; this, if only it were full of the “power of God,” should come “with the demonstration of the Spirit.” The Spirit should make even the “natural man” see and “know” and accept this Jesus. He should furnish an evidence peculiarly His own, which should carry with it a force of proof and of conviction that should sweep away before it ignorance, pride, prepossessions, prejudice, and carry “the things of the Spirit of God” into the world of the “natural man’s” understanding and heart and life. The Higher should, with a holy violence, make for itself an entrance into the Lower. Let other teachers try “persuasive words,” arguments of the most cogent, if they will, and endeavour to win from the proud intellect and the prouder heart, the patronage of an acceptance of their “Gospel,” such as it is! The Spirit of God will Himself use the “foolish” matter, put in no “persuasive” way, but in blunt, repellant nakedness of “speech,” and will “demonstrate” the truth and the method as the “wisdom of God.” Even a preacher who is hampered with physical “weakness” of poor health or fatigue, to say nothing of “a thorn in the flesh”; who, moreover, is burdened and anxious about his work and his companions; who is full of “fear” as he thinks of what is before him; if only he be content to speak in “words which the Spirit teacheth” (1 Corinthians 2:13), can succeed, even in Corinth! By such methods of teaching even the natural man may come to saving knowledge of spiritual things. .—1 Corinthians 2:1-5A Model Preacher. I. The man. II. The message. III. The method. I. We naturally and rightly conceive of Paul as one of the greatest moral forces of his day, a man more important to the life of his age and to that of all future ages, than any man then living. But he did not so stand out to his contemporaries. The leading Jews in Rome (Acts 28:21), though intercourse between the capital and every part of the empire was frequent and fairly easy, knew, they seem to say, a good deal about the stir which the Nazarene faith was everywhere making, but very little about Paul himself, even as a “ringleader of the sect.” At all events, from even Judζa there had not come letters such as would have indicated that the authorities there attached preeminent importance to the prisoner remitted by Festus to Nero. Out of their sight, out of their way, out of their mind. Plainly at Corinth, and probably elsewhere, the very Christian Church did not, as we do, see Paul overtopping—a Saul amongst them—the rest of the Apostolic band. He came and went, “one of these Jews,” somehow not much in favour with his fellow-Israelites; and except for an occasional tumult, the work he was doing went quietly on, unknown to the cultured, fashionable, busy world. “The world knew not” (1 John 3:1) Paul or his Churches. “Gallio cared for none of these things;” the exalted Roman gentleman attached very little importance to such canaille and their squabbles! We must not read back our present knowledge into the look of things then; and, above all, must not unduly magnify the man by looking at him through the spectacles of the results of his labours. What the Corinthians saw was a man of no striking appearance, perhaps in physical weakness, perhaps betraying his “fear and much trembling.” He was not deficient in moral courage, as many an incident shows, and repeatedly met danger with calmness. But he was not a “fighting” character, and may even have been constitutionally timid. [So Howson thinks, Hulsean Lectures, Character of St. Paul,” lect. ii. He refers to Monod’s sermon on the “Tears of St. Paul” (Acts 20:18-19, etc.). 2 Corinthians 2:4; Philippians 3:18. He points out the three reassuring visions, Acts 18:19; Acts 23:11; Acts 27:24, and compares 2 Corinthians 7:5. See further the depression of spirits in anticipation of the issue of his third missionary journey, at Miletus and Tyre and Cζsarea. We see a strong craving for personal sympathy, almost to the point of dependence. “Alone,” 1 Thessalonians 3:1; 1 Thessalonians 3:10-11; 2 Corinthians 2:13; Philemon 1:11; Philemon 1:14; 2 Timothy 1:15; 2 Timothy 4:9-10. See also in Critical Notes.] No preacher or worker should feel Paul far away from him, knowing nothing of his feelings, exempt from his anxieties about his work and his qualifications for it, and his little likelihood of success. Very human, often very much “down,” commanding no world-wide reputation or respect; little known, and less loved, except by his converts, and not always by them; but “made able as a minister,” etc. (2 Corinthians 3:6). The “earthen vessel” very “earthen,” to the eyes of his contemporaries (2 Corinthians 4:7) The “meek man has inherited the earth.” II. The message.—One topic, only one—“Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” 1. Let a modern instance illustrate this. “Ned Wright, a well-known South London evangelist, said [coram me, H. J. F.] that when he was once preaching on or near London Bridge a half-tipsy man thrust himself into the crowd gathered round, and cried out, “Look here, Ned! I am Jesus Christ!” “Come here, then;” and the crowd made way. “Let me look at your hands. Hold them up!” Ned made a show of examining one, and then flung it away from him with a contemptuous gesture: “You are not Jesus Christ. You are not my Jesus Christ. My Jesus Christ has nail-holes in His hands. Be off with you!” And the poor fellow slunk away ashamed, amidst the laughter of the crowd, who did not the less intelligently listen whilst Wright took advantage of the incident to drive home the lesson that the sinful and guilty heart wants a Jesus Christ that is crucified. 2. It is a true instinct which has made preaching “popular” in the best sense to centre in the cross of Christ. Or, better, the Spirit of God has thus rightly guided the successful “popular” preacher. Christian speculation, the philosophical study of the Christian system, may rightly bring the Incarnation into greater prominence than has often been given to it. But in every time of Evangelical revival in the Church, in every time of personal concern because of conviction of sin, it is seen that the centre of gravity of an effective Gospel for a guilty, unholy soul is at the Cross, not first at the Manger. Bunyan was sketching his allegory on the lines of often-repeated and self-justifying experiment, when he made the pilgrim’s burden fall from his shoulders at the Cross. The old experience of the early missionaries of the Moravian Church in Greenland is repeated in every successful mission-field: the best place to begin at in teaching Christian doctrine is the Cross. When the heart has found rest at the Cross, it can then return to the Manger, and the Babe, and the Incarnation, and the perfect Manhood and the perfect Example of an ideal human life. But the Cross meets the first and most urgent need of an awakened soul. 2. Nor is it sufficient to make the Cross merely an incident in the Example, even though perhaps the crowning, culminating point of its self-sacrifice, and of its appeal to the human heart. It is all this; but to make it, and offer it as, no more than this, fails to give due weight to the teaching of experience, or to acknowledge the perpetually recurring demand of the awakened conscience and the troubled heart for some such satisfaction as has always been, as a matter of fact, given when the Cross has been an Altar bearing a Sacrifice for Sin. The evangelist finds the Cross, with a vicarious, expiatory, reconciling Offering, his best lever for lifting the lowest, whilst it meets the universal heart as found in the highest. It is his true cure-all for all cases of spiritual distress. It has been a despised sling and stone only; but it has brought down the giant! The pathetic crucifixion of Josef Meyer at Ober-ammergau does not, with all its dramatic vividness, so prove a revolutionary moral force. Nor did the real crucifixion of Peter, or of thousands of Jews by Titus, so move mankind. Was Paul crucified for you? For that is the very centre and heart of what Christ is to you. 3. In giving this narrower prominence to “Jesus Christ … crucified,” Paul is following the lead of even the Gospel history. [Cf. Dale, Atonement, lect. ii., who says:] “All the four Evangelists are agreed about the exceptional importance of our Lord’s last sufferings. Only two of them relate the circumstances of His Birth, which we might have supposed none of them would have omitted. Only two tell the story of the Temptation. The Sermon on the Mount appears neither in the second Gospel nor the fourth. St. John says nothing about the Transfiguration, the agony in the Garden, or the institution of the Lord’s Supper. The story of the Resurrection and of the appearance of the Risen Christ to His Disciples occupies only twenty verses in St. Matthew’s narrative; only twenty—perhaps only nine—in St. Mark’s; and St. John appears to have said in thirty verses all he intended to say, and to have added another five-and-twenty at the request of his friends. St. Matthew tells us nothing of our Lord’s Ascension into heaven, nor does St. John; and even if the closing verses of St. Mark’s Gospel came from his own hand, he tells us nothing more than the bare fact.… Time and place are left indefinite, and our Lord’s parting words to His Disciples and the vision of angels are passed over in silence. But the Betrayal, the Arrest, the appearance before Caiaphas, Peter’s denial, the cry of the people for the release of Barabbas, and the Crucifixion of our Lord, Pilate’s judgment, the inscription … on the cross, are … in all the four Gospels; and they all bring the story to a close with words which indicate that at the very moment of our Lord’s Death there was no loss of consciousness or exhaustion of strength.” He proceeds to show that in the deaths of the Old Testament there is no precedent for this elaborate detail, and in those of the New Testament no true parallel. He discusses the suggestion that all this was only the lingering of love over the particulars of last hours, or to give the clearest demonstration of the evil heart of the Jewish rulers, and concludes: “A careful examination of the Gospels will lead us to (decide that) in the importance which they attach to the Death of our Lord, they are but following the line of His own thought. To Him His Death was distinctly present from the very commencement of His ministry.” After Pentecost, indeed, Peter and his fellow-apostles “gave witness, with great power, of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 4:33). But the Resurrection is an integral part of the “Doctrine of the Cross.” The actual crucifying needed no emphasising in Jerusalem; the complementary fact, which gave the death any meaning and value and power, needed clear and vigorous proclamation. Without the resurrection and intercession, the Cross is no Gospel of an atonement; it is a mere death upon a gibbet. When Peter declared the resurrection, he was “preaching Christ crucified” in the full significance of the Messiah’s name and work. III. His method.—“Proclaiming the testimony, the mystery, of God.” Assertion, not argument. Announcing a fact, not propounding any theory, the result of his own study or excogitation. He had been taken behind the veil and shown one of God’s secrets; now he came forth commissioned to impart it to others. But only to tell it out; not to add to it, or mutilate it, or refine upon it. “Put in trust with the Gospel” (1 Thessalonians 2:4), he had simply to pass it on, to offer it, in its entirety. He had only to stand up as a witness, bearing “a testimony.” A method widely different from that of the discussions of the Porch, the Grove, the Academy, where everything might be challenged by the learner, and the teacher must support with reasons. A very narrow function, a very restricted office and work. But it is the preacher’s right place, and the limit of his sphere. He should first go in and learn the secret of the Lord, and then come forth simply to tell and testify of “what he has seen and heard.” [John 3:11, “We” = Christ and all His representatives pursue the same method. 1 John 1:3. [It is a principle which may be illustrated by a modern case, closely analogous. When Dr. Duff first sailed for India in 1830, the Lady Holland was wrecked on Dassen Island, a sandbank off Capetown. All eventually found safe landing on a higher point, a penguin haunt. A sailor, walking along the shore looking for eggs, found Duff’s Bagster’s Bible and Scottish Psalm Book, given him at his ordination, both safe because of the chamois-leather case. He had taken out eight hundred volumes in every branch of human knowledge—journals, notes, memoranda, essays, “as dear to a student as his own flesh”; all were lost. In the first flush of his student success, he “had only half parted with them,” when he became a missionary. He could never lose the culture they gave him. But the loss seemed to him didactic, a speaking incident, that all save these two perished, or were reduced to pulp. “The memory of Dassen Island was never absent from what he regarded as temptations to literary self-indulgence” (Dr. Smith’s Duff, i. 258). God’s Word was the only book for the missionary, and for the minister of the Gospel. More exactly parallel to Paul’s determination is this:] Dr. McAll, of Paris, recently deceased, said that many a time, when his father, the still more famous Dr. McAll, one of the brilliant galaxy of pulpit orators of the early half of the century, was at the zenith of his fame, and was being followed everywhere by admiring and deeply affected crowds of hearers, he has seen him come home and sit down, bursting into a flood of tears, distressed that all the popular favour and all the effect of his preaching seemed to mean so little of real conversions to God. His son read the fact in the light of this text, and feared that the “excellency of speech” had really been an obstacle to the success of his father’s ministry, and therefore deliberately adopted a simpler style for his own. Paul bore his witness in the plainest and in entirely inartificial language, lest he should so wreathe and overlay the Cross with the flowers of human thinking or rhetoric that the Cross itself could not, as it were, be seen. Is there, then, no place in preaching “Christ crucified” for the faculty of moving speech, of wit, of clear reasoning, or of any other gift of God’s bestowal? (See on 1 Corinthians 9:16) Yes. Apollos might quite lawfully employ his special talents. There is no cast of mind, no one mould of man, from which God has not raised up successful witnesses of His truth; no faculty, no knowledge, on which contribution cannot be levied for the service of Christ. There is an “excellency” of popular address which is the very equipment of an out-of-doors evangelist. There is an eloquence born, and inevitable as certainly as the man opens his lips. But there is an eloquence which is taught and acquired and laboured after, the mere artificial rhetoric of the schools and their fashions of oratory, which, in Paul’s view, is no thing for the minister of Christ to seek after or employ. In any case the faculty of attractive, persuasive speech must be kept a means to an end, never a thing desirable, an end in itself. Where it is a native, necessary, inborn, unconscious eloquence and excellence, it must rigidly be kept consecrated to the service and glory of Christ alone. But the speaker will find it hard not to create a difficulty for his own heart, and not to arrest the attention and heart of his hearers at himself. Any art associated with the delivery of the message may assume undue importance. If it succeed, it may get the credit due only to the “power of God.” Probably Paul would not censure his friend Apollos, who, eloquent and philosophical as he perhaps was, might nevertheless [or therefore?] do good, and who certainly would, if his aim and heart were kept right. Yet he plainly believed that his own mere “testimony,” in simpler language, would do greater good, and that it ran less risk of obscuring in any degree the glory of the “power of God.” The anxiety to justify the Gospel to the intellect of the unrenewed man, or to cast it in some such mould as would be less likely to be repellent at its first hearing, would to him be a putting on of the hampering armour of Saul, instead of relying upon the sling, and stone—and God! It might even issue in so modifying some essential feature of the Gospel that it should no longer be simply God’s “testimony.” The intellect of the world had, in Greece above all, been fed upon the noblest philosophies, and was sick of them all, and unsatisfied. Teacher after teacher was more critical of his predecessors, than constructive of anything satisfying. Should Paul attempt to give the weary world another philosophy? No! He would tell them a history, and the heart of the history should be a Person—“Jesus Christ,” and that Jesus Christ “crucified.” The “princes of this world” knew everything but this. Paul knew nothing but this; but such a man, with such a message, working on such a method, succeeded. 1 Corinthians 2:2. Paul’s One Topic.—[Cf. this resolution of Paul the preacher, with the resolution and life-habit of Paul the sinner, “This one thing (I do).… I counted all … loss. Yea, I count all … loss” (Philippians 3:13; Philippians 3:7-8).] [“The man of one book” is a proverb of narrowness of knowledge and of view. “Fiddling ever upon one string” is usually a reproach to any public speaker. But a Paul could outmatch a Paganini in educing from his “one string” an endless variety of soul-winning music. Rather, Paul’s one string will give endless variety to the preaching of a man of far less ability than Paul. The theme, not the player, is inexhaustible.] I. Christ Jesus, not Paul (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:5). In the analogous case of Galatia, the rival teachers really at bottom only cared to boast how many converts they could make to their Judaising form of the Gospel (Galatians 6:13). Really a subtle glorification of themselves and their ministry; before even the Circumcision, for which they professed such anxiety. II. A Person, not a philosophy or a set of doctrines.—Men’s hearts cannot rest in a system. There is rest only in a person. A well-known characteristic of Christianity that Christ identifies His religion with Himself. Faith does not only, or chiefly, lay hold of a series of propositions about Him, whether historical or theological, but of Himself. “If I say Christianity, I thereby say Jesus Christ. Christianity appeared in the world, not as a system of philosophy, not as a code of morality, but as an actual fact, the fact of the person Christ Jesus. All depends on Him. With Him, Christianity stands or falls. It cannot be separated from Him. It was not His precepts, but His person and His testimony concerning Himself, which brought about the crisis in Israel. He Himself made His whole cause depend upon His person. We cannot separate it from Him. Rationalism has attempted to separate Christianity from Christ, and to reduce it to a mere morality. But experience has proved the attempt impossible. Jesus Christ does not bear the same relation to Christianity as Mahomet does to Mahometanism, or as any other founder of a religion to the religion he has founded; but He is Himself Christianity. To speak of Christianity, is to speak, not of doctrines and precepts, but of Jesus Christ. Christianity is indeed a summary of truths, a new doctrine, a philosophy if you will, a new view of the world, a new explanation of history, a new mode of worship, a new morality, a new rule of life, etc. It is all these, because it is a fact universal in its nature. But all these depend upon the person of Jesus Christ, are given with Him, and included in Him—stand and fall with Him” (Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, lect. viii. 256). Part of its universal adaptation, this. The child, the ignorant, the heathen, at once are led to the very heart of Christianity when they are taught to know Him. They believe in Him, they learn to love Him, life is summarised and simplified into living for Him. They can die for Him. They say as Paul did, “To me to live is Christ.” So the little child can be a Christian. The heathen, whether in lands nominally Christian or really heathen, simply, readily learn the secret of becoming saints. III. “Not to know anything save,” etc. What was the alternative in Paul’s mind? What was the alternative in the practice of the rival teachers at Corinth?—If we are to find any suggestion in the use of the name “Cephas,” and with that may couple what we gather from the Galatian Epistle about Peter’s connection with the Judaising controversy which just at this period evidently occupied so much of Paul’s life and thoughts, our answer may be “Circumcision.” In contrast with some other teachers at Corinth, Paul made his topic “Jesus Christ, not circumcision.” In Acts 15:1 is summarised the thesis, so to speak, which the side of the Christian community whose associations and affinities were with the Judaism from which they had been recruited, nailed up on the door of the Antiochian Church, and which became for many years the centre of fierce strife within the new brotherhood: “Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.” Paul saw from the first that this proposition struck direct at the honour of his Divine Master. What was to save a man? Was not Jesus Christ a sufficient Saviour? What did they propose—“Christ and Circumcision”? Or was it “Circumcision before, or even instead of, Christ”? Either way he would “know nothing” of the kind. Should he preach some necessary supplement to the work of his crucified Master, without which what He did was not complete and sure foundation for a sinner’s hope? “God forbid” (Galatians 6:14). Could it be that they even meant Christ to be the supplement to the efficacy of the now mere dead ceremonial? “God forbid!” Could it be that, not Christ at all, but the ceremonial was to save? Yet the ceremonial was now effete, evacuated of all meaning or virtue; it had, indeed, become a mere “concision” (Philippians 3:2), a mere piece of surgery, a mere cutting of the flesh. Whatever these later comers might do, or teach, when he entered Corinth his own resolve was clear and definite, and to it he had rigorously confined himself: “Jesus Christ … crucified.” IV. Moreover, he had from the first been at the uttermost pole removed from the motives of such teachers, as well as from their teaching [to borrow light again from the Galatian Epistle, as above: 1 Corinthians 6:14]. Their motives were of “the world,” not of Christ. The religion of circumcision was becoming almost fashionable in some quarters. The weary heart of many in the upper classes were seeking, some of them a new sensation, some of them real rest, in becoming Jewish proselytes. A few years later a proselyte Jewess, Poppζa, sat by Nero’s side on the throne of the empire. But the man who made any profession of “Christ, the crucified” Jew of Nazareth, had to lay his account with social exclusion, and to have for his friends for the most part the artisan, the slave, certainly “not many noble, mighty,” etc. It was human nature; therefore it was the spirit of “the world” getting a footing in Christian hearts again, when some of these were putting to the front the side of Christianity on which it had relations with the Old Religion, with its prestige of a sort, and were keeping in the background the Cross, with all its associations of shame and suffering and social inferiority. The crucifying of Christ had so entered into Paul’s life that he himself was “crucified with Him,” and a crucifixion was between him and such “worldly” motives in teaching and thought. He was crucified to the world, and was quite content that it should care no more about him than it did for a poor fellow hanging dead upon a cross. The world was crucified to him; he cared no more for its good opinion or its bad opinion, for its favour or its frown, than did the dying man for the passing show beneath him, on which his glazing eyes looked down from the elevation of his cross. “I am nothing to the world; the world is nothing to me. In any personal life I know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” “Weakness and folly be it! A weak fool I was prepared to be reckoned, when I came to you wise and mighty people in Corinth.” All which has its present-day analogies for the man who is determined, in the world—not to say also in the Church—to know, to have but the one theme, sovereign in all his theology, his ethics, his teaching, his service—“Jesus Christ crucified.” 1 Corinthians 2:4. The Demonstration of the Spirit.—A pivot-word of the chapter; a pivot-fact in the story of the Gospel. I. The secret of Paul’s success at Corinth.— 1. Consider the conditions under which Paul sought to win Corinth for Christ. Morally, a city of the vilest. A seaport, with all the difficulties of a shifting population, of medley composition, given eagerly to the pursuit of wealth. Sufficiently a Greek city for the Corinthian to pique himself upon his intellectual acuteness. And a large Jewish community—as everywhere, proud, narrow, intolerant. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/phc/ NOTES1 Corinthians 3:1. And I.—Q.d. “As any other ‘spiritual’ teacher would have to do.” So Ellicott; but perhaps laying undue stress upon the “and,” which, if more than merely a half-colloquial redundance, may rather be parallel with 1 Corinthians 2:1; q.d. “Accordingly I,” etc., i.e. in agreement with the broad lines of necessary procedure laid down in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16. Spiritual.—In the precise and quasi-technical sense of chap. 2 [or inter alios, Galatians 6:1]. Carnal.—We should have expected “natural” (= “psychical, animal-souled”). But this would have denied to them any participation in the grace and awakening and renewal of the Spirit. They are Christians of a low type, but not so low as that. They are “in Christ,” but only as “babes.” Note the reading: only appearing in the Received Text in 2 Corinthians 3:3, but now here also and in Romans 7:14; Hebrews 7:16. Some deny any distinction between the old form and the new, except of literary rank. Trench would (§ 72) distinguish as between “fleshly” (= the displaced reading) and “fleshy” or “fleshen,” parallel to “wooden” (= the new reading, and in 2 Corinthians 3:3); as if distinguishing between men in whom “the flesh” was indeed predominant, but with many gracious checks and restraints, and men in whom the one apparent feature in life was so much the literal “flesh” that they were “not anti-spiritual, but un-spiritual, … flesh and little more, when they might have been much more.” Yet he regards the word as conveying a less grave accusation than the ordinary word for “carnal” (“fleshly”) does. The varying judgments of the authorities show how slight at best is the distinction.1 Corinthians 3:2.—Cf. Hebrews 5:11 to Hebrews 6:4, where note that the doctrine of 1 Corinthians 15 is amongst the “elements,” the “milk” for babes. Also Paul “preached the Resurrection” to the merely “natural” men of Athens (Acts 17:18). Cf. “New wine in old bottles”; “new cloth on old garment.” So Christ only spoke plainly to the disciples about His death, when, e.g., Peter’s faith in His Godhead had first risen into a bold confession; and then also the announcement, so perplexing to a Jew, and so distressing to a friend like Peter, was followed up by a view of his Master in His true, native glory (Matthew 16:20-21). Cf. “Neither yet now are ye able” with “Ye cannot bear them now” (John 16:12). Also cf. “earthly things” and “heavenly things” (John 3:12).1 Corinthians 3:3.—Helps to a definition of “the flesh”; as does Galatians 5:19-20, by no means a catalogue of bodily sins alone. See life in the flesh plainly differentiated from life in the material body (Romans 8:9), “Ye are not in the flesh.” Note the changes of translation in After the manner of men.—So in 1 Corinthians 15:32. But the special colouring of the phrase, whether neutral or condemnatory, varies from instance to instance of its use.1 Corinthians 3:4.—Less complete enumeration than in 1 Corinthians 1:12. Perhaps for the reason explained in 1 Corinthians 4:6. Also he and Apollos were more closely connected than any others with the origin and growth of the Corinthian Church. .—1 Corinthians 3:1-4“Babes in Christ.”—(Read Critical Notes, on “carnal.”) I. The Creator has stamped His own unity upon His many-sectioned creation in the many homologies which link together part and part, and, above all, natural things and spiritual things, physical facts and the facts of the world of morals and religion. Just because Christ knew these links of idea and these correspondences most perfectly, He spake parables as never man spake. He saw Nature parabolic as never man saw it. He stood at the central point of God’s Idea, and saw its radiating lines of expression touching, traversing, connecting, the concentric [and, as the geometer says, “similar”] areas of diverse classes of facts. The physical history of the human body, the natural, morally neutral history of the development of the human mind, is a Parable in Nature, easily, early, always read. [1 John 2:12-14 is a good example of this way of reading. (a) There are the “little children” who barely know more, but who do know this, that they “know their Father,” and that because of forgiven sin there is nothing but love between them. Loving, happy, living childhood, content to be alive and know Him and His favour. (b) There are the “young men,” victorious over the Wicked One, with well-knit body, and the firm tread of vigorous early manhood, to which the indwelling Word is bread and life. (c) There are the “fathers,” of whom only one thing is said—“they know Him that is from the beginning.” The strength, élan, enterprise, of manhood is perhaps gone; in a sense, the life has returned to its starting-point—as “children” they “knew Him”; but now with a deeper insight, with the experience of an intercourse of long years’ standing; as an adult, mature man who is a father, for the first time “knows” his father.] In St. Paul “babes” is never a word of praise. He hurries forward to, and hurries forward his converts to, “perfection”; the adult manhood, with its perfection; of harmonious development of every power and faculty and grace; of “knowledge of the world” of spiritual things with which for years the man “in Christ” has been conversant; of ripeness of character without any first touch of senile failure or weakness or decay. These are “babes” at Corinth. II. Babes and carnal.— 1. “Natural” (chap. 2) would hardly have been too strong for the fact. “Envying,” “strife,” “schisms,” and these ruling and raging, are incompatible with the “spiritual” man’s life. These are “works of the flesh.” In fact, the discrepancy, as to area and included human contents, between the Ideal Church and its actual, historical, disciplinary expression and embodiment and enumeration, had already begun to appear. The Church, as its Lord reckons its census, may here and there overpass the bounds of the Church, as our humanly designed and most faithfully administered methods mark it off from “the world.” But much oftener it shrinks far within the boundary-line of our survey, and leaves the Church, of any real, effective, sanctified life, a central area of occupation within a much larger one which is hardly more than in name and claim and ownership still Christ’s. These men are still within the bound of the external organisation; the branch most utterly dormant, if not utterly dead, is still in mechanical connection with the Vine, as Paul cultivates and cares for it. He had not cut these off, as he bade them without pity or delay do with incestuous man (1 Corinthians 3:5). Indeed, in the hopefulness of charity, he goes further than logically would be possible, and speaks of these men over whom “sin has” such clear “dominion” (Romans 6:14), as “in Christ,” though “babes.” [Does he? Has he really given to those who had lapsed from any but the external, mechanical connection with Christ, the elementary lessons which, elementary as they are, belonged really to a stage in advance of them?] But it is at most the tender judgment which without any tampering with, or disloyalty to, the inevitable distinction between “natural” and “spiritual,” is willing for the moment to look no deeper than the outward profession and the still maintained connection with the Church. None but a reckless hand will lightly disturb even the outward connection, if it has at one time meant life, and is not manifestly declared unreal by flagrant sin or long-continued indifference. So long as it continues, there is always the happy possibility that the branch may again fill and thrill and throb with life; it will not lightly be disturbed. The claim of the Church is paramount that it should be kept pure; the claim of the Head of the Church demands that all dead or unworthy membership be cut off; but the claim of the redeemed soul demands that the membership, once admitted, shall be tenderly dealt with, and rated at its most hopeful value. “Envying, strifes, partisanship,” and the like; yet Paul will concede to them a place “in Christ,” if it be only as “babes,” and will “speak to them” accordingly. 2. How many members never get beyond the stage of “babes in Christ.”—There is a beauty about infancy, in nature and in grace. Nothing more charming than the simple, unaffected, direct love of God’s “little children” towards Him and towards each other. Happy manhood, both in nature and grace, which never loses the affectionate, childlike heart; keeping it fresh under, and along with, all the manly gains in knowledge and experience. A beauty about the simple directness of a child’s trust in all that is told to it; it may be deceived and misled, but the faith of a little child is more beautiful and more receptive of grace than the cynical scepticism of the man who always begins by suspecting, and presumes the worst. A beauty about the loving obedience which belongs to at least the ideal of childhood, and is one of the first, most tender fruits of the Spirit’s new birth. What music in God’s ear, and how delightful to a “perfect man” in the life of God, the first, unschooled, open, spontaneous, unconventional utterances of their thoughts and experiences, from the lips of God’s little children! But this beauty is no beauty when it becomes permanent. Fifteen, or fifty, with the face and mind and powers of five years of age, would be a calamity to the grown child, an agony to parents, a subject of mockery or of pity to outsiders. She sees of the travail of her soul and is satisfied,—that mother into whose arms is laid the helpless babe, that does not yet know her, or know itself, but simply lives, and is perfectly formed and healthy. To Him who died that His people “might have life,” that He might Himself “see His seed,” life is better than death; life is full of all possibilities; death has no possibilities, no future, but corruption. It is some measure of reward for His “pangs,” some measure of “satisfaction,” when His people begin to live, even as “babes in” Him. In a human home, in Christian lands at any rate, the child that grows weakling, puny, sickly, deformed, often calls out a love that seems intensified by the very need of love in the dependent creature; the tenderer the child, the tenderer the love. But the “satisfaction” is in the children who grow hearty and strong, who develop girlish beauty and youthful strength, until at last womanhood and manhood fill the parents’ heart with satisfying joy. What a disappointment to Paul [may the same human word be attributed to Christ also?] that after these years, since he first went to Corinth, these members of the Church there, “enriched in” everything for the sustenance and training of the new-born life (1 Corinthians 1:5-7), were still, at the most favourable estimate, only “babes in Christ”! There was no beauty or satisfaction or honour in such a standstill life. There are such in every Church. Always learning to stand, to walk, to do; never accomplishing much at either; indeed, spiritually always learning to live. To them the Church is hardly yet a school; certainly not a workshop; more truly a nursery. Every pastor has many such, who must not only be “looked after” incessantly, lest, like naughty or heedless children, they stray away into the world, but who must be nursed lest the feeble flicker of life be extinguished in death. How large a part of the work of the Churches, how large a part of the care of the ministry, must be absorbed in the working of keeping up to the level of even “babes in Christ,” some who have been in outward membership for years! [The coincidence of our paragraph with Hebrews 5:11-14 is noteworthy.] 3. Paul refers to their food: “Milk, not meat.”—No humble child of God’s family but acknowledges how often, in some of the lessons of God’s school, he has never seemed to get beyond the A B C of teaching. The same discipline year after year, the same trials, because the one lesson has never been perfectly learned yet. To promote His scholar into the work of the next higher “form,” whilst yet the lessons of the lower have never been mastered, would only be to ensure bad work, to attempt to “rush up” a building upon a badly laid foundation. The Jerusalem scoffers in Isaiah’s day cried half in scorn, half in anger, “Whom shall he [the prophet] teach knowledge?… weaned babes? Does he take us for such, with his precept upon precept, … here a little, there a little?” (Isaiah 28:9-13). The words are read by some, and are as true, if they be seriously spoken, perhaps by the prophet himself. What they said in scorn was a simple, sad necessity. They were fit only for such lessons. There are truths which alone the children can take in. There are truths which are of “the secret of the Lord,” only revealable to the grown men. There must not be on the part of the human teachers—from any mistaken policy, or from any fear of being misunderstood by their youngest pupil—any such keeping back of truth as makes what is taught all but falsehood. Economy, reserve, are not for man, for ecclesiastics, to practise. If the Spirit of God has only gradually (Hebrews 1:1) brought out the full round of truth, it has been from no desire to conceal anything; the disclosure has been conditioned by the receptiveness of the scholars, and by that only. To Nicodemus the Master Himself distinguished between “earthly things” and “heavenly things” (John 3:12), as being of different grades of comprehensibleness. Human teaching will adapt; it will not for the teacher’s sake reserve anything which is needful and can be communicated. The human difficulty is to teach elementary truth without so far distorting it that before anything more can be added, something must be unlearned; we must often pull down a little before we can “graft” the new work upon the old. The model should be the teaching of the Revealing Spirit; all absolutely true, so far as it goes; no need for unlearning in order to new learning; from milk to meat in His teaching is one orderly, harmonious progress and growth of truth. But how long He has to say, “Ye were not able to bear it; neither yet now,” etc. 4. Note the special token of carnality, of infancy.—They are children with their favourites, over whom they boast and wrangle and quarrel. No sign of “manhood in Christ,” to be so devoted to one man, or one type of minister, as to appreciate and be helped by no other. NOTES1 Corinthians 3:5.—Better reading “what?” not “who?” Also “through.” Not, “As the Lord gave to every man of you the type of teacher he needed”; but, “As the Lord allotted to each teacher” the divided labour. Stanley suggests that Paul takes up, and with his own meaning adopts, their depreciatory distinction: “Yes, you did but plant. It was Apollos who watered, and so brought your work to anything like what could be called a successful issue!” Note here, as in 2 Corinthians 6:4, they are working under God’s orders, at God’s work. [In Mark 16:20, “the Lord (Christ) works with them.”] [Cf. the inscription on the University: “Louvain planted, Mechlin watered, Cæsar gave the increase.”]1 Corinthians 3:8. One.—Our status, quâ the work, the increase, the Great Employer, is precisely the same. No parallel to John 10:30.1 Corinthians 3:9.—Notice the Q.d. “All of us together belong to God, the field, the building, the company of workers in the field, or on the building. The fellowship only between man and man, God being above them all.” But A.V. is supported by Romans 16:3; Romans 16:9; Romans 16:21; 2 Corinthians 1:24; 2 Corinthians 8:23, also 1 Corinthians 6:1 (but note the reading). “Husbandry” speaks of growth from within; “building” of growth by additions from without. .—1 Corinthians 3:5-9 Paul; Apollos; God.—“Co-workers,” Paul ventures to say (2 Corinthians 6:1). Not only are Paul who plants and Apollos who waters “one” (1 Corinthians 3:8), but these “three agree in one” purpose and result. I. Three ways of reading—three heart-inflections of tone in reading—this verse.— 1. “A Paul may plant, an Apollos may water; but God alone can give the increase!” The despondent, despairing tone of the physical and mental reaction of an earnest worker, after a day of effort and “failure”; said as if God gave charily and grudgingly the increase, and the chances were to be taken as against His giving. Or said by a worker who goes out mechanically, without much heart in his work, to discount apologetically beforehand the failure which he expects, and deserves; or his wonderfully wise “explanation” of his failure when the day is over: “Ah! you see, a Paul may plant,” etc. Very pious, but dishonouring to God. 2. “Paul must, … Apollos must, … God must,” etc. The formal, sometimes useful, summation of the conditions of success. One of the “Rules” hung up at the gate of the field, to be considered and complied with by every worker. On these conditions only can the work be done, on these only can success be claimed. Usually God will not do the work of Paul or Apollos, will do nothing without them. They must remember that they can effect nothing without His co-operation. Paul? Nothing! Apollos? Nothing! God? All in all! (1 Corinthians 3:7). Yet there is a better reading of the verse still. 3. “Paul planted, Apollos watered, God did give the increase.” The historical rendering and reading. Always, in invariable sequence, the history of any true labour for God. So certainly as the first two terms of the series are found, so certainly does the third follow to complete it. If Paul has done his part, if Apollos has done his part, God may be reckoned upon. God always does give the increase. The historical view is the healthy view, warranted by the history of the universal, working Church. II. The human workers.—Are human. Macmillan (Bible Teachings in Nature, p. 101) points out that corn never grows spontaneously, is never self-sown, self-diffused; [this not true of Divine Truth, of the Bible, without limitation]; depends, as the seed of “life” does ordinarily, upon being sown by man’s hand. [The Greatest of the workers was human; Who might say to His Church, “I have planted, ye have watered”; Who said, “Others laboured, ye have entered into their labours.] With all human variety. Many and many-fashioned tools are needed to do the work of God. The material is many-fashioned. Each worker is made to be a specialist in some particular kind of material. Every kind of material, every type of mind and heart, is somebody’s speciality. The worker and the work, the minister and the man he is made to help, are both to be found; if only they find each other, all is well. The Great Director of the work knows where to lay His hand on the Paul, where to find the Apollos, the very man to do the work which wants doing. With all human limitations. Paul need not be distressed because he cannot do the work of Apollos. Nobody need blame Apollos because he cannot pioneer and “plant” like Paul. No man is made to do everything. Let a man frankly accept the limitation; let him consecrate to the Work and the Worker his ability thus bounded; then let him set himself to be at his own best for Christ. Paul is not to chafe against the fact that he is not an Apollos; still less is an Apollos to be thinking how much better he would have done the work, and how much more faithfully, than Paul, if only he had been set to Paul’s task with Paul’s talent. Depreciating criticism of others, disheartened views of oneself, are equally mischievous and needless. The work has always been done, and was intended to be done, by a division of work amongst workers, each of whom has a limitation of ability. Neither Paul nor Apollos was an “all-round” man, a monstrosity of all perfection. [It does not appear here; there was nothing in the facts of the case to suggest it, but ordinarily one must add, With all human infirmities. Ideally perfect work, even in a man’s own special “line,” never gets done. Nor does any most perfect plan ever get worked with ideal intelligence, or even with ideal faithfulness. “The Best is the enemy of the Good,” says a German proverb. Practical wisdom in the Church will not indeed be supinely indifferent to any chance of improvement of workers or methods, yet it will accept, and make the very most of, the workers who are “to hand,” with all their humanity. No organisation, no reorganisation, will ever eliminate from the conditions under which God’s work has to be done, the blameless, natural imperfections of the workers, or even their moral imperfections. See the men with whom God in Old Testament and New Testament alike did His work. We see the glorious results of the past; we see the best points of the conspicuous workers who contributed to them. But a nearer view, a more intimate acquaintance, would have shown them very human, most of them average, not only in ability, but in goodness; only a few of first rank in power and sainthood. But the glorious result is due to the great worker, God, who accomplished it by using the tools which were to His hand.] III. The work.—Is of many forms. “Planting,” “watering.” No “reaping” is mentioned. A good case showing how such illustrative language does not bear insisting on beyond the one point of analogy which it is used to illustrate. Paul’s “planting” of a Church was a very real “reaping” of individual souls. The illustration here used is valid thus far—that many labourers, and many successive “layers” of faithful toil, contribute to the great Result. One man can in the deepest sense rarely claim to be the instrument (say) of a conversion. Ordinarily he has had the native ability, sanctified, to bring to a “head” what has been working in a soul pervasively, as the result of many a preceding labourer’s toil and prayers. How “planting” and “watering” are both needed to lead to full, ripe growth, is well seen in the case of the Master Himself. Any day of His three years’ ministry might be summarised in the sentence: “A Sower went forth (that morning) to sow.” He might have said, “I only planted.” The very parables of Matthew 13 illustrate His words. How few moments it occupies to read the Sower; how much time has been spent in expounding it. In how few words contained; how many myriads of words, how many acres of paper, spent in its enforcement. Rightly so. That morning He had gone out to sow; He was sowing from the boat that day seed truths, packed in small compass, but with living germs in them, which might be, and were meant to be, developed in many-branching expositions and applications of truth. His three years’ work was a seminal one, almost entirely; acts, works, Himself, in historical record,—the seed of a Gospel. But the Spirit of Pentecost “watered,” and, with a leap, that seed started into life and immediate blossom and fruitful harvest. “These things understood not His disciples at the first, but,” etc., (John 12:16). Perhaps not too much to say that without the watering of the Spirit the words of Christ must still remain seeds only, undeveloped potentialities, to some who read and even expound them. [Peter at Pentecost has got hold of all essential Christian truth, yet there is a development in some small degree to be traced in the clearness with which he and others apprehended Divine truth, particularly in regard to the Personality of their Master.] The work is to bring men to “believe.” It aims at making and building up “believers.” This certainly is a seminal, germinant work. When a sinner is brought to saving faith in Christ, a work is begun, and only begun, which may fruitfully fill eternity. How happy the selection and the succession of Pastors and Ministers with which the Great Head of His Church has often provided both its Churches and individual souls! How constantly the very man who can “water” is sent to follow up the man who can “plant”! How one man’s appeal follows up another man’s sermon! Would it not be oftener so, if in simple faith the choice and order were left to Him? III. The increase and success.—“As the Lord gave to every man.” “Success” is as complex a thing as the labour which leads up to it; as many-sided as the work and the men. Again (as in 1 Corinthians 1:1), let it be said that there is always a real and true “success” and “increase” so surely as there has been the prayerful, faithful “planting” and “watering.” [N.B.—In the Sower (Matthew 13), if there are three causes of failure, there are also three degrees of success (in one case exceedingly abundant), as certainly as “a sower goes forth to sow.”] It may be a “success” whose full measure only begins to be seen at a second or third remove from the man whose work it really crowns. He is, e.g., a minister who only knows of the salvation of one man or one boy; but that boy becomes the evangelist who gathers in his sheaves by the hundred wherever he works. From heaven perhaps the original labourer sees for the first time his true success. Paul’s “success” and “increase” were not least when his words saved Luther, and when Luther’s comment on Paul saved John Wesley. [Eadie (Paul the Preacher, pp. 94, 95) gives a good case of germinant “increase.” There lived in last century in England an obscure woman with an only son. When he was but seven years old she died. But her image and her prayers haunted him by land and sea, in the ports of Britain, on the beach of Africa, when shipping manacled negroes, or carousing on shore with a seaman’s zest. His heart was touched; he became a minister renowned for his impressive conversation and correspondence. His words reached Claudius Buchanan, and sent him to India. The recital of his labours so attracted Judson that it drew him to Burmah. The same gift to a mother’s prayers threw light on the soul of Scott, the commentator. It also strengthened Cowper, and gave birth to the Olney Hymns. Wilberforce was greatly indebted to the same source, and his Practical View brought the truth home to the mind of Legh Richmond. Thus John Newton’s mother’s prayers gave birth to his preaching and correspondence, to two missionaries, a commentary, a Christian statesman, and a pastor. Yet her grave and her name are unknown.] IV. The reward of the workers.—Over-subtle exegesis to say, “According to his labour, not according to his success.” Formally true, as a matter of lexical interpretation of “labour”; but too narrow for the thought of Paul, and for the fact. The Saviour has summarised the Divine Method of reward in the twin parables of the Pounds and the Talents [Luke 19; Matthew 25. As alike as twins, and as different. As alike as two faces, or twenty; built up on the same general plan, made up of the same basal facts (N.B. in the Pounds, however, two sets of facts are interwoven; there are subject-citizens who become rebels, as well as subject-servants); yet perfectly distinct and individual, in their occasion, in their construction, and in their teaching; each exactly congruous to its occasion and its audience; each, in even small details, internally harmonious and self-consistent.] In their contrast they exhibit complementary truths. Servants of Christ, with equal endowments [each of the ten a pound], may be in very diverse degree “successful.” One may be tenfold more diligent or devoted than another; with opportunities fairly equal the issues of their life’s “labour” may vary in the widest degrees. Some barely bring “one pound” of increase from their pound. Some of the same “pound” make ten. And the reward is proportionate. “Heaven” is no indiscriminate prize to every servant of God. There are many heavens in Heaven; as many heavens as men. Happy the man of a “ten cities” heaven. But on the other hand servants of God with widely different endowments may be equally faithful. It means as much for some to bring one “talent” for one, as for another to bring two talents where two were given. The man who adds five to five is no more “good and faithful a servant” than the man who should add one to one. The same words of praise, the same “joy of the Lord,” await the “labour” of those whose fidelity in labour has been equal. Success and results are not overlooked. Only God can appraise them truly. His servants may carve out for themselves the measure of their reward, whilst it is all of grace that there is a reward at all. But He does not overlook faithfulness. A Paul’s “labour” and the spirit of it; the “labour” of an Apollos and the fruit of it,—all is noted, and noted for exactly just “reward.” V. The Great Worker is God.—“Ministers by whom,” instrumentally, God brings men to faith. They are only efficient when in His hands. The strength, the wisdom, for labour come from Him. The wisest “labourer” works where, and for so long as, He appoints him in the field, the vineyard. “God is all, in all” the work and “in all” the workers. That it is “God’s husbandry,” not Paul’s; that the real Worker, the real Author, of the “increase” is God, needs to be remembered by the human “co-workers” on two occasions: (1) when they seem to have “succeeded”; (2) and, more urgently, when they seem to have “failed.” NOTES1 Corinthians 3:10.—Was given … I laid, q.d. “when I was at Corinth.” “A foundation,” “which I subjectively laid in my teaching at Corinth, because God had already laid the same objectively in heaven” (Evans). “Laid objectively for the whole Church in the Great Facts [by God], … laid subjectively in the hearts of the Christians at Corinth as the firm ground of their personal hopes by Paul” (Beet).1 Corinthians 3:11-15.—See Homiletic Analysis; also Appended Note. No valid analogy to warrant the application of this to the doctrine of Purgatory. This rests upon (a) the distinction drawn between venial and mortal sins with temporal and eternal penalties attached, and (b) the doctrine of merit. The temporal penalty of sins not “paid off” at the date of death must be “paid up” in Purgatory fire. The accumulated stock of merit, of Christ and the saints—a surplus beyond their own requirements—may be drawn upon by an indulgence, and the amount be applied to reducing the purgatorial term. .—1 Corinthians 3:10-15 Work tried by Fire. I. The imagery employed.—Ancient cities, and some modern ones (e.g. St. Petersburg), not so sharply divided into rich quarters and poor quarters as often the case with us. Houses of highest and humblest much more closely associated and intermingled. Palace and hovel might literally jostle. Buildings adorned with costly marbles [=“precious stones”], perhaps made priceless by the lavished art of the sculptor, stood surrounded with (sometimes literal “lean-to”) houses of stucco, of wood, or even of clay, thatched with hay and stubble, the houses of the artisan, the poor, the slave. St. Paul sees the work of a great fire, such as that which under Nero was made the occasion of a great persecution of the Christians, or that which a century before, on the capture of Corinth itself by Memmius, had laid the city in ruin. [Not to be made too precise, but may be conceived of thus:] The fire breaks out (say) at midnight, in some obscure dwelling, and quickly reduces to a heap of ashes the frail tenement of “wood, hay, stubble.” It catches adjoining houses; the winds fan and spread the flames, till a whole quarter of the city is wrapped in a conflagration which seems to Paul a fit emblem of the fires of “The Day” of all days, God’s Day of testing and doom. In the morning little knots of curious spectators and of sufferers wander about the ruins, discussing the work of the night. The slave is looking for his house of wood, hay, stubble. It stood there where that heap of ashes lies. He stirs them with his foot, and lays bare the stone foundations still unconsumed. The fire could not touch those. And, like many more, the homeless man recounts to any sympathetic listeners how his own life and that of his family are all they could save out of the wreck and loss of all. They were awakened, perhaps, and saved at the very last moment, “saved through the fire.” Another little group gathers round the stronger-built and still-standing stone walls of a better class of house. Stucco, woodwork, ornament have perished; but the man who built it “has his reward” for the money and pains spent over his substantial walls. There is something, more or less, to begin with, in restoring his ruined house. Close by stands a temple or a palace, as if almost contemptuous of its ruined neighbours, as it stands in the isolation of its survival. It has passed through the ordeal almost unscathed. Contents uninjured; cunning works of the goldsmith; spoils of conquered nations,—all untouched by the fire. Its costly marbles and statues within have not felt it. Its strong walls, besmirched with smoke indeed, have defied the flames. That builder, too, has his reward. He built with good material; it stands the fire. II. Paul’s use of the imagery.— 1. In the course of a somewhat lengthy stay in the city, Paul had founded the Church of Corinth. No man could pretend to dispute or share with him the honour of being the “master-builder,” the first to preach Christ in the city. Some little time after his departure, he sent over from Ephesus his friend Apollos to carry on the work. Apollos, an Alexandrian Jew, worked in perfect harmony of heart and aim after Paul; but perhaps felt himself more free than Paul had done to use the Alexandrian rhetoric and human learning in setting forth the Gospel. Every Greek was a born “politician,” or at least a born party man; the Corinthian Church early showed the effects of this partisan spirit within its membership. Parties sprang up with men’s names for their badges. [Little “schisms” Paul calls them, dissidences within the body, not yet grown to separations from it.] Whether we have the exact names 1 Corinthians 4:6 perhaps makes a little doubtful, nor is it clear that Paul’s list is exhaustive. Yet the characteristics and tendencies of the parties may be easily gathered. 2. There was an “Apollos” party. They liked such rhetoric as Apollos gave them, and chose to think their intelligence flattered by what of philosophy he may have employed in the shaping of the truth. Their danger was perhaps (e.g. in 1 Corinthians 15) to exalt reason at the expense of faith; we may not unreasonably think that in trying to be philosophical Christians they were denying or refining away the facts and doctrines of the Gospel, frittering away their power, or rejecting them as contrary to reason. It might not to be an unwarrantable borrowing of a modern name to call them the “rationalising” party at Corinth. 3. There was a “Cephas” party, belonging to that “wing” of the Christian Church who had been Jews, and whom at this period of Paul’s life we everywhere find dogging his footsteps, denying his Apostolic standing, often defaming his character. These at Corinth glorified Peter,—no, “Cephas.” “Call him by his honest Hebrew name!” Old school men, who could not so rapidly or readily unlearn as Paul had done the habits and training and teaching of years; who mistrusted him as “sadly radical”; who, though Christians, sought to enforce upon the Gentiles the worn-out ritual of Moses’ law and the now meaningless circumcision. Old style, conservative men, with a leaning to ceremonialism. The “ritual” party. 4. “No,” said another party. “We stand by Paul. He will have none of your Law for Christians. We will have none of it. He is a ‘liberty’ man. We are ‘liberty’ men too.” Only, where he meant the formal law of Moses, they meant the very principle of law itself. When he taught “liberty,” they interpreted “licence,” and some lived “licentiousness.” The Christian Church from the beginning has always had some too “liberal” in thought and in practice. 5. Yet one party more. They owned no human teacher, indeed. They had climbed to a sublime, serene height far above where their poor, misguided brethren were rallying round, and fighting over, this man or that, Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas. Possibly hyper-conservatives, fresh from the Lord’s brother, James, in Jerusalem; at all events, they said, “We are of Christ!” A beautiful party-cry; very attractive to the unwary and simple-hearted. But when it means “Christ as we understand Him” it is not quite so beautiful. 6. So, then, to the Church at Corinth had happened on a small scale what has been happening in the Church of Christ ever since. These were all Christians as yet. The differences between them and their heathen or Jewish neighbours were far greater than those which distinguished them from each other. All acknowledged one Divine Head, and had some great doctrines connected with Him as a bond of union. But some of them were building up the Church [and Christian lives] with doctrine and practice which Paul regarded as “wood, hay, stubble”; useless at best, and sure to perish in “The Day,” when God’s judgment should “try every man’s work, of what sort it is.” Some there were, he knew, who happily were building after his own heart and judgment, “gold, silver, precious stone.” Great should be their reward! Some also there were whose work gave him only mingled satisfaction. “Every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour,” partly according to how much he has done, but still more according to what kind of work he has done. Of those for whom he feared that they should find the labour of their life wasted, yet he hoped they should at least “save themselves,” if even like men snatched out of the flames which left them nothing but “their foundation” and “their lives.” [The opening words of the paragraph suggest:] “Woe to any builders whose work should really be a disturbing of the very Foundation itself, other than which none may lay a basis for faith, or life, or hope.” 7. These Church parties at Corinth were our modern “Churches” and “sects” in miniature. The causes at work at Corinth have never ceased to work wherever we have Christian men, until we have a Christianity not even outwardly at one. Yet we need to give Paul’s recognition that they are nearer to each other than to the world outside. Their unity is a more striking and deep thing than their diversities. They are one Church still. The broadest and deepest diversities at Corinth were still within the Church, insomuch as they were only surface cleavages; they did not run down into the foundation. That was one. Men weep because there is not external unity of all the Churches in one communion. As well weep that the sapling, which a thousand years ago was one simple undivided stem, has branched out into the oak with its hundred arms, many of them really big trees themselves. The branching is an inevitable consequence of life. And the tree is one at stock and root. Minds will always differ in cast and capacity. Training is of endless diversity. Race will make a difference. No one man ever sees the whole round of a truth; hardly any one Church or age does; no two ever see the same phase of presentation of it. There will always be men liable to pay too great honour to Reason; always some too ready to insist upon and overvalue Ceremonial. Reasons convincing to one do not appeal to another. An order of service not to the taste of one suits another and helps him. And so on, in endless diversity. What then? Recognise the fact that the diversity is a necessity. It has often become an evil; it need not be, and will not be, when men become broad as Paul, and recognise other patterns of doctrine and life and church order as all fairly to be included in the One Church. 8. It were a good thing for some to be as narrow as Paul about the “One Foundation.” It is unreal “liberality” to attempt to include within the “Christian” Church both those whose Christ is God-man, the Father’s equal and man’s fellow, Messiah of the Jews, Mediator for the Race, and, on the other side, those whose Jesus is at the highest a creature whom His Creator could annihilate, and who was perhaps a mere man, who might or even did make mistakes, a man not superior to Paul, and to whom Christianity owes not more than it does to Paul. Their status and acceptance before God depend on other considerations, but they are not on the Foundation in Paul’s sense. The lesson of the paragraph is not indifference to what a man believes, or what his neighbour believes, or how he works or worships. Each should be honest and earnest in accepting and living and defending that special aspect or portion of The Truth, which he or his Church sees. Experience shows that, as a rule, they do most for the broad work of Christ who work with a fixed creed and with a definite Church attachment. Each should give and claim equal recognition. The paragraph teaches charity, since experience also teaches that perfectly honest church-and creed-builders have built in what others saw clearly was “wood, hay, stubble,” and have rejected what some saw was “precious stone,” if not “gold” or “silver,” of system and doctrine. Probably no uninspired teacher ever built upon the One Foundation nothing but what would endure the fire. III. A personal application of the words lies not far from this.— 1. If a man is to be saved in “The Day” of God’s judgment, Christ must be the foundation of his life. “Saved” and “perishing” (2 Corinthians 2:15) mingle together it the closest intercourse of life, with closest similarity of outward course and bearing. Indeed, sometimes the balance of amiability or of strict probity seems to be on the side of the “perishing.” What is there to make Paul’s classification so sharply definite? 2. Dig down to the foundations of the two lives.—In the man really “being saved” this is the starting-point: Time was when he felt himself a sinner, guilty before God, and his heart full of sin. He cast himself on God’s mercy in Christ; he was forgiven; ever since, the Spirit has dwelt in him, doing something towards cleansing the heart, and putting there a new motive for all he does and feels—love to God who gave him Christ. If not, he is not a Christian. Others are “perishing,” because, go back far as we will, dig down deeply as we may, we cannot find that. There never was the fundamental experience of “sin” and of “faith in Christ” as the “spiritual man” understands them. Reform may only be throwing the arch of a culvert over the sin of the past and the sin of the heart; the man covered up his past and began to build the new life over it. But there, lowest of all, are the past and the sin, not Christ and His atonement. The other foundation and beginning of all life-building is Rock! [Turning over a new leaf is a good thing if it do not mean simply fastening down the old, without having first the record “blotted out.”] The superstructure of Eddystone Lighthouse was good enough when it was removed a few years ago; but the sea was undermining the foundation. A good superstructure upon a good foundation: lesson the first. 3. Then build something upon the foundation.—See in the suburbs of growing towns unfinished property. Walls of a certain height, but left unfinished; perhaps hardly more than the foundations got in when the money failed. Ground lies waste; weeds grow, rubbish accumulates, till it becomes difficult to see without some search whether there are any foundations at all. Like some lives. The true foundation was made right some years ago, but scarcely anything has been put upon it since. The accumulations of a worldly life have gathered, until an observer—and perhaps the man himself—hardly knows whether the foundations are still there. Rear a Christian character; build a superstructure of work for Christ. No better evidence that the foundation is there, and is sound, than the growing, fair superstructure. Build something. Some builders never get very far. What they build is good—stone, if not gold or silver, but it never amounts to much. A day’s unfaithfulness pulls down a week’s building. “Sinning and repenting.” “Ever learning, never coming to the knowledge of the truth.” 4. Build something every day.—“How did Michael Angelo accomplish so much?” “Nulla dies sine linea!” he replied. No day without something which will endure the testing fire: this will be the secret of some very unobtrusive, little-noticed lives which by-and-by are crowned with large reward when the reward is according to the work—in amount as well as quality (cf. supra). 5. Test all employments by this.—“Will they stand ‘the fire’? Do they now help towards an abiding, thorough Christian character? Or are the things I have done to-day mere ‘wood, hay, stubble,’ sure to perish?” 6. Build something to-day; at least, find the foundation to-day.—If to lay the one and only foundation [so far as we can be said to lay it at all] were the last act of a wasted life, the builder should escape “saved as by fire.” But it would be a very unworthy use to make of Christ and His salvation. “To-day.” NOTES1 Corinthians 3:16.—A temple (R.V.) misses, or denies, the typology binding Old Testament and New Testament together here. A case where, as often (e.g. 1 Corinthians 11:20), one of the great leading facts of the Old Covenant is divested of its temporary, local robing and embodiment, and brought forward into the new world of the New Testament, to find a new embodiment in the Church. The old building has gone; the new shrine where God dwells on earth is growing, rising, every day. A local Church, and still more the aggregate Church, is the New Testament form of the old Temple idea. It is the Temple to-day. This a collective Temple; in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 an individual application of the same idea is found. The word here is that which signifies, not the whole structure inclusive of the surrounding courtyard, but only the actual Temple building itself. “In” is here practically “among”; as distinguished from the indwelling in the man, 1 Corinthians 6:19 (see Appended Note from Evans).1 Corinthians 3:17.—Defile and destroy, same word; combining “impair,” “mar,” “ruin,” “destroy.”1 Corinthians 3:18.—Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:33 for the thought (not for the word); men seem to persuade themselves that they shall somehow evade the penalty of sin, although others do not escape. Thinks.—As 1 Corinthians 8:2; not with any hesitation, but with much confidence. Among you.—And yet taking his place, and holding his own, as a wise man of the world “in the world.” “Can’t be done! Incompatible things altogether!” The connection between inflated self-esteem and a slavish submission to party leaders is exposed in 1 Corinthians 6:6. Surely no implied caution to, or censure on, Apollos!1 Corinthians 3:19.—Note the small change of translation. Quotation of words of Eliphaz, from Job 5:13. [On the general principle of such a quotation being taken as part of what “is written,” see Homily on xv. 33, § 1.1 Corinthians 3:20.—Psalms 94:11. “Reasonings” (R.V.). .—1 Corinthians 3:16-20 The Temple of God.—Very little in this paragraph which is not dealt with elsewhere. For 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 see, e.g., 1 Corinthians 6:18-20; for 1 Corinthians 3:18-20 see, e.g., 1 Corinthians 1:18 sqq. Note, however, that the Temple is here collective, the whole Church; in 1 Corinthians 6:18-20 it is individual—indeed, the very body of the Christian man. I. Note how, from paragraph to paragraph, the illustrations change.—In 1–4 Paul is the “nursing father” (Isaiah 49:23); the Church is the house where “the holy seed” is growing up, or ought to be, into strength and ripeness of godliness. In 1 Corinthians 3:5 figure is dropped, unless “ministers” be a figure. Paul and his friend and successor Apollos are employés of God, enrolled in His service, to bring men to Christ and to faith in Him; John Baptist-like, to bring Bridegroom and Bride together. There has been “a division of labour,” and the thought is made pictorial in 1 Corinthians 3:6. Paul and his fellow-worker are seen toiling each at his task in God’s field or in God’s vineyard—“labourers in the vineyard,” each of whom is to receive “whatsoever is right” according to his work. [There is more in the Scripture than was in the Scribe. The mind of the Spirit is often fuller than any thought in the mind of the human writer. Yet the use of the illustration goes so little beyond the division of tasks amongst the qualified workers, and the payment according to results and fidelity, that an expositor may hesitate to fill out these two hints with the typology of the Vine and the Vineyard of God, found, e.g., in Psalms 80; Isaiah 5:2; Ezekiel 15; Ezekiel 17; Matthew 21:28; Matthew 21:33, sqq.; Luke 13:6 (where the two figures for Israel are conjoined); and, with most profound significance, John 15:1, and Matthew 26:20 (adding, perhaps, 1 Corinthians 9:7).] Then again the picture changes; as the “dissolving-view picture” fades out when another is superposed upon it, so the busy “labourers” at their “husbandry” have scarcely been shown to us before the field has faded and a “building” is rising as we watch. There is no doubt who is the Architect; whose is the great, leading, essential Idea of such a house. It is a busy scene. Not Paul or Apollos only are “workers together with God” this time. Every Corinthian teacher, every Corinthian believer, is a co-worker too. Paul has done his part of the work; “well and truly laid” does this Master-mason declare his foundation to be. Yet more truly the “foundation” is bed-rock; of God’s “laying,” in the prehistoric ages of a wider than earthly history (Revelation 13:8; 1 Peter 1:20). “The Church’s one FoundationIs Jesus Christ the Lord.”What Paul or Cephas may lay is rather the lowest courses of the masonry, which, in their turn, rest upon this “Rock of Ages” (Isaiah 26:4, margin). It is mercy and blessing to man that he is permitted, privileged, to be a worker “together with God”; but we touch the fringe of The Great Problem in all human thinking—the problem of Evil—when we see how this has entailed the invariable consequence that the design of the Great Architect never gets fairly carried out. Nor is it only that the workers blunder or are innocently incompetent; the deviation from the design of the Great Builder has a moral character. The material is bad; the building is careless; the work will be fit for nothing but the fire—very much of it. In our paragraph the building is specialised in its character. What we saw as a great house rising is now the Temple of God. And then the figure drops once more. Upon the screen are portraits; Corinthians strutting themselves in their fancied “wisdom”; He who knoweth men pronouncing His verdict: “Fools! You are only setting a trap for your own feet!” And the chapter leads up to the last solemn sentences in which is recited God’s “grant” of all men, all things, to His Church, to the individual Christian. A party said at Corinth, “We are of Christ.” The truth is far wider than that. They all “are Christ’s”; He is not “divided” (1 Corinthians 1:13); He belongs to no one party; all the parties belong to Him; as yet, all the “schisms” at Corinth have not cut off any of them from Him. The seemingly so humble “We are of Christ” too easily passes over into the miserably exclusive “We are of Christ.” “Ye are all Christ’s; all that is His is yours; all things are yours.” II. The Church is the Temple of God.—[N.B. the, not a.] Fulfilling the age-long truth that God loves to dwell amongst men. “God with us” is the keynote in which, if Sin had not put all things out of tune, the story of the relations of God and man would have run on in one lovely strain of most perfect music. He planted His Tent in the midst of the tents of Israel in the wilderness; He accepted the Royal Palace built for Him in His capital, Jerusalem, by His viceroy Solomon. Men looked from their housetops in the city across to the Temple; they hushed their thought as they passed beneath the boundary walls of its outer court—“The King, Jehovah, is within there!” And when their sin had cost them the presence of the occupying Shekinah-cloud, the Palace stood still, a witness to the desire of the heart of God to dwell amongst men. [All this is carried out in chap, 6, where see.] The word used is that for the actual Temple building, the Naos or Shrine. Around this lay broad outer courts, the outermost and largest being open to the world, the Court of (even) the Gentiles. It was an ill day for the Church when it added a great outer court, the Court of the World. In a true sense, perhaps, like the Court of the Gentiles, it may be included in the Hieron. The outer Court of the World does stand in a true relation to God. But the ill-day is when the court of the baptized, or unbaptized, world is counted part of the Naos; when the sacred name which belongs to the Shrine only is extended to the outer court, to the great confusion of thought and discipline and practice. “Ye are the Naos.” The Church with the “indwelling” of the “Spirit of God” is the present-day embodiment and exhibition of God’s Thought. [Not the last; the last but one. The last and most perfect is in Revelation 21:3. And in heaven to-day is another, concurrent, exhibition of it, where He sits who is, and will eternally be, the God-man. (The two are one: Ephesians 1:23).] The individual and the collective modifications of Paul’s illustrations are combined in 1 Peter 2:5. The whole building is instinct with Life, because every single stone is “living.” Peter’s figure hardly bears, even in a reader’s mind, to be put into visible shape. The truth is clear. The Temple is built up of temples. Men whose body is a temple, and they alone, build up the Temple of God. But there is a presence of God which specially belongs to the Church as such. III. “Defile” and “destroy” are the same word.—A vox media, for which Evans suggests “mar.” Sin, as so often is repaid in kind. It shapes, as well as earns, its own punishment. [In part, a sinner makes his own kind of hell.] The man who does anything in the corporate life of the Church, which is a “grief” and an offence to the Divine Tenant of the Temple of to-day, shall find that he has grieved the Spirit of his personal life. It is the One Spirit of Holiness who everywhere, in church or soul, makes its most grievous penalty His own withdrawal. Let the life of the body depart, and from that moment it begins to be “marred” and “destroyed” by disintegrating moral corruption. In this particular instance the “defiling” is done by the introduction of party spirit, and by the introduction of the “wood, hay, stubble” into the structure, whether of Church order or Christian doctrine, or personal character and life; not to add by the envying and strife which proved the Corinthians “yet carnal.” Let every man in Corinth watch not only lest he offend against the holiness of his personal Christian life, but be jealous of anything which might impinge upon the corporate holiness of The Church of Christ. Let every Corinthian enrol himself in the honourable Guild of the Temple-guardians [lit. “Temple-sweepers,” Acts 19:35] of the shrine of the great God and His Spirit. NOTES1 Corinthians 3:21-23.—See Homiletic Analysis. Note the unexpected turn of phrase; not “Christ is yours.” “Rise to the plane of His life and your relations to Him, then you are a possession, not owners. You are feudal holders of your estate, but the baron himself was the ‘king’s man.’ ” .—1 Corinthians 3:21-23 Our Estate and our Title: “All things yours.” I. Incidental illustration of this in the occasion of the paragraph.— 1. “All things work together for good to them that love God.” Corinthian Church a saddening spectacle to an observer, especially to one having Paul’s close personal interest in its welfare. Sad even at this distance of time to see the state of things in a Church hardly more than two or three years old, and endowed with gifts—many of them miraculous—beyond any other of that age. Members split into factions, party spirit running high. Some living in immorality “not even named amongst the heathen” around them (1 Corinthians 3:1); some defending such sin; others suffering “rationalising” scepticism to sap the foundations of their faith, and, which always follows, to eat away the vitality of their Christian life. One is sick at heart at the meanness and virulence of their personal feeling against Paul, the man to whom they owed their Church existence, who had “spent himself” for them, only to find that “the more he loved them the less he was loved” (2 Corinthians 12:15). Yet to this condition of things we owe these two letters to Corinth; of all his longer Epistles the most human in their interest, and coming nearest to the every-day life of house, market, citizen, church. 2. Especially do we owe to this the many passages, of which this is a specimen, of greatest weight and importance. How again and again, in the midst of passages of rebuke or direction concerning the temporary and sometimes trivial points submitted by the Corinthians to Paul for his decision, do we find his pen guided to such passages of solemn or glorious truth as, e.g., 1 Corinthians 7:29-31, or as this paragraph. As the casual blow of the pick of the lucky miner strikes upon the precious nugget embedded in the rock of quartz, or as many a fair flower grows so strong and so fair out of, and because of, the very corruption with which its roots are fed; so out of the foolish and wicked party spirit of the Corinthian Church grows this glorious title-deed to the Universe and its contents, the estate of the Christian. The very parties in Corinth are “ours”! [How is the preacher to put all the estate, “all things,” into one homily? He and his people can but walk over a part of it, noting the things which lie next the path on either hand, or can be seen afar off in large outline. No matter in what direction they strike out together a path over such an extent of possession, new “views” open on this side and that, new “finds” of pleasure and profit lie close to their way! Before starting across in even one direction, let them look over their Title. “All is God’s; all is Christ’s, His Son; all He has is yours, His brethren.”] II. The title by which the estate is held by the Church and the Christian.—At each link in the above chain of successive “conveyance,” from God to Christ, from Christ to His people, the ground of possession, the nature of the ownership, varies. 1. “Of, through, unto, God are all things” (Romans 11:36). They have being because He willed it; they are what they are, and as they are, and they continue, at His will. All the creatures, and pre-eminently Man, find in His glory the aim and end of their being. Sin would destroy this order. The germ, not only of heathenism but of all sin, is that “they worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). The members of the Church have come again into harmony with the Creator’s design, and glory with David as he stood amidst his people’s offerings to God’s Temple on earth, bowing at our Creator’s feet with the homage, “All that is in the heaven,” etc. (1 Chronicles 29:11). All the voices of the universe were meant to be and ought to be in harmony with the cry of the four “living ones” and the four-and-twenty elders who, self-discrowned, bow before the Lord God Almighty in the temple of heaven, saying, “Thou hast created,” etc. (Revelation 4:11). He is Lawgiver to His universe. The “laws” which we laboriously make out, are nothing but expressions of His will, the ordinary, orderly methods according to which He is pleased to govern His great Kingdom. All is His, in virtue of His Creatorship; all is subject to Him; all at His disposal. 2. But there comes in between Him and His Created Universe His Son; between, not as a separation, but as a link; as a Mediator, not only between God and man in Redemption, but as between Creator and Creature in Creation and in Providence (John 1:1; Colossians 1:16). Even in the days of His veiled glory He once said: “All things that the Father hath are Mine”; and the writer of the Hebrews (1 Corinthians 1:1-3) allows us to see this “Son appointed Heir of all things, … sitting down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.” And “all things” are His, subject to His power and at His disposal. 3. Then comes in the astounding revelation that He is all this, and has all this, for the sake of the redeemed race of man. [Note the force of Heb 1:3-4, “Being the brightness, etc., … sat down … when He, who was all the while this, had by Himself purged our sins.” The “purging” of our sins and the after-session “on the right hand,” etc., are “projected,” as it were, on the background of His abiding, continuous dignity as “the Brightness” and “the Image.”] Whilst He thus has all things for Himself, He has linked Himself with man, has taken flesh and come down to us, that He might lift us up with Himself to God, and join us with Himself in a possession as wide as His own ownership. The very heart of the argument of Hebrews 2 is here. Yonder sits One Man in whom all the dominion of Psa 8:4-6, ascribed to man, is actually fulfilled; the only one wearing our nature in whom that dominion is as yet realised. But His enthronement and dominion carry the principle of Man’s restored dominion. His royalty is representative as well as personal. His people are so “partakers with Him” that they already enter into a life of rule rather than of subjection, and their ultimate and complete glory is sure. “Ye are Christ’s” carries with it an answer to the old question, “What is man?” such as was never dreamed of by him who asked it. The creature physically lost in the vastness of the universe, dwarfed into a point by the heavens, the work of God’s fingers, doomed to suffering and to death, in bondage all his life to the fear of death, and in that respect lower than the “cattle” and the humbler animated creation (Psalms 8), is already beginning, so our paragraph says, to realise that along with and like the Representative Man “he is crowned with glory and honour”; all things are put under his feet, and serve him; he is to become conqueror of death; angels are his servitors. Indeed, there is nothing, there is no being, in the whole contents of God’s creation-realm, that is not at His orders to serve the interests, and advance to its perfection the life, of those whom Christ has made His clients and His brethren. “He is head over all things to His Church” (Ephesians 1:22 [a paragraph thoroughly parallel to the thought of our present section]). Each member of His body—of His very Self—may say, “All things that the Son hath are mine.” The Lord of all that is or that begins to be, of all that happens in the unfolding of events, of all the forces and contents of the universe in all their capabilities and combinations, is making all ceaselessly contribute to and converge upon the interests of His people and of each single individual of their number. [May illustrate in homely fashion thus: The mere caller at a house is shown into one room; there stays, and only stays; takes nothing, uses nothing, of what is in it. The visitor in the family has the use, the “run,” of all in common use by the family, and of those set apart specially for him; but he feels that many are closed against him. In a very restricted way does he feel free to use what is at his disposal and service. But the child of the house has the free “run” of the house. Nothing is shut against him; in submission to his father’s wishes, all it contains may be called into requisition for his use and comfort and welfare.] The home belongs to the brethren of Christ. The estate is His; but, we may almost venture to say, not its smallest value to Him is that He can make His brethren sharers with Him in its possibilities of blessing. III. The estate and its contents of good.—In a word, “everything.” There is nothing in the physical or the spiritual world; in the present, in the future; persons, circumstances, changes of condition,—nothing of which the Christian is not master instead of servant, and which cannot be made to issue in and contribute to the service and advancement of all his best interests. 1. The matter immediately in hand is the ministers and order of the Church: “Paul, Apollos, Cephas.” With fervid, slavish, personal devotion the Corinthians were ranging themselves very obediently as the adherents of this man and that. Indeed, they were fiercely contending for their favourite, under whose yoke they were eager to put the neck of their judgment and will and heart, almost as if their party-head had been crucified for them, or they had been baptized into his name and not Christ’s. No man contended more stoutly than did Paul (e.g. chap, 9) for his Apostolic rights and all due recognition of his status. But the place which some at Corinth would have given to him or to other apostles, was one which belonged to Christ (1 Corinthians 1:13). Such exaltation of an apostle into lordship over their own head and heart, was an inversion of the true order. As he looks at the humblest man in Corinth, ennobled by his brotherhood to Christ, he says: “Remember, the apostle is for your sake, not for his own glorification. The Church; its arrangements; its officers and their qualifications, exist for your salvation and sanctification, and not at all for their own advancement or glory. You are not theirs, not mine. Paul, Apollos, Cephas, we are yours!” There is no one pattern of “excellence” in the ministry, as there is no one pattern of need or character in the people. Every man is the “excellent” minister to somebody! The expositor of the Word, or the declaimer of theses on the topics of the day; the man who excels in pathos, or in historical word-painting, or in satire and shrewd analysis of character and its foibles; the man who “cannot preach,” and the man who can preach but who cannot organise; the man who is at his best in a sick-room, or that other who is a born ruler of men;—through all their infinite variety of gifts, there is no faithful minister of Christ who is not and has not something which somebody wants, or at some time will want. Each man will have his own aspect of truth to present and teach, the aspect which he sees most clearly, into which he enters most fully; and all are wanted, Paul and James, Cephas and John, Jude and Apollos, to give the whole round of truth. A many-sided, many-gifted ministry is not the smallest part of the wealth and rich heritage of the Church. Let the Christian man see what he can find for himself in each type of man. There is something. Let him not be so wedded to any one type, that he cannot enjoy, or find help from, or even think kindly of, a man who is not after the pattern of his own “best,” the style of minister who most helps him. And, similarly, first stands the interest of the individual soul, and next the form of Church organisation and administration. No form is worth anything which never was, or is no longer, of use towards helping those who belong to Christ. Any form, as any man, who does this, is to be recognised and to be utilised as part of the endowment of the people of God. 2. Then Paul’s view widens. His words grow broad in their range, even to indefiniteness. “World yours! Life yours! Death yours!” Then “the world”—and its predominantly ethical and evil significance need not be excluded from it—is no mere necessary evil, which must be endured and perhaps survived. There is no “must be” which ordains that life, with its business, its sorrows, its trials and conflicts, its unfriendly or uncongenial men and women, its strange perplexities and obstacles of circumstance, shall be of necessity a hindrance to growth in grace; putting the break on, even if it cannot quite stop all progress, as if a Christian could not hope to be thorough in service or enjoyment so long as life in “the world” lasts, and as if the one thing most to be desired was to “shuffle off this mortal coil” and be done with it all. Paul’s words in our paragraph say rather: “You are not to succumb beneath life’s burdens like that. You are not to acquiesce in a low type of spiritual life, because your circumstances and whole location in the world are not favourable to growth. The world is not to be master like that. Evil as it is, its evil is under the rule of your Christ. ‘God shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly’ (Romans 16:20), and you may begin to enter into your victory and have your foot even now upon the power of evil; and then all the good there is in life and in the world may be set in motion and utilised for your enjoyment and help. The trials, the difficulties, the very temptations, are not to be met simply as the bulrush bows its head before the storm, praying that the storm may soon be over, and that you may not be uprooted utterly by its passing violence. Rather, like your Master, ride the storm, in His strength. Every hurricane obeys laws—His laws—and blows as He listeth, towards His goal and for His purpose towards you. The water outside will carry the well-found ship; admitted within, it will sink it. Keep the world outside your heart, and the world is yours, to use and rule and lay under contribution to your growth in grace.” Trials may teach. Crosses may lift nearer. [“Even so,” and in no other way, “must” every “son of man be lifted up!”] The very necessity of the strife and of unremitting watchfulness against evil will drive a man so often and so near to Christ his Source of strength, that he emerges from every specially severe testing-time with new knowledge and a new power in prayer. The very weight of life’s burdens will have forced him to find a Friend in Christ, whose strength and faithfulness the world has forced him to test and experience, as he would never otherwise have had occasion to do. He is a fine specimen of manhood, who has taken his place in the world, and felt its storm, and fought it when it assailed him, and after all is not hardened or “secularised” or soured, but is trained to patience and sympathy with others, and to a more perfect reliance upon his God. The fire will brighten and purify what it cannot burn. In “the world” it is true that the soldier is in an unfriendly country; but even the enemy’s country can be requisitioned for what will enable him to carry on the campaign. [The darkest days of life have often been the most fruitful in permanent advancement to the soul. The cross has had a jewel hidden beneath it which has repaid for lifting the cross. A true parable in a German Legend: A famous egg of iron was given by a prince to his bride, who flung down in displeasure so unworthy a gift. The concussion started a spring in the iron case, and revealed a silver “white” to the egg. Curiosity examined this, and found again within a “yolk” of gold. In this lay hidden a tiny ruby-set crown, whose circlet concealed a marriage-ring for the union of bridegroom and bride! So, at the very heart of the most forbidding experiences of “the world” and “life,” the soul has many a time found the pledge of new love and a closer union with the Christ who rules “the world” and “life,” and who gave the painful and hard experience, etc.] 3. Nothing seems more utterly master than “Death.” The natural heart often stoically looked life in the face and defied it; or sometimes sullenly, doggedly, went onward to meet its changing fortunes and crushing sorrows as the Inevitable. But reckon death a possession, part of one’s wealth? No; it must be submitted to! In all literature, except what is Christian, or at least Christianised, Death is the great Conqueror; knocking impartially at the door of palace and hovel, calling as imperiously the king from his throne as the beggar from his rags and wretchedness, and calling them at his own caprice; playing havoc with all men’s plans and work, breaking these off at most unlooked-for and unfortunate times; mocking the tears of affection over sundered bonds; defying all efforts to arrest his progress or stay his hand. On the contrary, they who are Christ’s see that He has conquered death, and they share in His victory. They already “have everlasting life.” Death has become dying only, simply an incident—no more—in the course of an “eternal life” which began when faith united to Christ, and which stretches on in victorious continuity through the important, but still accidental, change of surroundings and abode and conditions which dissolution occasions. They do not tremble at any capricious shooting of His arrows. The Lord of Life makes every arrow of Death to carry His message attached to it. He “has the keys of Hell and of Death” (Revelation 1:17). The realm of the “departed” is part of His dominion. His people enter it as possessors, not as prisoners. They are only advancing into another section of a life which is all theirs. Its doors are opened by Death when He wills, and at His bidding. And so far from putting an abrupt and inopportune end to the execution of their life’s purposes, or thwarting them, they are only by death advanced a stage nearer to their completion. Salvation is put out of peril; for the first time do the majority of His people then see their Lord. To wake up into the blessedness of that first moment, when their eyes at last see the Christ they have heard of, and trusted, and loved, and have tried to serve—Death which brings that is no dread, no enemy; it is a hope, it is their own. 4. Nor does anything seem less their own than the future. “Things to come” may unfold in such terrible possibilities, and may involve such unforeseen contingencies, as may set at nought all their wisest planning and blight all their brightest prospects. No dawn so clear but the noonday may be shadowed over with clouds which never lift again long as life’s day lasts. Men seem working life’s problem with a quantity unknown, incommensurable, when they must needs take the future into their reckoning. Masters of the future? No, not even its prophets! Rather its sport! “Things to come are yours.” What these shall be, He is deciding. They lie within the domain which is being ruled by the Son, and ruled by Him for His Church and for the individual Christian man. Even here He used to speak of the unseen world and its facts as one to whose foot the other side of the veil was as familiar ground as this side is to us. In like manner the future lies mapped out to His eye as clearly as, more clearly than, the past is to ours. For instance, some man will one day cross my path who will materially affect my whole after-life. Christ, the Ruler of the future, has His eye upon the point of convergence; and upon the path which that man, perhaps as yet altogether unknown to me, or far from me, in perhaps another hemisphere, is traversing, and which will bring him to the meeting-point by-and-by. When the moment arrives there is the man, just when, and just such as, my life needs. The present is being so guided into the future, and the future is being so fitted on to the present, as that the life of a man who is Christ’s, is in its whole stretch and extent one perfect harmonious whole (see Homily on 2 Corinthians 1:10). Somewhere in the whole round of His universal possession there is the very help and deliverance he will someday want; it will be brought out and forthcoming at the proper time, “in His times” (cf. 1 Timothy 6:15). As each stage of the earthly series of “things to come” is reached, relays of help [like the relays of fresh horses awaiting the travellers at each successive posting-station in the old “posting” days] will always be awaiting him. “My times are in” Christ’s “hand.” FOR A COURSE ON 1 Corinthians 3:22 The World is Yours. I. To lodge in. II. To study. III. To use. IV. To enjoy. V. To conquer.—[J. L.] Life is Yours. I. As a daily gift of God. II. As a period of discipline and instruction. III. As a season of enjoyment. IV. As an earnest of a more glorious life.—[J. L.] Death is Yours. I. To consider. II. To terminate your sorrows. III. To effect an important change. IV. To unfold the mysteries of eternity. V. To introduce you to eternal happiness.—[J. L.] Things Present are Yours. I. The dispensations of providence. II. The provisions and arrangements of the Gospel. III. All the supplies, agencies, and experiences of time.—[J. L.] Things to Come are Yours. I. The future of time. II. The coming of Christ. III. The resurrection of the body. IV. The day of judgment. V. Heaven. VI. Everlasting life. VII. God, who was, and is, and is to come.—[J. L.] NOTES1 Corinthians 3:11 sqq. Since it was by preaching and teaching that Paul laid the foundation of the Church of Corinth, the builders must be different kinds of teachers. Since the matter taught is the material the teacher uses, this must be the gold, silver, wood, straw, etc. The results produced by the teacher in the hearts and lives of his hearer are the building he erects. He may produce good results which will last for ever and be to him an eternal joy and glory. Since these results are altogether the work of God, and are revealed in their grandeur only in the great day, they are a “reward” given by God in that day for work done on earth. But a teacher may produce results which now appear great and substantial, but which will then be found utterly worthless. He may gather round him a large number of hearers, may interest them, and teach them much that is elegant and for this life useful, and yet fail to produce in or through them results which will abide for ever. If so, the great day will destroy his work and proclaim its worthlessness. But he may be said to build upon the one foundation, Jesus Christ. For he is a professed Christian teacher, and people go to hear him as such. He may be a sincere, though mistaken Christian believer, and therefore be himself saved. But his work, as a teacher, is a failure. Now the permanence of a teacher’s work depends upon the matter taught. The soul-saving truths of the Gospel enter into men’s hearts and lives, and produce abiding results. All other teaching will produce only temporary results. We understand, therefore, by the wood and straw whatever teaching does not impart or nourish spiritual life. The three terms suggest the various kinds of such teaching. It may be clever or foolish, new or old, true or false; but not subversive of the “foundation,” or it would come under the severer censure of 1 Corinthians 3:16 sq.… We have Christian examples in many of the trifling and speculative discussions which have been frequent in all ages. We also learn that even of the teaching which produces abiding results there are different degrees of worth; in proportion, no doubt, to the fulness and purity with which the teaching of Christ is reproduced. In both cases the results are the results, lasting or transitory, produced in the hearers’ hearts by the use of these materials; results which are in some sense a standing embodiment of the teaching.—Dr. Beet.“By Fire.”— 1. It may be homiletically useful to cast into orderly shape the Bible use of “Fire.” Needless to say that the Bible is not pledged to any such unscientific piece of obsolete antiquity as that Fire is an Element—one of four. It is content to take the visible fact, and its palpable effects, as a serviceable illustration, apprehended readily by the child or the heathen, and perfectly good as an illustration, whatever be the scientific revision of our knowledge of the state of the case. For teaching purposes Fire is Heat and, still more, Flame. Flame is now understood to be gas so highly heated as to become in some degree luminous, and generally made more luminous by being loaded with incandescent particles, whether of carbon or other matter. That is nothing new to the Divine Author of Scripture and of Nature; nor was it unworthy of Him, or untrue, that what was to be the popularly apprehensible phenomenon should in the original planning of Nature be so adjusted and adapted as to lend itself well to teach moral truth. Indeed, the devout students of Nature find that both the superficial, phenomenal facts and the deep scientific “laws” are alike parabolic and didactic Nature is full of man, and of truth which man wants. Creation is didactic. “Creation is redemptive.”2. A convenient starting-point is Hebrews 12:29 : “Our God is a consuming fire.” Closely connected with “God is Light.” The difference is here: Light is what God is in Himself; fire what He is in relation to (sinful) mankind. Hence frequently the chosen symbol of His self-manifestation,: the Bush, Exodus 3:2; the Pillar, Exodus 40:38; Tongues of Pentecost, Acts 2:3; Sinai, Exodus 19:8; Exodus 24:17; Deuteronomy 4:36; Vision of God’s glory, Ezekiel 1:4; Exodus 24:9-11 (N.B. Nadab and Abihu), Daniel 7:9; Revelation 4:2. In Isaiah 4:5 we have three manifesting symbols of God combined—light, radiant splendour, burning fire. Still more frequently the accompaniment of His self-manifestation: e.g. “After the earthquake a fire,” 1 Kings 19:12; “fire goeth before Him,” Psalms 97:8. Loosely connected with all this are the fiery Chariot and Horses sent for Elijah, 2 Kings 2:11; fiery Chariots round about Elisha, 2 Kings 6:17. This last and the Pillar over Israel, or the Shekinah in its midst, are gathered up in Zechariah 2:5.3. Hence when He accepted, “took,” “ate,” appropriated, a sacrifice, it was by a fiery manifestation. E.g. at the Ordination of Aaron and the Inauguration of the priestly system and ritual, Leviticus 9:24. So at the Dedication of Solomon’s Temple, 2 Chronicles 7:1-3. And in less important instances: Carmel, 1 Kings 18; on Araunah’s threshing floor, 1 Chronicles 21:26; Gideon’s sacrifice, Judges 6:21. The Burnt Offering, as distinguished from the Sin and Peace Offerings, and as symbol of an entire surrender on man’s part and an entire appropriation on God’s part, was (as its name says) burnt with fire. And this links on the foregoing to the twofold employment of the symbol as exhibiting the active relation of a Holy God to sinful man.4. All that could, so to say, be volatilised went up purified and in perfect acceptance; all that was gross and earthly was left behind, to be cast out. Hence, “Baptized with … fire,” Matthew 3:11; Malachi 3:2 brings out the action of the refiner’s fire upon metals. So Isaiah 4:4, “Purged Jerusalem by the Spirit of Judgment and the Spirit of Burning”; “in that day,” primarily the return of a purified remnant from Babylon, then the setting up of a Christian Zion, perhaps, by-and-by, a restored and purified Israel once more. Isaiah 30:23, and more remotely still Isaiah 29:6, perhaps may better come in later on. The same Holiness which is purifying to the man who desires to be purified, burns as a consuming fire against sin and the sinner who will not be parted from his sin. Hence fire frequently sets forth the holy, active antagonism to evil and evil men, in defence of His people. Isaiah 30:27, “His tongue a devouring fire; lips full of indignation.” “Fury like a fire,” Jeremiah 4:4 (against unfaithful Judah and Jerusalem), Jeremiah 21:2. So it proved, Lamentations 3:3. So against the heathen and Idumæa, Ezekiel 36:5; against Gog, Ezekiel 38:18-19. [Psalms 83:14; Psalms 140:10; Ezekiel 24:9; Amos 5:6. God and His people are so identified that they become a fire too, Obadiah 1:18; Zechariah 12:6. So in Isaiah 30:27-33 we have it again. Fire purging the faithful from the unfaithful, sifting the nations, then burning up the pile of Tophet. [But “the King” may (as Talmud) be the Eternal King, and Tophet the burning-place outside the purified, ideal Jerusalem, where all the refuse is to be cast (Matthew 13:50).] Certainly the twofold action is seen in Isaiah 31:9, “Fire in Zion; furnace in Jerusalem”; Isaiah 33:14. As the Assyrian invasion approached, and the denunciations of holy wrath against sinners in and enemies of Zion, “sinners in Zion are afraid.” “Who can dwell with devouring fire?” cry they, “… with everlasting burnings?” i.e. with a God whose holy antagonism to sin never relaxes, never spares, never ends. 1 Corinthians 3:15 is the answer. But the principle is here which has occasioned and justified a very frequent use made of this text. God’s fierce, fiery antagonism to sin cannot cease unless sin cease—must last everlastingly if sinners live on everlastingly sinners still. Same connection appears in Nahum 1:6. Indeed, the whole cycle of events connected with the Assyrian invasion seems the foundation of much Bible language concerning the punishment of wicked. Not only such as Psalms 46:9 (usually [not in Speaker] connected with these events), but Isaiah 9:5, bring up the fires with which the dead bodies and the wreck of the host were cleared away (1 Corinthians 9:5 = no fighting, no blood, but simply burning of the litter and refuse and the dead), with, by the usual analogy, a future fulfilment. Isaiah 66:24 (foundation of Mar 9:44-46 [cf. Stier, Words of L. J., i. 156]; rather the figure of a holy Jerusalem with its Gehenna, its burning-place for all the refuse of the city [Matthew 13:50]); here also the fires on the battle-field after Sennacherib’s defeat are evidently in the mind of the writer. The battle-field is one vast Gehinnom outside the city walls.5. Many actual examples of God’s vengeance in which fire is the agent of punishment. N.B. these are all examples of sins very directly against His holiness and unique position and claims. Nadab and Abihu, Leviticus 10:2; Taberah, Numbers 11:2; Achan, Joshua 7:25; Korah, Numbers 16:35; Elijah and the captains, 2 Kings 1:10 (unless, indeed, this be, first and chiefly, God’s manifestation of Himself, appealing both to Elijah and to the witnesses and hearers of the event). Above all Sodom, Genesis 19:24; referred to in Luke 17:29; and at least shaping the language of Psa 11:6; Ezekiel 38:22; Revelation 21:18. [Imagery of Mal 4:1-2 is anticipated by Genesis 19:24; Genesis 19:23.6. So, coming to the New Testament, we find three great cycles of type: (a) Sodom, (b) Gehinnom, (c) Assyrian invasion.NEW 1. General.—God’s vengeance against sin is fiery, Matthew 3:10 (? primarily the Jewish nation), “Tree hewn down and cast into the fire”; Hebrews 6:8, the doom of the persistently barren ground. Also of individuals, Matthew 7:19; Luke 3:9; Hebrews 10:27, “Judgment and fiery indignation; 2 These. 1 Corinthians 1:8, “In flaming fire taking vengeance.”2. God’s holiness is testing.—1 Corinthians 3:13 [though there is here very little of all this typology; hardly more than the commonly observed action of fire]; 2 Peter 3:7 (Luke 12:49-52 is connected).3. Sodom.—Jude 1:7, “Suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.” Revelation 19:20; Revelation 20:10, “Lake of fire and brimstone, where the Beast and the False Prophet are” [Revelation 18:9, Babylon; cf. Abraham beholding the ascending smoke of Sodom]; the Devil; Gog and Magog deceived by him (obvious ref. to Ezekiel 38:22); who-soever “not found written in the book of life.” Revelation 14:10, worshippers of the beast and his image, who have received his mark.4. Gehenna.—Matthew 18:9, “Worm dieth not,” etc.; Mark 9:44-46, referring to Isaiah 66. “Furnace of fire,” Matthew 13:42; Matthew 13:50, where the latter verse, having nothing in the parable connected with it to suggest it—the fish are cast into the water—shows that the phrase had become, or was now first made by Christ, a customary equivalent for the doom of the wicked.5. The battle-field.—Linked with Mark 9, as above, but originating the phrase “everlasting burnings.” In Matthew 25:41; figure (almost?) lost. So completely the revelation of the future that we must say: “Whatever be the nature of the punishment of a lost, embodied spirit, if we might ask him what he suffered, he would say, ‘Fire,’ as the only earthly analogy available.”6. Mark 9:47. A difficult verse. Every man shall—must—come into contact with the holiness of God. Will a man let it (Him) burn away all impurity, and himself thus become a sacrifice salted with grace, and so accepted? Or, refusing this, will he simply meet and feel the fire which never burns itself out?1 Corinthians 3:16-17. There were Hebrew converts in Corinth, and such would easily catch St. Paul’s allusion … to the national Temple. This national Temple in the Apostle’s mind clearly enlarges and transfigures itself into a Temple spiritual. This living Temple of the Catholic Church is one Temple; it is one, yet elastic; it grows and expands, associating to itself and assimilating, so to speak, many lateral chapels. It is, in fact, an organic unity of several organs, each it itself a unity; it is, in brief, a unity of many contained unities. Each several Church, therefore, of the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church in miniature, so that of the whole all the several parts are themselves wholes; each branch of the Tree is a tree planted in Christ.—Evans, in “Speaker.” NOTES1 Corinthians 4:11 sqq. Since it was by preaching and teaching that Paul laid the foundation of the Church of Corinth, the builders must be different kinds of teachers. Since the matter taught is the material the teacher uses, this must be the gold, silver, wood, straw, etc. The results produced by the teacher in the hearts and lives of his hearer are the building he erects. He may produce good results which will last for ever and be to him an eternal joy and glory. Since these results are altogether the work of God, and are revealed in their grandeur only in the great day, they are a “reward” given by God in that day for work done on earth. But a teacher may produce results which now appear great and substantial, but which will then be found utterly worthless. He may gather round him a large number of hearers, may interest them, and teach them much that is elegant and for this life useful, and yet fail to produce in or through them results which will abide for ever. If so, the great day will destroy his work and proclaim its worthlessness. But he may be said to build upon the one foundation, Jesus Christ. For he is a professed Christian teacher, and people go to hear him as such. He may be a sincere, though mistaken Christian believer, and therefore be himself saved. But his work, as a teacher, is a failure. Now the permanence of a teacher’s work depends upon the matter taught. The soul-saving truths of the Gospel enter into men’s hearts and lives, and produce abiding results. All other teaching will produce only temporary results. We understand, therefore, by the wood and straw whatever teaching does not impart or nourish spiritual life. The three terms suggest the various kinds of such teaching. It may be clever or foolish, new or old, true or false; but not subversive of the “foundation,” or it would come under the severer censure of 1 Corinthians 4:16 sq.… We have Christian examples in many of the trifling and speculative discussions which have been frequent in all ages. We also learn that even of the teaching which produces abiding results there are different degrees of worth; in proportion, no doubt, to the fulness and purity with which the teaching of Christ is reproduced. In both cases the results are the results, lasting or transitory, produced in the hearers’ hearts by the use of these materials; results which are in some sense a standing embodiment of the teaching.—Dr. Beet.“By Fire.”— 1. It may be homiletically useful to cast into orderly shape the Bible use of “Fire.” Needless to say that the Bible is not pledged to any such unscientific piece of obsolete antiquity as that Fire is an Element—one of four. It is content to take the visible fact, and its palpable effects, as a serviceable illustration, apprehended readily by the child or the heathen, and perfectly good as an illustration, whatever be the scientific revision of our knowledge of the state of the case. For teaching purposes Fire is Heat and, still more, Flame. Flame is now understood to be gas so highly heated as to become in some degree luminous, and generally made more luminous by being loaded with incandescent particles, whether of carbon or other matter. That is nothing new to the Divine Author of Scripture and of Nature; nor was it unworthy of Him, or untrue, that what was to be the popularly apprehensible phenomenon should in the original planning of Nature be so adjusted and adapted as to lend itself well to teach moral truth. Indeed, the devout students of Nature find that both the superficial, phenomenal facts and the deep scientific “laws” are alike parabolic and didactic Nature is full of man, and of truth which man wants. Creation is didactic. “Creation is redemptive.”2. A convenient starting-point is Hebrews 12:29 : “Our God is a consuming fire.” Closely connected with “God is Light.” The difference is here: Light is what God is in Himself; fire what He is in relation to (sinful) mankind. Hence frequently the chosen symbol of His self-manifestation,: the Bush, Exodus 3:2; the Pillar, Exodus 40:38; Tongues of Pentecost, Acts 2:3; Sinai, Exodus 19:8; Exodus 24:17; Deuteronomy 4:36; Vision of God’s glory, Ezekiel 1:4; Exodus 24:9-11 (N.B. Nadab and Abihu), Daniel 7:9; Revelation 4:2. In Isaiah 4:5 we have three manifesting symbols of God combined—light, radiant splendour, burning fire. Still more frequently the accompaniment of His self-manifestation: e.g. “After the earthquake a fire,” 1 Kings 19:12; “fire goeth before Him,” Psalms 97:8. Loosely connected with all this are the fiery Chariot and Horses sent for Elijah, 2 Kings 2:11; fiery Chariots round about Elisha, 2 Kings 6:17. This last and the Pillar over Israel, or the Shekinah in its midst, are gathered up in Zechariah 2:5.3. Hence when He accepted, “took,” “ate,” appropriated, a sacrifice, it was by a fiery manifestation. E.g. at the Ordination of Aaron and the Inauguration of the priestly system and ritual, Leviticus 9:24. So at the Dedication of Solomon’s Temple, 2 Chronicles 7:1-3. And in less important instances: Carmel, 1 Kings 18; on Araunah’s threshing floor, 1 Chronicles 21:26; Gideon’s sacrifice, Judges 6:21. The Burnt Offering, as distinguished from the Sin and Peace Offerings, and as symbol of an entire surrender on man’s part and an entire appropriation on God’s part, was (as its name says) burnt with fire. And this links on the foregoing to the twofold employment of the symbol as exhibiting the active relation of a Holy God to sinful man.4. All that could, so to say, be volatilised went up purified and in perfect acceptance; all that was gross and earthly was left behind, to be cast out. Hence, “Baptized with … fire,” Matthew 3:11; Malachi 3:2 brings out the action of the refiner’s fire upon metals. So Isaiah 4:4, “Purged Jerusalem by the Spirit of Judgment and the Spirit of Burning”; “in that day,” primarily the return of a purified remnant from Babylon, then the setting up of a Christian Zion, perhaps, by-and-by, a restored and purified Israel once more. Isaiah 30:23, and more remotely still Isaiah 29:6, perhaps may better come in later on. The same Holiness which is purifying to the man who desires to be purified, burns as a consuming fire against sin and the sinner who will not be parted from his sin. Hence fire frequently sets forth the holy, active antagonism to evil and evil men, in defence of His people. Isaiah 30:27, “His tongue a devouring fire; lips full of indignation.” “Fury like a fire,” Jeremiah 4:4 (against unfaithful Judah and Jerusalem), Jeremiah 21:2. So it proved, Lamentations 3:3. So against the heathen and Idumæa, Ezekiel 36:5; against Gog, Ezekiel 38:18-19. [Psalms 83:14; Psalms 140:10; Ezekiel 24:9; Amos 5:6. God and His people are so identified that they become a fire too, Obadiah 1:18; Zechariah 12:6. So in Isaiah 30:27-33 we have it again. Fire purging the faithful from the unfaithful, sifting the nations, then burning up the pile of Tophet. [But “the King” may (as Talmud) be the Eternal King, and Tophet the burning-place outside the purified, ideal Jerusalem, where all the refuse is to be cast (Matthew 13:50).] Certainly the twofold action is seen in Isaiah 31:9, “Fire in Zion; furnace in Jerusalem”; Isaiah 33:14. As the Assyrian invasion approached, and the denunciations of holy wrath against sinners in and enemies of Zion, “sinners in Zion are afraid.” “Who can dwell with devouring fire?” cry they, “… with everlasting burnings?” i.e. with a God whose holy antagonism to sin never relaxes, never spares, never ends. 1 Corinthians 4:15 is the answer. But the principle is here which has occasioned and justified a very frequent use made of this text. God’s fierce, fiery antagonism to sin cannot cease unless sin cease—must last everlastingly if sinners live on everlastingly sinners still. Same connection appears in Nahum 1:6. Indeed, the whole cycle of events connected with the Assyrian invasion seems the foundation of much Bible language concerning the punishment of wicked. Not only such as Psalms 46:9 (usually [not in Speaker] connected with these events), but Isaiah 9:5, bring up the fires with which the dead bodies and the wreck of the host were cleared away (1 Corinthians 9:5 = no fighting, no blood, but simply burning of the litter and refuse and the dead), with, by the usual analogy, a future fulfilment. Isaiah 66:24 (foundation of Mar 9:44-46 [cf. Stier, Words of L. J., i. 156]; rather the figure of a holy Jerusalem with its Gehenna, its burning-place for all the refuse of the city [Matthew 13:50]); here also the fires on the battle-field after Sennacherib’s defeat are evidently in the mind of the writer. The battle-field is one vast Gehinnom outside the city walls.5. Many actual examples of God’s vengeance in which fire is the agent of punishment. N.B. these are all examples of sins very directly against His holiness and unique position and claims. Nadab and Abihu, Leviticus 10:2; Taberah, Numbers 11:2; Achan, Joshua 7:25; Korah, Numbers 16:35; Elijah and the captains, 2 Kings 1:10 (unless, indeed, this be, first and chiefly, God’s manifestation of Himself, appealing both to Elijah and to the witnesses and hearers of the event). Above all Sodom, Genesis 19:24; referred to in Luke 17:29; and at least shaping the language of Psa 11:6; Ezekiel 38:22; Revelation 21:18. [Imagery of Mal 4:1-2 is anticipated by Genesis 19:24; Genesis 19:23.6. So, coming to the New Testament, we find three great cycles of type: (a) Sodom, (b) Gehinnom, (c) Assyrian invasion.NEW 1. General.—God’s vengeance against sin is fiery, Matthew 3:10 (? primarily the Jewish nation), “Tree hewn down and cast into the fire”; Hebrews 6:8, the doom of the persistently barren ground. Also of individuals, Matthew 7:19; Luke 3:9; Hebrews 10:27, “Judgment and fiery indignation; 2 These. 1 Corinthians 1:8, “In flaming fire taking vengeance.”2. God’s holiness is testing.—1 Corinthians 3:13 [though there is here very little of all this typology; hardly more than the commonly observed action of fire]; 2 Peter 3:7 (Luke 12:49-52 is connected).3. Sodom.—Jude 1:7, “Suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.” Revelation 19:20; Revelation 20:10, “Lake of fire and brimstone, where the Beast and the False Prophet are” [Revelation 18:9, Babylon; cf. Abraham beholding the ascending smoke of Sodom]; the Devil; Gog and Magog deceived by him (obvious ref. to Ezekiel 38:22); who-soever “not found written in the book of life.” Revelation 14:10, worshippers of the beast and his image, who have received his mark.4. Gehenna.—Matthew 18:9, “Worm dieth not,” etc.; Mark 9:44-46, referring to Isaiah 66. “Furnace of fire,” Matthew 13:42; Matthew 13:50, where the latter verse, having nothing in the parable connected with it to suggest it—the fish are cast into the water—shows that the phrase had become, or was now first made by Christ, a customary equivalent for the doom of the wicked.5. The battle-field.—Linked with Mark 9, as above, but originating the phrase “everlasting burnings.” In Matthew 25:41; figure (almost?) lost. So completely the revelation of the future that we must say: “Whatever be the nature of the punishment of a lost, embodied spirit, if we might ask him what he suffered, he would say, ‘Fire,’ as the only earthly analogy available.”6. Mark 9:47. A difficult verse. Every man shall—must—come into contact with the holiness of God. Will a man let it (Him) burn away all impurity, and himself thus become a sacrifice salted with grace, and so accepted? Or, refusing this, will he simply meet and feel the fire which never burns itself out?1 Corinthians 4:16-17. There were Hebrew converts in Corinth, and such would easily catch St. Paul’s allusion … to the national Temple. This national Temple in the Apostle’s mind clearly enlarges and transfigures itself into a Temple spiritual. This living Temple of the Catholic Church is one Temple; it is one, yet elastic; it grows and expands, associating to itself and assimilating, so to speak, many lateral chapels. It is, in fact, an organic unity of several organs, each it itself a unity; it is, in brief, a unity of many contained unities. Each several Church, therefore, of the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church in miniature, so that of the whole all the several parts are themselves wholes; each branch of the Tree is a tree planted in Christ.—Evans, in “Speaker.” NOTES1 Corinthians 4:1. So.—Choose between (a) a forward reference to “as” (e.g. with Stanley), and (b) a backward reference (with, e.g., Evans, in Speaker, and Beet) to 1 Corinthians 3:21-22; meaning: “Let a man account of us as Christ’s servants, having moreover the greater thought also present in his thinking, and governing his estimate of us, that we are thus the house stewards in Christ’s household for the very purpose of dispensing to him and his brethren these ‘all things’ which belong to him, because he belongs to Christ.” Servants.—Good note in Trench, Syn., § ix., on the four New Testament words for “servant.” See διάκονος and δοῦλος together in Matthew 20:26-28. [Matthew 22:2-14, where Trench points out that the “servants” who bring in the guests are men, and can be δοῦλοι, but the executioners of the sentence of the Host are angels, who are only διάκονοι.] See δοῦλος and ὑπηρέτης (the word here) together in John 18:18. The δοῦλος [slave, bondservant] is bound to a person; the θεράπων does some service to a person, whether as his slave or a freeman, whether for the once, or frequently and customarily; the διάκονος is a man charged with a special task, and to the task, rather than to the person who enjoins it, the word points; the ὑπηρέτης is, so to speak, an attendant charged with the duty of an office. Our word may be studied in Acts 13:5; Matthew 5:25; Luke 4:20; John 7:32; John 18:18; Acts 5:22. Must not overpress the derivational sense—the “under-rower in a galley”; the ship being the Church, Christ sitting at the helm, the passengers being the members of the Church. Stewards.—Might be slaves, though in positions of important trust. Joseph, e.g. was so. Here the thought is only that their business is to administer the household of their Master, and particularly to deal out the stores of soul-feeding “mysteries” to their fellow-servants of other offices and orders (Titus 1:7; well expounded in 1 Peter 4:1, and 1 Corinthians 2:1; Ephesians 3:2). For “mysteries,” see 1 Corinthians 2:1; certainly not the sacramenta, which word in ecclesiastical Latin, through the Vulgate, has become the equivalent of “mysteries.”1 Corinthians 4:2.—Notice “here,” by a change of reading. Stanley (alone) joins the word with the preceding sentence. A maxim true of all stewardships in ordinary human affairs.1 Corinthians 4:3. Judge.—Examine, as if dealing with a man on his defence in a court of justice. So 1 Corinthians 9:3. Judgment.—Lit. “day”; parallel to the “day” of God’s judgment in 1 Corinthians 3:13. (See Separate Homily on that passage for general treatment of the subject.)1 Corinthians 4:4. Know nothing by myself.—Not at all to be taken as: “I have no knowledge of Divine things but such as is a gift of the grace of God.” Simply a piece of old-fashioned English, still lingering in the provincialisms of some counties. A Lincolnshire peasant, e.g., will say, “What do you think by it?” instead of “think of it,” or “think about it.” Paul only means, of course, “I am not conscious to myself of anything.” He does not say “evil”; that is so generally, however, the issue of any examination and judgment of oneself that almost of necessity it is suggested by his language. Cf. 1 John 3:20. The Lord.—Paul’s largely predominant usage makes this almost certainly “Christ.” This is confirmed by 1 Corinthians 4:5. It is always Christ who “comes,” and who will act as Judge. Yet ultimately, and supremely, though the judgment and sentence is Christ’s, the reward is “God’s praise.” Note “his praise” (giving the force of the article) in R.V. —1 Corinthians 4:1-5 Theme: Judgment. I. The minister’s own judgment of himself. II. Other men’s judgment of him. III. The master’s judgment. I. The preceding sentences of the letter (chap. 1 Corinthians 3:18-23) have been concerned with the Corinthian habit of over-valuing themselves, and with the party idolatry of their (eponymic) leaders. As for Paul he wishes neither to be over-estimated nor to be under-estimated. [There is no virtue in undervaluation of oneself; such over-depreciation is not infrequently not humility at all, but pride—a subtle pride which is hungry to be told that it is too humble and that the self-asserted value is too low. For the sake of the Master’s work, a man may well desire to know what he is worth, and what he is fit for, and to what he is adequate.] Paul would be judged “according to truth” (Romans 2:2). To what court shall he go for Justice and for Truth? To the court of Conscience, perpetually “sitting” within his own spirit? This has its value, and its supporting power to him, as he avows (2 Corinthians 1:17, where see). A man walking in the favour of God, his spirit continually illumined with the light of the Spirit of God, may know himself. He will guard against self-deception. The grace which is in him will keep him awake to the danger of such self-deception. And whilst there will always be ministers [and workers of every order] whose danger will be an undue, morbid self-depreciation and self-condemnation; just as there will also always be those whose danger lies quite at the opposite pole; in many more the healthy conscience will give them the sustaining force of the knowledge that their aim is as right as they know how to keep it, and their discharge of duty faithful, at any rate up to the measure of their ability and knowledge. Woe to the man who goes about his work without the approval of even his own conscience! Who is unfaithful, and knows that he is! Man’s judgment may not condemn him. He may hit exactly the taste, he may meet exactly the desire, of those to whom he ministers; he may give them exactly the only teaching they will welcome, and do neither less nor more in his ruling of the flock than is agreeable to the sheep; he may be personally popular, therefore; he may have the applause of the public as a “successful man,” the pastor of “a successful Church.” Yet, if all the while the Spirit of God will not suffer him to approve himself, but will keep his sense of right so far alive that not only can he not forget the meaning of the ministry as a “stewardship,” or the high ideal of faithfulness to God with which he began his work, but that a voice and verdict within him will ever persistently condemn, he is of all men most miserable. Wretched he who cannot even stand the judgment of himself upon himself. II. It were folly to pretend to be literally indifferent to the judgment of others. Sometimes, when a conscience has been lulled, or drugged to sleep, or silenced by long neglect; when a man without the guard, or the goad, within him has sunk, not only far beneath the Master’s standard of requirement as to faithfulness in His stewards, but even beneath what was once his own; then the rebuke and condemnation of outsiders may do the man a service. It may make for him an objective conscience, and compel him to hear again from others what he used to hear from himself. He has broken or made dull the mirror within him; then the condemnation of “man’s judgment” may confront him with his own image in the mirror of Truth in their hand. It would be both foolish and false to pretend to be indifferent to the good opinion of others. If the faithfulness of the steward chance to secure the approval and esteem of other men, he will take it as a grace and a gift from his Lord, to be used, in its turn, like any and every other gift, for the advantage of his Lord’s work. The goodwill and esteem of his people are a help to the minister towards doing the people good. Wise and loving fidelity may accomplish something—it must—even where its sharp rebuke or unwelcome dealing puts a strain upon the pleasant relationships between man and man; it will not utterly fail to do good, even when it does its work in the face of indifference or dislike. But where goodwill and affection, and a true estimate of the meaning of the minister’s work and office, prepare for, and co-operate with, his fidelity, there it will “have free course.” The design of the whole Divine ordinance of “stewardships” for the dispensing of “the mysteries of God” will be then most perfectly fulfilled. However indifferent Paul may have been to the judgment of men, his sympathetic, affectionate nature prized highly the love of those for whom he “spent himself” even to the “spending” of himself “out” (2 Corinthians 12:15). III. Yet none of these “courts” is that of Final Appeal. No absolute and unchallengeable acquittal [or condemnation] can be given even from the bench where Judge Conscience sits, and still less from that other tribunal where “Man” holds the “day” of his assize. Says Paul: “I desire greatly the approval of my own conscience; I believe I have it; as to my stewardship and my fidelity as a steward, I cannot charge myself with any wrong. I do not forget a legitimate regard for the ‘manifestation of myself in your consciences’ (2 Corinthians 5:11). As a matter of fact, I know that many of you do not give me a very approving verdict. Yet I dare not trim my sails to catch the breeze of your applause. I hold it, indeed, a matter of the smallest moment that you should approve or condemn, in comparison of the one greater, final, absolutely true and just verdict of the Lord.” Man is so often to himself a problem utterly perplexing, that he knows not how to hold a just balance in his estimate of himself; he fears to approve too easily, he fears to acquit too readily, whilst, rightly enough, he does not desire to harass himself by condemning without reason. A Christian man is so conscious of the blinding effect of a biassed heart upon the clear vision of his judgment, that even if in the court within he be held clear, he will still report the verdict to the Higher Judge for His endorsement or revision. A faithful, honest worker will be so sensitive to the ensnaring power of too nice a consideration of man’s favour or man’s frown; he will be so conscious of the deflecting power of an anxiety what man will think or say or do, upon the compass-needle of his conscience; that he will never trust the steering of his course to anything lower than the judgment of his Lord. Up above earthly influences and bias, stable amidst all the revolutions and vagaries of man’s opinions and judgments, there it shows, the Divine Pole Star of his direction. He will not disregard, as we have seen, the commendation of his fellows, but he will not “lay himself out” to win it. If they give him condemnation, then he “will appeal unto” the Greater than Cζsar. Against man’s judgment, and from man’s “day”; whatever also be the judgment of his conscience in its “day” of inquiry and sentence; the matter is carried up to the Great Judge and forward to His “day” and its “Great Assize.” For that, amongst other reasons, do Christ’s people “love His appearing” (2 Timothy 4:1; 2 Timothy 4:8). It was said of Dr. Pusey that the deepest note of thankfulness in all his Te Deum was this, “We believe that Thou shalt come to be our Judge.… We praise Thee, O Christ!” In that day all the clamour and conflict of the varying and uncertain verdicts of man will be hushed into silence, whilst He speaks. Even now it is no small comfort to a true-hearted “steward” to remember that He knows all about him and his work. All that under-life of motive and aim, which works its way to the surface and becomes obnoxious to man’s judgment, only after struggling, as it were, through an overlying medium of imperfect knowledge and of many another limiting disability, is always, and altogether, in His clear view. It may be that He knows the man even better that the man knows himself; that He may judge him now and again more favourably than he judges himself. In any case, He will always be profoundly reasonable in what He expects from the “steward of the mysteries”; no prejudice, or favour, with Him; profoundly reasonable, and utterly and simply just. “Let me”—for the sentence as well as for its execution—“fall into the hands of,” not “man,” but “Christ.” Moreover, the full and final verdict can only be pronounced when the coming of the “Day of the Lord” shall have completed the facts and evidence on which it most justly rest. So, then, Paul will pronounce no final verdict upon his own fidelity in the discharge of his office. “Let it stand over until He comes.” The passing, temporary, human judgment may well go for little with him in the expectation of that other judgment. Indeed, he suggests not obscurely that his opponents and detractors at Corinth may have more reason for apprehension in view of it than he has. When “hidden things of darkness and the counsels of the hearts are dragged forth,” some men, some apostles, may “have praise of God,” but some may have—[How nearly without exception are all our judgments of men and conduct judgments before the right time! How often have even the lapse of a few years or months and the addition of even a single new fact caused an entire revision of some unfavourable judgment on men and actions, till we have stood ashamed at the bar of our own conscience that we judged so hastily, on such imperfect data, and so harshly, and perhaps gave in our words or bearing such unfair and unchristian effect to our hasty prejudice! “Wait till the Lord comes!” “Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be condemned: behold, the Judge standeth at the door” (James 5:9). How often a little more knowledge has shown us that the very confident verdicts of our “righteous” indignation were after all at the best wasted words, and at the worst were so hasty and uncharitable, as to have been sins against the Spirit of Christ! “Therefore judge nothing before the time.”] And how precious and glorious a compensation for all the unfair, hasty, or even evil-hearted judgments of men will be His praise! In a moment, all the past swallowed up and forgotten, all the pain gone, all the temporary disadvantages past. Nor is it anything but a laudable motive that a man should make the winning of “praise” in that day an object for which he cultivates “fidelity” to his trust. If He says, “Well done, good and faithful,” he surely does not intend, or expect, that we should be faithful for bare fidelity’s sake. His “Well done” is in itself an object to be worked for. Finally, if praise is not for ability only, or chiefly, or for success, but for faithfulness, all may win that! [The Pounds, Luke 19, exhibits graduated reward according to graduated results from equal ability and endowment. The Talents, Matthew 25, exhibits equal praise for unequal ability and endowment, because of equal fidelity. Both are true principles of the judgment.] [Said Bishop Thirlwall, writing to a friend, “The law of God’s kingdom is ‘He that is faithful in a few things shall be made ruler over many things.’ But how little it matters whether there are many or few, so long as there is the faithfulness which makes the most of the few, and can do no more with the many.”] [Robertson, Expos. Lectures, in loco, says: “Learn not to judge, for we do not know the heart’s secrets. We judge men by gifts, or by a correspondence with our own peculiarities; but God judges by fidelity. Many a dull sermon is the result of humble powers, honestly cultivated, whilst many a brilliant discourse arises merely from a love of display. Many a diligent and active ministry proceeds from the love of power. Learn to be neither depressed unduly by blame, nor, on the other side, to be too much exalted by praise. Life’s experience should teach us this.… And our own individual experience should teach us how little men know us! How often, when we have been most praised and loved, have we been conscious of another motive actuating than that which the world has given us credit for; and we have been blamed, perhaps disgraced, when if all the circumstances were known we should have been covered with honour. Therefore let us strive … to be tranquil; smile when men sneer; be humble when they praise, patient when they blame. Their judgment will not last; ‘man’s day’ is only for a time, but God’s is for Eternity.”] 1 Corinthians 4:1-2. The Stewardship of the Minister. I. The office.— 1. No great Fact in God’s order is simple. It is only in the “elementary” stages of His work that we find what is not complex, many-sided in its aspects and relationships. The permanent, developed “ministry” of the Church was in even Apostolic times becoming a many-sided fact, needing many analogies to set it forth. Each one [as in all cases of teaching by analogy] has its strong point of teaching and applicability; often with its many weaker, where it does not bear pressing, or using at all. There it is supplemented by another, strong where it is weak, but needing in its turn the strength of the first to be its complement in exhibiting the whole round of the truth. The men are here called “ministers” (see Critical Notes); they are “Shepherds” (Ephesians 4:11, etc.) who “bear rule” (Hebrews 13:17) with whatever of authority a Shepherd must of necessity have over the Flock. They are “Teachers” (Eph. as above, etc.). They are “Presbyters” or “Elders” (e.g. Acts 20:28), and indeed, like those of Ephesus, are “Overseers” or “Bishops.” They claim whatever respect and weight of influence is needful to enable them “to watch over souls (cf. Ezekiel 3; Ezekiel 33) as they that must give account” (Heb. as above). This last clause completes the circle of ideas by inserting into its round the link of the thought found in the word “Stewards.” 2. Stewards, not priests.—This name is never given to any order of men selected out of the general body of the Christian community. [Even as they are “ministers” of the Mediator, and not themselves mediators.] The priesthood of the Old Covenant order is, like every other essential, fundamental, basic idea of that order, brought forward into the new. There is a “priesthood” still. The essential lines which govern the representation of the office and function are still there, plain enough to establish the identity, the continuity. But they are modified; touched here, filled up in more detail there, emphasised in a third point; and, above all, are now found in complete exposition in the Man Christ Jesus, and only in Him. [Moses spoke of the coming Prophetic Order in Deuteronomy 18:15; the prophets, every one, in anticipatory, suggestive, partial presentation embodied God’s Idea, which was by-and-by to be fulfilled in the One Prophet. Of Him pre-eminently did Moses speak (Acts 3:22; Acts 7:37). Similarly he might have said, “A Priest shall the Lord your God raise up,” etc. Indeed, the fulfilment of such a saying would already have begun in the Priestly Order which had been established. Also remember how the Idea of Priesthood in its highest function more and more clearly stood out to men’s apprehension, until the very phrase “High Priest,” unknown at first, became a necessity of religious thought and expression.] The complete, two-sided significance of Mediatorship is exhibited in Him who is “the Apostle”—sent out from God to man—and the “High Priest”—going in from man to God—“of our profession” (Hebrews 3:1). And the offering of a sacrifice which made atonement for sin, the culminating point of the priest’s office, to which everything else was only sequential and subsidiary, is now restricted to Him. In that sense Christianity knows only the one “priest.” The “steward” is no “priest.” The many, mortal priests, themselves sinners needing atonement, have yielded up their office and honour to the undying, holy One—The Son, “consecrated for evermore” (Hebrews 7:23-28). And if indeed anything of the hierophantic office of the priesthoods of the Gentiles seem to cling to the work of the man who has to deal with the “mysteries of God,” yet there is manifest and vital difference. The hierophant took in—into the penetralia of the building as well as of the doctrines—the few favoured ones, the esoteric circle, the illuminandi; took them in as a favour from himself, which he had the right to withhold, as well as to confer. The “steward” does impart “mysteries” indeed. But he has no right to withhold them; he has no right to make them the possession of a favoured few; their disclosure is his duty, he must bring them out to all. “Must bring them out” also. The figure must not be overpressed; but he is not the priest leading some into an inner darkness and secrecy; he is a steward bringing out from the store-chamber what is to be given freely to all waiting outside who need what he brings. 3. Stewards, not proprietors.—They have no controlling rights over the disclosure of the truth. They are only the “ministers” of Christ in the matter, passing on, giving round, to the hungry multitudes what He has blessed, and what has only been given into their hands that it may be given away widely by their hand. [“So” exactly means, “All things are yours,” 1 Corinthians 3:22; cf. 2 Corinthians 4:15. They are not to indulge in the selfish indolence of the man who sits in his study, reading, reading, reading, thinking, learning, acquiring, but only slightly if at all attempting to enrich his people with the fruit of his growing knowledge of the “mysteries.” They have it, they are entrusted with it, to pass it on. The apostles, no doubt, might and did satisfy their own hunger with the marvellous bread, but the fainting five thousand had the prior claim. Etymologically “stewardship” is “economy.” But the ecclesiastical “economy” in the disclosure of truth has travelled a long and aberrant way from the idea of “stewardship.” It is one thing to see to it that the “babes” have only their “milk,” whilst the men of full age are fed with their “meat” (Hebrews 5:12-13); it is another thing in fear, or with dishonest tact, to suppress or modify truth, in the presumed interests of “truth,” or in the interests of a Church or an order of men, or for the security of some conciliar or personal dogma. Whatever is the truth of God should all be told to all. He can be trusted to take care that its widest disclosure works no real, no lasting mischief. Better the risk of mischief than of manipulation by not too honest stewards. The Bible Society is an organised expression of the stewardship of the mysteries entrusted to the Church of Christ in the gift of the Word of God. It is given to the Church to be given by the “stewards” with world-wide liberality of distribution. They may not even detain it in the store cupboard! 4. Stewards, not discoverers.—God is the Fountain of all the knowledge they impart. The Son is the Revealer of it all; He has drawn back, so far as it is drawn back at all, the veil under which lay hidden what the time has now come to disclose. [Cf. “Has brought to light Life and Immortality” (2 Timothy 1:10). They are not new things; they were facts before; they were there all along; but they were under a covering (? Isaiah 25:7).] His stewards do but publish widely what He has been Himself taught, and is commissioned to disclose. [He may take as bis own the words of Balaam, Numbers 24:13. Nothing else lies within the four corners of a steward’s commission; anything else is ultra vires. He may not devise a Gospel, he may not add to the Gospel speculations of his own, not fairly deducible, or to be proved, from the definite instructions and disclosures given to him (Galatians 1:8-9). An “original thinker” in the ministry of the Church has properly his only “originality” in the analysis, and the fresher or clearer or more profitable presentation of the original corpus of “mysteries,” and in the skill and fulness of knowledge with which he is able to bring from all quarters what may be laid under contribution for the illustration of their meaning and their message to men. He stands before his people as simply, by natural gifts, by special study, and by special training, “an expert” in their exposition. [“The mysteries” are dealt with under 1 Corinthians 2:1, 1 Corinthians 15:51. II. The fidelity expected of the steward.—There is (1) fidelity, with responsibility, to the Lord Himself; and (2) fidelity to the matter of the mystery and to the persons designed to be benefited by its disclosure; in these senses, partly accommodations of the idea of “fidelity,” the responsibility is still, and only, to the Lord Himself. Beginning with (2). Paul has his own illustration, from the innkeeper who adulterates his wine (2 Corinthians 2:17). [The converse is suggested, under the connotation of another figure (1 Peter 2:2).] There must be no tampering with the mysteries. The fashion in such “wine” may change; the public palate may be perverted; it may demand the produce of another vineyard; but he at least will only supply this, of the best and purest he knows how to procure. He will spare no cost of pains and prayer to get this, that he may have it to offer. But he dares not—he desires not—to offer anything else. He may have the pain, and be put to the test of fidelity, of seeing those whom he desires to supply, leave him, to turn aside to the man who will give them a more popular vintage. But, for one thing, that old Gospel [not to press the figure too far] saved him, and still comforts and sustains him. In “faithfulness” to the mystery whose revelation has blessed him, and many ten thousands more, he will still dispense that. It is his presumed function and office to preach and present the “mysteries of God” in their Divine, unmingled simplicity. He is a living falsehood if. whilst he is presumed to do that, and whilst the people expect that of him, he offers something of merely human devising or imagining; or the “mystery,” indeed, but so overlaid with rhetoric, or the speculative supplements of undisciplined or uncurbed reasoning, that it is hidden and neutralised, put in such a form as never fed or saved anybody. He owes some “fidelity” to this very message, to the matter which has been disclosed by God, and of which he is a steward. Also, he must be faithful to his people. Indeed, if they are wise, they will wish him, and help him, to be faithful. If fidelity in a steward be needful anywhere, it is in dealing with Divine truth. “By these” mysteries “men live” (Isaiah 38:16). These are not merely gains to knowledge, however accurate, enlarging, ennobling. They are men’s life. It is of urgent necessity to them to possess in its unadulterated purity and in unstinted quantity the truth in the mysteries. It is Bread of Life for dying souls. They are a foolish people who will only ask for, and will only tolerate, what truth is pleasant or conventionally correct; for their own sakes they will covet, and will honour, and will thank and love the man who will only deal honestly with them as a faithful steward, who will give them the whole message of God, and will not in fear or in wicked complaisance spare themselves. He is not accountable to them (1 Corinthians 4:3) indeed; yet his relation to them is one which demands of him fidelity as the truest kindness. [Such “kindness” to them as that of the Dishonest Steward (Luke 16:1-8) may serve his dishonest turn for a moment, but will not carry him or them very far!] But, above all, (1) he will be faithful as a matter of responsibility to his Master, and to God whose mysteries he holds in trust for distribution “as every man has need.” [The following verses, separately dealt with, give the noble portrait of a “steward” who is sustained under misconception, misrepresentation, detraction, malicious depreciation; or in the face of angry people, offended at the whole truth; by a sense of the approval of Christ, vouchsafed to him by One who knows how pure and direct his aim has been, how reverent and careful his handling of the disclosure of “the mysteries.”] “The Master praises; what are men?” But does the Master praise? That is ever his main question. His every day’s duty will be planned under his Great Taskmaster’s eye, and will be discharged with constant reference to His judgment. Motives are so intermingled in our life, the tangle so often passes all our own power of unravelling, that he will not spend overmuch time upon self-analysis. His mingled aims—right after all in their main drift and object—will be simply laid before his Master en bloc, for His analysis and judgment and smile of reward. If He is satisfied, the rest matter little! III. The people’s estimate of the office and of the minister.—Two dangers threaten: an undue exaltation, or an under-valuing of the office; or, in another alternative, a party worship of the man, as at Corinth, or a superstitious estimate of the office. 1. The under-valuing of the office is a very real danger. The “minister” must not be simply the chief, and perhaps the only paid, officer of an organisation called “a Church,” which “keeps a minister,” as some in the congregation keep a clerk or a manager in their business. He must not simply be the chairman of their meetings; or the president of their social gatherings; or the intellectual leader of their speculations, or of the literary or artistic activity of the young life of the Church; or their deputy on whom they devolve all the initiative of religious and philanthropic agencies which the public expect from them. He may, happily and usefully, be all these. But these are the secondary things of his office. His first and essential duty—the “Hamlet-part” in the play, without which all is miserably incomplete—is to be a steward, blessedly made familiar with the mysteries of God, by close intercourse with God, their Giver, and coming forth from the holy intercourse to dispense them with a wisdom of adaptation to the needs of his people which is itself not a small gift and honour from God. If he only bring to his people—if his people only expect from him—spoken “leading articles” on topics of the week or of the time, perfect in literary finish; if they are satisfied with brief theses on half-secular themes, full of satirical, or sympathetic, or poetic power; if they are content with brief, admirable, but “natural,” ethical prelections which do not lift up duty into any organic connection with religion, its motives, its power, its sanctions; if he never bring to their ears, and to their hunger, any of the revealed secrets of the heart and will of God,—he is not “fulfilling his ministry,” nor discharging his “stewardship.” If they have no hunger of heart, and do not definitely desire to be fed; and even resent the earnestness of the man who would gladly be to them a steward of God’s mysteries, bringing them forth for the supply of their heart and conscience; they misunderstand and under-value the office. Desire him to be, pray for him that he may be, by sympathy with his aims and by grateful recognition of his work, help him to be, a steward and a faithful one! Not less than a steward! 2. On the other hand, not more than a steward. Do not think of him, do not accept of him, as a priest or an exclusive mediator with God. If he boast never so loudly of ordination by any special order of ministers, and claim to be of any special order himself; if he will thrust himself between God and the soul, as in any sense a necessary and indispensable intermediary; if he will claim over the judgment and conscience an authority which of old belonged to a prophet, and now belongs only to Christ, as represented by His Spirit, in the administration of redemption; if he will claim, in any sense, to offer a sacrifice which stands in any necessary relation to the forgiveness of sins or the maintenance of the spiritual life; if he claim priesthood in any sense which belongs exclusively to Christ, or in any sense which does not belong equally to every member of the “holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5),—then to acquiesce in such pretensions is to over-exalt the man and his office. Allow no priesthood; hear of nothing, think of nothing, but of “Ministry” and “Stewardship.” Pray for him, listen to him, use him, as a steward, not less nor more. And if a man, credentialled no matter by whom, assume to be the way to God, say to him: “Thou art in the way! Stand out of my way! Christ is my Way. Let me come direct through Him to God.” “Let a man so account of us.” A true “minister” asks no more. 1 Corinthians 4:2. Faithful Stewardship. I. If in the ordinary transactions of time it is imperative that those who are concerned in the management of temporal concerns should be faithful, how much more, in matters which relate to the soul and eternity, is it imperative that the stewards of God’s mysteries should be faithful! The consequences of infidelity or dishonesty in the charge of the affairs of this life may be disastrous; but who can measure the ruin which follows when there is a want of fidelity in dealing with the things of the next life? In such case the ruin is irretrievable, the loss of the soul will stand no comparison with even the gain of the world. II. Easy to perceive the fidelity required of the minister of Christ. 1. Personal fidelity. If a man has not experienced for himself the grace of God in convincing, converting, and sanctifying his own heart, how can he tell others of the change which is implied in all these workings of the Spirit? 2. Consistency of life and conversation. Even supposing that the doctrine preached is in accordance with God’s Word, an inconsistent life will wither the power of the message and frustrate the ends of its delivery. Not only this; but 3. There must be fidelity in the declaration of the whole revealed truth of inspiration. It is not allowed to the ambassador to deliver only a part of his message; he must proclaim the whole revealed counsel of God. He is to preach the truth in all its integrity, keeping back nothing which is plainly revealed; but as a wise householder he must bring forth things new and old, in order that he may be faithful to Him who hath called him and invested him with such lofty responsibilities. [“It is written.” “It is written again.”] III. There are lessons which all professing Christians may derive.— 1. “Of all our earthly possessions we are stewards, not proprietors. There is in the ordinary arrangements of Divine providence a vast employment of second causes, and many of the things we acquire appear to come in the course of our own efforts and as the effect of our own industry or skill; hence arises the idea of ownership, and forgetfulness that all things come of God, and that we have not a fraction to which we can lay claim as an independent possession, which we have a right to employ without reference to Him who gave it. But in truth all the secondary means … are gifts from God, and derive their efficacy from His imparted power or beneficence. So that, in the most literal sense, all things come of Him, e.g., gifts of intellect which qualify for conspicuous usefulness to others, gifts of wealth or power for influencing largely our fellow-creatures. The point to be remembered is that all these bestowments are entrusted to the keeping of those who possess them to be employed by them as stewards in trust … for God’s service. Have you, then, consecrated large possessions and the gain of them to the Lord, and your substance to the Lord of the whole earth? Is the talent which belongs to authority over others employed for God, for upholding God’s honour, for promoting the temporal and spiritual well-being of all within the range of your influence?” 2. Our fidelity must originate in personal piety.—“ (1) The root of Scriptural obedience consists in a right apprehension of the relationship in which we stand to God. We are His creatures, every faculty we possess is His gift, and we are bound to consecrate all we have and are to His glory. (2) More than this, God has yet a stronger claim. If we constantly remembered the wonderful love of God in the gift of His Son, we should never lose sight of the obligations under which we lie, to consecrate our souls and bodies to His service, to act as stewards who are bound to be faithful in His sight. (3) And what a motive for fidelity is supplied when we call to mind the shortness of our allotted period of service, and the near approach of the time when Christ will reappear to reckon with all His professing servants. Stewardship always implies a time of reckoning. It may be near or distant, but then there will be no escape or evasion. With what joy will Christ’s true and faithful servants hear the welcome, ‘Ye have been faithful over a few things,’ etc. How terrible, then, the condition of those who, though they were stewards, have not been found faithful; the measure of their privileges will be the measure of their fearful condemnation. (4) Let us then bear in mind the lesson which this day’s Epistle [Third Sunday in Advent] delivers for our direction. Knowing beforehand the strictness of the account which we must each one render, let us aim at dependence upon Divine grace to overcome every temptation, to conquer every difficulty, which opposes our progress in sanctification, and so to abound unto every good work that in the end we may attain to the recompense and the reward which in the last day awaits every one who shall be found to have been faithful to the stewardship confided to his keeping.”—Abridged from Bishop Bickersteth, “Clerical World,” i. 172. NOTES1 Corinthians 4:6.—From 1 Corinthians 3:5 he has discussed what applied to all the factions and their leaders, and even more to the others than to the so-called Pauline and Apollonian factions, in connection with himself and Apollos alone. “For their sakes” he has done so, to avoid arousing personal feeling or giving avoidable pain, content if, “in himself and Apollos” as sample cases, the question might be more calmly discussed and its conclusion more dispassionately arrived at. And the one lesson emerging from the discussion is, Not to think of themselves, or of teachers they were tempted to idolise, without taking account of what is written in such Scriptures as, e.g., he had quoted in 1 Corinthians 1:19; 1 Corinthians 1:31, 1 Corinthians 3:19; and therefore not to be, in any overweening conceit of themselves or their own judgment, such strong partisans for one teacher as against another teacher. Puffed up.—1 Corinthians 4:18-19; 1 Corinthians 5:2; 1 Corinthians 8:1; 1 Corinthians 13:4.1 Corinthians 4:7.—Transition to the self-esteem which really underlay their party zeal for this or that leader. Who?—Certainly not yourself, nor the man to whom you attach yourself.1 Corinthians 4:8.—Note the tenses in Sharply—not bitterly, but sadly—ironical. As if the Master’s “judgment” (1 Corinthians 4:4) were over, the rewards distributed, and they were already on their thrones (Luke 22:29-30; Revelation 3:21; Revelation 1:6; Revelation 5:10). Apart from Paul and Apollos! And yet to them, if to anybody, the Corinthian Church owed its very existence (1 Corinthians 3:6). “Would that the day for your thrones had really come! We should then be on our thrones too, and all this weary life of labour, suffering, obloquy, would be done with! But it is not done with yet!”1 Corinthians 4:9.—The last batch of criminals doomed (say) to the lions, kept back as the climax of the show in the amphitheatre, where the Corinthians sit in comfort and royal state as spectators. As to the angel spectators, see Ephesians 3:10. The whole story of God’s revelation in Christ had been through the ages unfolding itself before the eagerly interested gaze of the watching, studying “principalities and powers in heavenly places.” Paul’s career was a small incident in the history which was being wrought out under their eyes; and they studied him and his fortunes, like everything else, with closest attention. [Like his Master, he was “seen of angels.” Cf. “set forth,” Romans 3:25, as if uplifted and exhibited upon the cross, “appointed to death,” to the gaze of heaven, and earth, and (perhaps) hell.] Apostles.—Whole reference is so vague, whilst mainly starting from himself and his career, that this does not necessarily include Apollos, or make him “an apostle.” Paul is “numbering himself with the eleven apostles.” (See also 1 Corinthians 9:1.)1 Corinthians 4:10.—Note the ascending climax. All ironical, except that perhaps “Ye are wise in Christ” may not only be “You think you are,” but also “You really are; and do not forget that you owe that indirectly to us who by the derided ‘message of the Cross’—‘such folly!’—led you to Christ.” (The “folly,” 1 Corinthians 1:18; 1 Corinthians 1:21; 1 Corinthians 1:23; 1 Corinthians 2:1-5. Their very real “wisdom,” 1 Corinthians 1:5.)1 Corinthians 4:11. This present hour.—Paul in Ephesus was still sustaining himself by manual labour (Acts 20:33-34), which often left him (as it did in Corinth, 2 Corinthians 11:9) in real want. We.—True of apostles in general. Yet these, and Paul pre-eminently, were, of all men then living, of greatest worth to and importance for the world’s interests and life. They were the little lump of leaven with which God was revolutionising the world! What a picture of Apostolic life is suggested! Naked.—Insufficiently clad (cf. 2 Timothy 4:13). Buffeted.—His Master was, literally (Matthew 26:67); perhaps he himself may have been (2 Corinthians 11:7-12 [1 Peter 2:20; 2 Corinthians 12:7]). No … dwelling-place.—Partakers with Christ again (Matthew 8:20), and with the Old Testament saints (Hebrews 11:37). “A peculiar grief in the ancient world” (Stanley).1 Corinthians 4:12.—“We use only the Christian weapons of resistance” (Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27). Paul’s is “the earliest instance of such language being used” (Stanley).1 Corinthians 4:13. Entreat.—Usually men who have been in the wrong do this, and who deprecate punishment. Or perhaps, more generally, “We give good words back in exchange for calumny.” Offscouring.—E.g. Acts 22:22. [So they cried of his Lord, “Away with Him!”] Not only did Israel cast him out, but the very Corinthians seemed to have less than no esteem for him; and the world outside, of course, counted him as vile and offensive. There seems to be some evidence that at Athens human sacrifices were cast into the sea as offerings to Neptune, with the words, “Be thou our ‘offscouring’ ” [the same word as the second here]; as procuring “salvation” or “redemption” in times of famine or plague. .—1 Corinthians 4:6-13 Kings; Real and False. I. Where to look for the true kings.—“How it strikes a stranger” used to be the title of a pleasant bit of thinly veiled satire on many of the commonest facts and customs of our daily life, familiarity with which has dulled in us the perception of their absurdity or their unrighteousness. Had one of the “principalities and powers” from “the heavenly places” been told off, in the days of our Epistle, to guide through the Roman world a “stranger” from some other planet, and had been asked to show his planetary charge the men of that age who were destined to stand forth in all future ages as its greatest, and to leave their work most deeply on the centuries “after Christ,” he would have conducted him to no philosophers or statesmen, but to a scattered dozen or so of Galilean country-people, who were beginning to be distinguished in their own obscure circle of friends as “the apostles”! “Find me, let me see,” says the visitant from the distant sphere, “the greatest man of the time, the man who will be seen by-and-by to count for most in the story of your race, the man whose influence and example and teaching are going to live and grow and govern your world’s life after he is gone. Where is the king of the world?” Certainly not within any then recent, or any then coming years, upon the throne of the Cæsars. The Stoics said more worthily, “The wise man is king”; but could hardly just then have found our inquirer a wise man of the first rank. As the verdict of the ages has pronounced, as the eliminating process of the oblivion of history has left names emergent from the general obscurity and forgetfulness of the remote past, our visitor would have needed conducting to a humble lodging in the city of Ephesus, to see a by no means striking-looking Jew sitting at work, with roughened, dirty hands, making goat-hair tent-cloth; perhaps, as he does so, dictating a letter to a friendly amanuensis who sits beside him, taking down from his lips, in only moderately good Greek, thoughts which are often sadly broken in their grammatical expression—sentences which, what with the pauses to allow for the writing down and with the impetuousness of the thinker’s heart, not seldom get very disjointed in their logical form. Or they might happen to find him on the Jewish Sabbath, a private person in some synagogue, taking what opportunity he can get of discussing the story and the claims of one Jesus of Nazareth, to whom he seems greatly devoted. And he has a strangely unroyal story of persecution from his own friends and countrymen, of repeated scourgings from Roman lictor and Jewish synagogue officers, of shipwrecks and hunger and cold, and want of necessary clothing. Yet that man’s name is going to stand forth as the foremost name of the age, as the most influential ruler of the thoughts and morals and activities and destinies of that and all after-ages. Our visitor might well wonder at the topsy-turveydom of the world where such things can be; where the kings are “fools” and “weak,” “despised,” “hungry,” “naked,” “buffeted” the “refuse” of the world, and where the “puffed-up” Corinthians, “full” of nothing but self-esteem, are kings and “judges,” forsooth, of apostles; where “the world knows nothing of its greatest man.” [ 1. A commonplace of the cynical moralist in all ages. The age is past, the men are dead, before the sorting-out process of history relegates to their real obscurity many who lived loudest to the public ear and most obtrusive to the public eye in their own generation, and leaves the really great and strong and good and helpful to stand forth, like the temples of some ancient city amidst the wreck of the common buildings or the waste from which the very traces of other slighter edifices have disappeared. 2. The men of thought are really the kings of the race. Man is, in the last analysis of things, ruled by Mind; and, still more, by Mind plus Character. The royalty of Mind apart from principle has indeed the golden head, but the feet are of clay, and it cannot permanently stand the shocks and tests of time. 3. Paul would have said—and it is after all the Truth—“Jesus Christ is King; I am only king ‘in Him.’ ” And if in the year 27 A.D. our visitor from some other sphere had sought for the Man, the Name, the Ruler of the world, he must indeed have seen a Tiberius on the Imperial throne, the absolute ruler of the lives of millions of men, a monster of cruelty and vice, surfeited to utter nausea with the banquet of his own vicious pleasures, but must have turned away from him to far-away Judæa, to a desolate district amongst its most rugged mountain region, to find a peasant Carpenter, alone, hungry, tempted to help Himself to miraculous bread, seeing that His Father in heaven seemed to have left Him in a wilderness to starve. And yet earlier, though Magi from the East aimed more nearly true, when they sought the King, not in Rome or Athens, but in Jerusalem, yet even they missed the mark. The King was a Babe in a manger in a village khan in Bethlehem. And later they would have found Him on a cross. 4. The law of disturbed, topsy-turveyed order holds good of the King, and of His apostles, and of His people. The “meek are the heirs of the earth” (Matthew 5:5). The world is “out of joint.” The Problem of Evil faces us, sooner or later, in every path of thought and inquiry we pursue, no matter what direction we take. For “God hath appointed” (1 Corinthians 4:9). 5. One thing, then, and one only, is clear: that Paul, or any other servant of God, should, and can afford to, go simply, directly forward day by day, doing duty, doing right, speaking all the message of God which is given him, bearing to be called a “fool” and “weak,” to be buffeted whilst he only “entreats,” to be “persecuted” etc. (as 1 Corinthians 4:10-13), and leaving all question of the effect of his life, and of the estimate man forms of him (1 Corinthians 4:3 above), and of the rank he will by-and-by take before God and man. It will take care of itself. God will take care of it and of him. Once Paul stood at the bar of Felix. Soon after, Felix sat trembling before the arraignment of the man of conscience (Acts 24:16-25). And which to-day does all the world count the greater, nobler man? But meanwhile:] II. What a “royal” life! (1 Corinthians 4:10-13).— 1. The greatest man of the time is the “filth” and “offscouring” of the world! The World—and even the Church of Corinth—are holding continually their “day” of judgment (1 Corinthians 4:3). And, as though in petty mimicry of that greater “Day” the sequel of whose sentence shall be that out of the kingdom of the Son of Man shall be gathered “all things that offend” (Matthew 13:41), they are sweeping out into the Gehenna of their condemnation and rejection Paul and his fellow-apostles. 2. Yet the kings, God’s true kings, do come to their kingdom (1 Corinthians 4:8). Their Lord has received His throne. He was cast out and rejected as though He had been the “off-scouring” of all kings. But His vindication and glory have come. And it is the pledge and foretaste of their vindication and glory and enthronement in the day when “the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:43). When their Lord comes in His glory, they come into theirs. 3. A “royal” life! Why, it is hardly the life of common, peaceable, happy citizens! Rather call it the death-in-life of gladiators or criminals. Year after year it is one battle with forces and men, wholly evil, before which it seems certain they must succumb. [Yet they conquer by dying; as did their Lord. “It is finished!” is the cry of a Conqueror. Every one “that falleth on this stone shall be broken.” Let the hard-pressed, persecuted Christian be patient. The victory is with the dying ones of the amphitheatre. How often has a dying Stephen pricked deeply the conscience of a Paul! And not only are the “angels” looking on. The Lord Himself is amongst the deeply interested spectators.] The world’s kings are in the arena, gazed at, scoffed at, buffeted, slain. But one touch transforms it all! God has appointed it, has thus exhibited them in the world’s great amphitheatre; and as they fall one after another, by the sword, the cross, the scourge, the fire, they cry, dying, “It is for Christ’s sake!” III. “We apostles, doomed to die, salute you!” Who are these human spectators whom the Apostolic band salutes from the arena? Those who sit complacently there criticising this Paul so confidently, as good judges might appraise the points of a good gladiator or a criminal down there in the sand; setting up, playing off one against another, of the dying band exhibited there; with lofty superiority of wisdom and strength shouting at them their taunts of “Weak!” and “Fools!” Who are these who are so “full” of knowledge that a Paul can teach them nothing more? Such judges of an apostle that they can weigh up and measure off and ticket with the exact bulk and size and value they have determined, a Paul, or a Cephas, or an Apollos? Why, one would think that they were “full” and needed hardly any more of God and His bounty; or, at least, that the Judgment was indeed over, and that they had already entered into the glory and the triumph of the “Kingdom of God,” in its eternal and supreme form! These sit and talk and judge like kings! Yet every rag of their royal robe of wisdom and strength and Christian standing they owe to another. What is their own? And how nearly all do they, under Christ, owe to those very men, Paul and Apollos! To whom, moreover, do they owe it that there ever came a Paul into their city to bring the “glad tidings” of the King and the Kingdom? The premier Church in European Christianity? Perhaps; but if they sit upon the spectators’ benches, in quasi-royal state, whilst apostles struggle and suffer and die down below, observed of angels and scorned of men, who seated them there? Yes, one thing is their own. God who, mediately or immediately, gave them all besides, never gave them the self-conceit which puffs them up. And, little as they suspect it, their inflated notion of their ability to judge between teacher and teacher, and their overweening, swelling self-centering of thought, make them the easy, willing bondmen of any party leader who will flatter their judgment and say “Yes” to their opinions. These inflated, “windbag” “kings” of Corinth are really subjects after all; but they have made their own yoke, and, in the vain wisdom of their foolish heart, have chosen their party-leaders for their lords. The servant of his own vain, darkened heart (Romans 1:21) readily becomes the “servant of man” (1 Corinthians 7:23). If only a man may be honoured and flattered in the choosing of his own tyrant, he will wear any yoke. The sham king easily becomes the real slave! [Much of the revolt of unbelief against “orthodoxy” means only a change of masters. Free-thought is often entirely under the yoke of great names. Much in the same way as some nations have thrown off the yoke of an ancient, native dynasty of kings, only to put themselves under the yoke of a dictator or a despot, perhaps an alien. But then it is something to have chosen your own despot and your own bondage! “Heresy” originally meant only “choice”; but moral conditions and evil so constantly mingle with and colour and direct choice, that the evil connotation early attached itself to the word (beginning to appear even in Titus 3:10). There are schools of unbelief as well as of belief, where learners obediently take in the master’s principles. Self-will doubts on authority as certainly as many Christians must needs believe on authority.] [NOTE on 1 Corinthians 4:13.—Readers of this Commentary, on both sides of the Atlantic, who are interested in the Evangelical Revival in England in the eighteenth century, may find an apposite and helpful parallel to this verse in the following words of a prominent helper of John Wesley in the early days of the movement: “There was law for us, but we could not find a magistrate who had courage or honesty enough to put it in force. [No Gallio to drive the persecutors from the judgment seat.] Men of all ranks used their power and influence to stop the blessed work of God. They spoke all manner of evil against the work and the instruments employed therein. They dispensed with two or three awakened clergymen tolerably well; these were regularly ordained, men of learning, gentlemen, and divines; but to see a ploughman or an honest mechanic stand out to preach the Gospel, it was insufferable. Hell was roused from beneath.… Layman and ecclesiastic joined heart and hand to suppress these pestilent fellows; not with acts of kindness, Scripture, or reason, but with invectives and lies. Dirt, rotten eggs, brickbats, stones, cudgels—these were Satan’s arguments in vindication of his own cause. It was the common cry in town and country: ‘Press them for soldiers, send them on board a man of war, transport them, beat them, stone them, send them to prison, or knock out their brains, and despatch them at once, for there is no law for them.’ ” (Christopher Hopper, Lives of Early Methodist Preachers, i. 191 sq.). The early history of the Friends in England abounds in many parallel stories of sufferings. In fact, such persecution is the opprobrium of no one Church, nor of “The Church” in any true sense. The persecutors may in name be Christians, but it is the work of the evil heart in man, in every age and Church, expressing in the like violence its hatred of good. Paul should be pictured, not as a prince-apostle, but as a working, tent-maker evangelist, and a Jew to boot; often roughly handled; and always, by the educated and high-placed of his day, when they happened to hear of such an obscure person, taken at the world’s valuation of an early Methodist lay evangelist or a Quaker preacher.] NOTES1 Corinthians 4:11 sqq. Since it was by preaching and teaching that Paul laid the foundation of the Church of Corinth, the builders must be different kinds of teachers. Since the matter taught is the material the teacher uses, this must be the gold, silver, wood, straw, etc. The results produced by the teacher in the hearts and lives of his hearer are the building he erects. He may produce good results which will last for ever and be to him an eternal joy and glory. Since these results are altogether the work of God, and are revealed in their grandeur only in the great day, they are a “reward” given by God in that day for work done on earth. But a teacher may produce results which now appear great and substantial, but which will then be found utterly worthless. He may gather round him a large number of hearers, may interest them, and teach them much that is elegant and for this life useful, and yet fail to produce in or through them results which will abide for ever. If so, the great day will destroy his work and proclaim its worthlessness. But he may be said to build upon the one foundation, Jesus Christ. For he is a professed Christian teacher, and people go to hear him as such. He may be a sincere, though mistaken Christian believer, and therefore be himself saved. But his work, as a teacher, is a failure. Now the permanence of a teacher’s work depends upon the matter taught. The soul-saving truths of the Gospel enter into men’s hearts and lives, and produce abiding results. All other teaching will produce only temporary results. We understand, therefore, by the wood and straw whatever teaching does not impart or nourish spiritual life. The three terms suggest the various kinds of such teaching. It may be clever or foolish, new or old, true or false; but not subversive of the “foundation,” or it would come under the severer censure of 1 Corinthians 4:16 sq.… We have Christian examples in many of the trifling and speculative discussions which have been frequent in all ages. We also learn that even of the teaching which produces abiding results there are different degrees of worth; in proportion, no doubt, to the fulness and purity with which the teaching of Christ is reproduced. In both cases the results are the results, lasting or transitory, produced in the hearers’ hearts by the use of these materials; results which are in some sense a standing embodiment of the teaching.—Dr. Beet.“By Fire.”— 1. It may be homiletically useful to cast into orderly shape the Bible use of “Fire.” Needless to say that the Bible is not pledged to any such unscientific piece of obsolete antiquity as that Fire is an Element—one of four. It is content to take the visible fact, and its palpable effects, as a serviceable illustration, apprehended readily by the child or the heathen, and perfectly good as an illustration, whatever be the scientific revision of our knowledge of the state of the case. For teaching purposes Fire is Heat and, still more, Flame. Flame is now understood to be gas so highly heated as to become in some degree luminous, and generally made more luminous by being loaded with incandescent particles, whether of carbon or other matter. That is nothing new to the Divine Author of Scripture and of Nature; nor was it unworthy of Him, or untrue, that what was to be the popularly apprehensible phenomenon should in the original planning of Nature be so adjusted and adapted as to lend itself well to teach moral truth. Indeed, the devout students of Nature find that both the superficial, phenomenal facts and the deep scientific “laws” are alike parabolic and didactic Nature is full of man, and of truth which man wants. Creation is didactic. “Creation is redemptive.”2. A convenient starting-point is Hebrews 12:29 : “Our God is a consuming fire.” Closely connected with “God is Light.” The difference is here: Light is what God is in Himself; fire what He is in relation to (sinful) mankind. Hence frequently the chosen symbol of His self-manifestation,: the Bush, Exodus 3:2; the Pillar, Exodus 40:38; Tongues of Pentecost, Acts 2:3; Sinai, Exodus 19:8; Exodus 24:17; Deuteronomy 4:36; Vision of God’s glory, Ezekiel 1:4; Exodus 24:9-11 (N.B. Nadab and Abihu), Daniel 7:9; Revelation 4:2. In Isaiah 4:5 we have three manifesting symbols of God combined—light, radiant splendour, burning fire. Still more frequently the accompaniment of His self-manifestation: e.g. “After the earthquake a fire,” 1 Kings 19:12; “fire goeth before Him,” Psalms 97:8. Loosely connected with all this are the fiery Chariot and Horses sent for Elijah, 2 Kings 2:11; fiery Chariots round about Elisha, 2 Kings 6:17. This last and the Pillar over Israel, or the Shekinah in its midst, are gathered up in Zechariah 2:5.3. Hence when He accepted, “took,” “ate,” appropriated, a sacrifice, it was by a fiery manifestation. E.g. at the Ordination of Aaron and the Inauguration of the priestly system and ritual, Leviticus 9:24. So at the Dedication of Solomon’s Temple, 2 Chronicles 7:1-3. And in less important instances: Carmel, 1 Kings 18; on Araunah’s threshing floor, 1 Chronicles 21:26; Gideon’s sacrifice, Judges 6:21. The Burnt Offering, as distinguished from the Sin and Peace Offerings, and as symbol of an entire surrender on man’s part and an entire appropriation on God’s part, was (as its name says) burnt with fire. And this links on the foregoing to the twofold employment of the symbol as exhibiting the active relation of a Holy God to sinful man.4. All that could, so to say, be volatilised went up purified and in perfect acceptance; all that was gross and earthly was left behind, to be cast out. Hence, “Baptized with … fire,” Matthew 3:11; Malachi 3:2 brings out the action of the refiner’s fire upon metals. So Isaiah 4:4, “Purged Jerusalem by the Spirit of Judgment and the Spirit of Burning”; “in that day,” primarily the return of a purified remnant from Babylon, then the setting up of a Christian Zion, perhaps, by-and-by, a restored and purified Israel once more. Isaiah 30:23, and more remotely still Isaiah 29:6, perhaps may better come in later on. The same Holiness which is purifying to the man who desires to be purified, burns as a consuming fire against sin and the sinner who will not be parted from his sin. Hence fire frequently sets forth the holy, active antagonism to evil and evil men, in defence of His people. Isaiah 30:27, “His tongue a devouring fire; lips full of indignation.” “Fury like a fire,” Jeremiah 4:4 (against unfaithful Judah and Jerusalem), Jeremiah 21:2. So it proved, Lamentations 3:3. So against the heathen and Idumæa, Ezekiel 36:5; against Gog, Ezekiel 38:18-19. [Psalms 83:14; Psalms 140:10; Ezekiel 24:9; Amos 5:6. God and His people are so identified that they become a fire too, Obadiah 1:18; Zechariah 12:6. So in Isaiah 30:27-33 we have it again. Fire purging the faithful from the unfaithful, sifting the nations, then burning up the pile of Tophet. [But “the King” may (as Talmud) be the Eternal King, and Tophet the burning-place outside the purified, ideal Jerusalem, where all the refuse is to be cast (Matthew 13:50).] Certainly the twofold action is seen in Isaiah 31:9, “Fire in Zion; furnace in Jerusalem”; Isaiah 33:14. As the Assyrian invasion approached, and the denunciations of holy wrath against sinners in and enemies of Zion, “sinners in Zion are afraid.” “Who can dwell with devouring fire?” cry they, “… with everlasting burnings?” i.e. with a God whose holy antagonism to sin never relaxes, never spares, never ends. 1 Corinthians 4:15 is the answer. But the principle is here which has occasioned and justified a very frequent use made of this text. God’s fierce, fiery antagonism to sin cannot cease unless sin cease—must last everlastingly if sinners live on everlastingly sinners still. Same connection appears in Nahum 1:6. Indeed, the whole cycle of events connected with the Assyrian invasion seems the foundation of much Bible language concerning the punishment of wicked. Not only such as Psalms 46:9 (usually [not in Speaker] connected with these events), but Isaiah 9:5, bring up the fires with which the dead bodies and the wreck of the host were cleared away (1 Corinthians 9:5 = no fighting, no blood, but simply burning of the litter and refuse and the dead), with, by the usual analogy, a future fulfilment. Isaiah 66:24 (foundation of Mar 9:44-46 [cf. Stier, Words of L. J., i. 156]; rather the figure of a holy Jerusalem with its Gehenna, its burning-place for all the refuse of the city [Matthew 13:50]); here also the fires on the battle-field after Sennacherib’s defeat are evidently in the mind of the writer. The battle-field is one vast Gehinnom outside the city walls.5. Many actual examples of God’s vengeance in which fire is the agent of punishment. N.B. these are all examples of sins very directly against His holiness and unique position and claims. Nadab and Abihu, Leviticus 10:2; Taberah, Numbers 11:2; Achan, Joshua 7:25; Korah, Numbers 16:35; Elijah and the captains, 2 Kings 1:10 (unless, indeed, this be, first and chiefly, God’s manifestation of Himself, appealing both to Elijah and to the witnesses and hearers of the event). Above all Sodom, Genesis 19:24; referred to in Luke 17:29; and at least shaping the language of Psa 11:6; Ezekiel 38:22; Revelation 21:18. [Imagery of Mal 4:1-2 is anticipated by Genesis 19:24; Genesis 19:23.6. So, coming to the New Testament, we find three great cycles of type: (a) Sodom, (b) Gehinnom, (c) Assyrian invasion.NEW 1. General.—God’s vengeance against sin is fiery, Matthew 3:10 (? primarily the Jewish nation), “Tree hewn down and cast into the fire”; Hebrews 6:8, the doom of the persistently barren ground. Also of individuals, Matthew 7:19; Luke 3:9; Hebrews 10:27, “Judgment and fiery indignation; 2 These. 1 Corinthians 1:8, “In flaming fire taking vengeance.”2. God’s holiness is testing.—1 Corinthians 3:13 [though there is here very little of all this typology; hardly more than the commonly observed action of fire]; 2 Peter 3:7 (Luke 12:49-52 is connected).3. Sodom.—Jude 1:7, “Suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.” Revelation 19:20; Revelation 20:10, “Lake of fire and brimstone, where the Beast and the False Prophet are” [Revelation 18:9, Babylon; cf. Abraham beholding the ascending smoke of Sodom]; the Devil; Gog and Magog deceived by him (obvious ref. to Ezekiel 38:22); who-soever “not found written in the book of life.” Revelation 14:10, worshippers of the beast and his image, who have received his mark.4. Gehenna.—Matthew 18:9, “Worm dieth not,” etc.; Mark 9:44-46, referring to Isaiah 66. “Furnace of fire,” Matthew 13:42; Matthew 13:50, where the latter verse, having nothing in the parable connected with it to suggest it—the fish are cast into the water—shows that the phrase had become, or was now first made by Christ, a customary equivalent for the doom of the wicked.5. The battle-field.—Linked with Mark 9, as above, but originating the phrase “everlasting burnings.” In Matthew 25:41; figure (almost?) lost. So completely the revelation of the future that we must say: “Whatever be the nature of the punishment of a lost, embodied spirit, if we might ask him what he suffered, he would say, ‘Fire,’ as the only earthly analogy available.”6. Mark 9:47. A difficult verse. Every man shall—must—come into contact with the holiness of God. Will a man let it (Him) burn away all impurity, and himself thus become a sacrifice salted with grace, and so accepted? Or, refusing this, will he simply meet and feel the fire which never burns itself out?1 Corinthians 4:16-17. There were Hebrew converts in Corinth, and such would easily catch St. Paul’s allusion … to the national Temple. This national Temple in the Apostle’s mind clearly enlarges and transfigures itself into a Temple spiritual. This living Temple of the Catholic Church is one Temple; it is one, yet elastic; it grows and expands, associating to itself and assimilating, so to speak, many lateral chapels. It is, in fact, an organic unity of several organs, each it itself a unity; it is, in brief, a unity of many contained unities. Each several Church, therefore, of the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church in miniature, so that of the whole all the several parts are themselves wholes; each branch of the Tree is a tree planted in Christ.—Evans, in “Speaker.” 1 Corinthians 4:7. Human Differences; their Origin and Design. I. Some modern scientific thought is tending to an over-emphatic assertion of the principle of Paul’s appeal. According to it, there is nothing—not even conscience—which is not simply the special and most recent result in the individual of processes, or of a conflict of processes, and, so to speak, of interests, acting and interacting and reacting through long ages and issuing in man. Thinking, willing, desiring, even the moral judgments—all are the necessary and quasi-mechanical outcome of the unbrokenly continuous past of man’s natural antecedents. Nothing is his own; he has so utterly “received” everything he has and is, that nothing is ever really begun de novo in his life; nothing is ever in any real sense originated within the man himself; there is no true independence, nor creative power in the will, no freedom. The natural heart over-does its protest, and in the opposite direction would tend to claim everything, except of course the obviously derived physical part of manhood and some features and degrees of capacity and inclination which are part of the original draught of that “character” in which plainly the individual has no choice. Man feels that he is not the mere creature of, at any rate, his present-day and personal environment. He is made by circumstances, but he is the master of circumstances; indeed, he is often first, and intentionally, the maker of the circumstances and conditions which then make him. He will not believe that it is only an illusion when he seems to find an independent power of origination and creation in his will. The man made by “self-help” is apt indeed to be so much his ideal; any help from the outside, and above all from God, is so apt to be, to all intents and purposes, out of his calculations and thanks; that he is his own maker, his own god. The little street Arab, in the mission school belonging to a London chapel, whose minister gave me the fact, refused point-blank to say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” “I shan’t ask nobody; I can get my own bread” (H. J. F., from W. J. H.). He is typical of the natural heart. The Corinthian heart is “rich,” is “full,” and “reigns” royally, not only without Paul, but without God. It is the danger of wealth; of high intellectual endowment, conscious of its own nobility of powers and exulting in every conquest of a new field; of all strong character, which cannot help but know its own force, finding its judgment sound, its business instincts sure and correct, other men’s will obedient and plastic before its volitions. “Our lips are our own; who is Lord over us?” (Psalms 12:4) is no abnormal or isolated independence. It is the very antithesis of “the little child,” in his readiness to believe and to do what he is told, and in his simple and natural and acknowledged dependence upon “father” for all he has and wants. But because it is so hard for the man—the manlier the harder—to “show himself the man amongst men” (1 Kings 2:2) and to be notwithstanding only “a little child before God,” it is therefore reputed “easier” for women and children to be religious than for men to be. Man’s nobility, his Godlikeness, is his snare. He tends to deny any higher, any God, but himself. Paul appeals to such: “What hast thou that thou didst not receive?” etc. II. 1. Natural character and constitution.—“From my parents?” Yes. “From my physical tempering together and make?” Yes. But all these only spell: “G-O-D.” To a Christian man of science what is or may be proved of (popularly so-called) Evolution is only so much more ascertained detail about the method of God in creation, the processes and instrumentalities He has employed. We are continually putting more and more numerous links into the chain of physical antecedents and consequents which links the will of God to the finished product; we find links almost innumerable where our fathers neither knew nor suspected any. But to the Christian thinker the chain still begins at God, and God is still as really in every link as when they were fewer. Our fathers believed God in immediate and direct contact with the created thing. If we are to be compelled to interpose a complex physical process between the Creator and, e.g., the finished individual man, yet He will be as really the Creator as ever. [The little child says, “God made me.” The parent, or the physician, or the modern physiologist, armed with all microscopic and other implements of the minutest observation and research, if he be a Christian, still says as simply as the little child, “God made me”; although, where the ignorance of the child or the uninstructed adult knows and dreams of nothing, he has watched a curious and highly complex physical process. To reconcile all that may emerge as proved fact in the evolutionary sketch of the history of creation, with a belief in a personal Creator, is only the “God made me” example on a larger scale.] “Tell me what your natural constitution is, what your inherited mental characteristics are. Tell me how the most recent scientific men settle questions of heredity and the like. I say God made you all that, and just that and no other sort of man. They are only ascertaining and exhibiting better than could ever be done before how He made you. You have nothing but what He put into you: your capacities and faculties are His gifts.” “But I have worked hard for my bit of money; I was up whilst other lazy people were lying in bed; I kept my eyes open, whilst other men were dreaming and let the chances slip, or never saw chances which I seized.” And so on. “True; and much of it—all the patient industry, the ungrudging labour, the diligent cultivation of natural powers, the honest thrift that watched every penny—all these and more are credit to the successful man. But remember that the original force of sense and business sagacity, the robust physical basis which made all this successful activity possible, where so many others were handicapped by sickness or other physical disability, are in the last analysis of all thought, God. He gave these as your capital, and in a score of ways He might have spoiled your returns from it, if He had pleased.” “Thou receivedst.” 2. The original surroundings and home.—No man chooses his own parents or birthplace, important factors as these are in all his after-career. “Chance!” is meaningless; it is no account of the matter at all; it is only a way of avoiding giving an account of it. It is only the baffled mind making its escape from the problem, covering its retreat—cuttle-fish fashion—with a dense wordy cloud. The sovereignty of God in election had in it this much of truth, evident in both Scripture and experience, that a thousand circumstances and conditions of life, all of which had some connection with, and influence upon, a man’s final salvation, nearly or more remotely, were beyond his control, and from the first were settled, quite outside his own choice. Whether he should see the light in a heathen or in a Christian land, for example, is in vitally close connection with the question of a man’s ultimate salvation, and, meanwhile, with his degree of moral responsibility, his standing and career and the influence of his life; this and numberless other elements in the case are ordered by rules which lie quite out of our sight, and are ordered by God. “Election” doctrine did not take sufficient account of a grace which held every man accountable for only the light and advantages he actually enjoyed, and which, on the other hand, made it possible for a man to be saved in any circumstances and with even a very limited measure of light. But, plainly, these things men “received.” Men should be thankful for, not vulgarly or proudly boastful of, the social advantages of birth and station. These are no mean elements, when consecrated, in conspicuous success for God. The “gentleman” born, or the man of inherited wealth, is so much the more debtor to God to use these for the glory of Him who gave them, apart from all choice or merit in their possessor. 3. All “natural” goodness is grace, the gift of God.—All points of “natural” beauty of character—unselfishness, generosity, truthfulness; and, much more, all early tenderness of conscience, all early disposition towards good and towards God; such early “goodness” as makes some say, “They were naturally religious from their childhood,”—all are of God. The “natural” is all grace; the preliminary gift of the Holy Spirit. “Man received it.” [The old theologians who drew stern pictures of human nature in its “total depravity” and its utter ruin and its entireness of evil, were dealing rather with a necessary conception of clear theological thought than with actual human nature. It was needful to state, as precisely and exactly as Scripture language, interpreted and verified by observation and experience—these being in their turn lighted up and explained by Scripture statements—would make it possible and would require, what human nature would have been, and would be again, without the grace of God. And no man, who knows his own heart, can doubt that, if that grace were wholly withdrawn, and himself were simply left to temptation, there is no depth to which he might not sink, no length to which he might not depart from God. But the old sketch of human nature wanted its hard, true outlines softening, and the whole picture transfusing, with the glow and life and tenderness of the grace of God shown in Christ to every man. Mere human nature, wholly evil, unrelieved by grace, has never been anything but a theological conception. In fact, there is good in every man; very much, and very early, good in very many. “But ‘thou hast received’ it. It is not thyself, but God, not nature, but grace, even before any conversion, or the desire to be converted. ‘Why dost thou glory?’ etc.” 4. Never will right hearts fells this more deeply and wholly true than when they stand, “saved,” in heaven’s eternal security. All their crowns of holiness, happiness, earthly sainthood, heavenly service, all will be cast before Him who gave them all. There at last “No flesh will glory in His presence!” NOTES1 Corinthians 4:14.—Irony dropped. Even in 1 Corinthians 4:6 it was “Brothers!” Now, “Beloved children!” Yet surely he did desire to make them ashamed of their bearing towards and estimate of himself? Yes. But not vindictively, nor so as to humiliate them before others. It was only such fatherly use of “shame,” as if in private between him and his erring children, as is really a most effectual “admonition” and educating force.1 Corinthians 4:15. Instructors.—More accurately “tutors”; an illustration of his in Galatians 3:24-25, with a different application. The slaves to whom the boy was intrusted during his school-life and minority, to look after him generally. [As the Master says, “I am the Shepherd to whom the sheep belong; others are but ‘hirelings.’ ” However faithful servants they may be, the sheep are “not their own.”] (Stanley thinks of the (often) “harsh and despotic sway” of these pedagogues, and compares 2 Corinthians 11:20.) I begat you.—Not claiming any larger share in the origin of their spiritual life than in Galatians 4:19; Philemon 1:10; Philippians 2:22; 1 Timothy 1:2; 1 Timothy 1:18. All he had done was “in Christ Jesus”; no independent work or glory. “An approach to the doctrine of the new birth.… Paul’s only direct reference to this doctrine is Titus 3:5” (Beet). [James 1:18 approaches Paul’s “through the Gospel” here.]1 Corinthians 4:16. Followers.—“Imitators,” as in Philippians 3:17; 1 Thessalonians 1:6, which again joins on to Ephesians 5:1. Says Pressensé: “Paul has attained to such a stripping off of self that he can without egotism propose himself as a model.”1 Corinthians 4:17.—To his “beloved children” he sends his “beloved child.” [As the Great Householder sent His Son to the unfaithful, rebellious husbandmen, Matthew 21:35. As in 1 Corinthians 16:10, there is the always recurrent strain of appeal for a kindly reception of Timothy. For this cause.—I.e. in order that you may imitate me. Timothy will remind you of “my ways in Christ.”1 Corinthians 4:18-19.—“Timothy instead of himself! He dares not come himself! Or, at best, he does not know his own mind, or stick to his purpose long together!” Cf. 2 Corinthians 1:15-17. Thus would revive suspicions of vacillation or duplicity already awakened. Note the tense, which is exactly, “Some got puffed up” previously. The Lord.—Most probably Christ, as in 1 Corinthians 4:4-5.1 Corinthians 4:20. Word … power.—Be ye prepared to match with facta non verba my own coming with facta non verba (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:18). [How irresistible Stephen was (Acts 6:10). Cf. Acts 8:6; Acts 10:44; Acts 17:11-12; Acts 19:20; Acts 14:1. If the preacher stands firing, and never hits anything or anybody, he must aim badly, or must have got the wrong sort of ammunition. The Truth, the Kingdom, are always “in power.”] .—1 Corinthians 4:14-21 Fatherly Appeals; Fatherly Discipline. I. The tender relationship.—Paul was a gardener (1 Corinthians 3:9), then a “master builder” (1 Corinthians 3:10), then a “minister of Christ” (1 Corinthians 4:1), then a “steward” in God’s household, the Church (1 Corinthians 4:1). Now he is a “father,” even to such thankless sons as these Corinthians. His heart cannot keep up the satire and rebuke and self-vindication against them; to think of them, and to recall their past, even that he might rebuke, melts him down. The tears are in his voice, “my beloved sons.” No tie more tender—no tie so tender—as that which binds together the minister and his spiritual children. No love deeper than that of the man who has seen in some souls the satisfaction of the sore travail of his own (Galatians 4:19). No pain more acute than for the father to lose the love of his sons, or to see their life a flagrant contradiction to all he tried to teach and to be before them. They will not be his “imitators.” That minister has not yet tasted the chief joy of the ministry who cannot say to any one soul, “In Christ Jesus have I begotten you in the Gospel.” Is he after all nothing but their “instructor,” their “tutor,” their “pedagogue,” fulfilling indeed a very useful function as he brings them to the school of some better teacher, and guards and shields and trains the young life committed to his care? The man who takes refuge in this, that he does not indeed “see conversions,” but he “builds up the Church,” certainly is not doing nothing, but is doing only that half of a minister’s work which presupposes the new life to have begun. The “instructor” is needed, but the complete minister is the “father” also. And to his spiritual children that man will be like no other man. If they will hear “admonition” from any lips, surely it will be from his. II. And the father is a model for his children.—“Be imitators of me.” All reproach of egotism or vanity is beside the mark, when it is remembered that the father is talking thus, in that familiar love of family life which expects to be understood as a matter of course. The father is not on his guard against being mistaken when he talks to his children. (See also, for another turn to the thought, in Critical Notes.) One of the brothers, Timothy, shall tell them again, if they have forgotten them, their spiritual father’s rules for “behaviour in the House of God” (as he afterwards himself gave them to this same Timothy, 1 Timothy 3:15); Paul’s little household code for the training up of the children’s life and the ordering of their activities, which he was accustomed to enjoin wherever a new family circle—call it “a Church”—sprang up. How Paul’s dear children would treasure up every word which their spiritual father had left behind him! How our boys remember “what father used to say”! How the girls copy “what mother used to do”! “Remember my ways which be in Christ;” it is a charming ideal. He is himself a man “in Christ.” The formative principle, that which governs all his own life, and gives its distinctive tone to his judgments, and preferences, and dislikes, and volitions, is the Spirit of Christ dwelling in him. It is really Christ expressing and exhibiting Himself through Paul. If then he says, “Copy me, children,” it is after all, “Copy Christ, children.” It will be a task to distress and daunt the minister if he approach it from this side: “I must so bear myself, and so be, that my people may safely be imitators of me, even when I am least adverting to the effect of my very life upon them.” But let him rather approach it from this side, “I must be in Christ,” all the problem then falls into ordered simplicity of solution. All that springs out of the life “in Christ” may safely be followed. Be “in Christ,” and leave the rest to take care of itself. III. Yet the father must needs sometimes speak sharply, and even use “the rod.”—Nothing but “love” and the “spirit of meekness” would be defective family government where the children are “puffed up” Even as “the rod” and the rebuke alone would be imperfect family government too. The “words” need the “power” behind them; but the “power” should be held, if it may be, in reserve. And (as in 2 Corinthians 1:18-20) if Paul seems self-assertive, it is simply that the man lives so thoroughly in his message and work, the Gospel he preaches has put its own stamp so deeply upon the man, that what is true of it is true of him; and, conversely, as is the man so are the Gospel and the kingdom he preaches. [The man preaches no “Yes” and “No” Gospel; he is no “Yes” and “No” man (2 Cor. as above). So here:] He comes on no errand of personal vindication; he comes to vindicate the “kingdom of God,” which has been endangered and endamaged at Corinth. It is not only or chiefly that he will show himself to have both “words” and “power”; and his thunder [says Jerome: “As often as I read Paul, I seem to myself to hear, not words, but thunder-claps”] to be wedded to swift-striking lightning. He comes only as the embodiment of a Gospel order of things in which indeed are words, tender or stern, as need may require, but where every word can be translated into a deed of blessing or of chastening wrath. [IV. 1. This unconscious conformity of Paul to the Gospel he preaches is a real parallel to the, not conformity with but, identification of Christ and His Gospel. He and His religion, the Gospel of His Kingdom, are alike “the Way” (Acts 9:2; Acts 19:9; Acts 19:23); “the Truth” (not so precisely, but see, e.g., 2 Corinthians 13:8; 2 Thessalonians 2:13; 1 Timothy 3:15); “the Life” (Acts 5:20). 2. The same fundamental unity of character and form makes the paragraph under consideration so curiously and closely parallel to the case of God and His erring and wayward children, that, without any violence to sense or to essential Truth, it becomes almost a parable. Thus (1) In all His dealings with sinful men in these days of His grace, God designs their amendment. Like Paul here, He desires to touch their heart into sorrow and into a reformatory love toward Himself. Even in their waywardness He does not deny them the name “children” or the epithet “beloved.” For His Son’s sake the race, even in their fall, are “the men of His goodwill.” If they will not be “admonished,” then there must come, even for these, the “shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2). (2) “One is your Father,” said the Great Teacher, the Eldest Son of the Family (Matthew 23:9). “Your Father;” it is the new name for God which leaps instinctively to the lips of the pardoned and adopted sinner, when “the Spirit of His Son” is “sent forth into his heart” (Galatians 4:6). It was unknown to the Old Testament saints [Psalms 103:13; Psalms 68:5 are no real exceptions; Psalms 89:26 is theocratic rather than personal; Jeremiah 3:4 is put into the lips of the nation, and is not personal]; no Old Testament saint got beyond “Friend,” and ordinarily were only “servants,” trusted and beloved and honoured indeed, but never, as does every New Testament saint, saying “Abba, Father,” as the customary, instinctive word of address to God. Nor does a man in the Old Testament stage of his spiritual life—for every man’s spiritual history recapitulates in brief summary the history of “the dispensations”—say “Abba.” (3) And the “Fatherhood” and the “Sonship” depend on a new-born life; the children have “been begotten again” (1 Peter 1:3), and this “through the Gospel,” the living, “incorruptible seed” of a new life (1 Peter 1:23). (4) He says—as Paul, with a special reference, once says for Him (Ephesians 5:1)—“Be ye imitators of Me.” Indeed, their new-created life is “after God,” the Pattern (Colossians 3:10; Ephesians 4:24). (5) And has He not sent a “beloved Son,” “faithful” (Hebrews 3:2) to His Father’s commission and errand, who brings into men’s remembrance God’s “ways”? What He desires, what He is—the verbal pattern and the character-pattern to which God would have His children conform—where are they so spoken, where are they so seen, as by and in the Son who has been sent to men in their forgetful, wayward, rebellious mood of mind and heart? (6) But men are “puffed up” as though God were afar off, and never could or would draw nigh, to any practical purpose. The natural heart is epicurean in the God it imagines and desires. Deism, which recognised a God, and even a Creator, but relegated Him to a distant aloofness of place and heart and relation towards His world, and towards the life of the individual man, was only a quasi-philosophical expression of the thought of the natural heart everywhere. “Don’t bring God too near me! Let me get into some far country away from Him!” Even believing science and history and politics do not escape the infection and tendency of the time, but are apt to minimise the supernatural. The scoffers of the last days cry, sometimes with a heart which feels a sinking misgiving underneath the loud mockery, “Where is the promise of His coming?” (2 Peter 3:4). (As they said it of Paul at Corinth.) Paul himself, in veiled language, has reminded us how The Coming (the Parousia) will burst in upon a world in which lawless revolt in voice and act will have risen to its climax of daring against God and His Christ (2 Thessalonians 2:8). [It is no mere accidental parallel that, only a moment or two before the Life-giver would raise from the dead the ruler’s child, the neighbours and hired mourners “laughed to scorn” the words, “Not dead but sleeping” (Matthew 9:24). Their mockery is a prelusive, anticipatory suggestion and hint of the loud, mocking naturalism of unbelief which shall be never more scornful and daring than on the very eve of the Parousia and the Resurrection.] Corinthian Church members who say, “Paul will never come here again—not he!” are but exhibiting the unbelieving habit of the natural heart in all men. [The parallel is not to be forced, but, until Paul arrive, Timothy will so be Paul’s representative at Corinth that he who saw and heard Timothy would see and hear Paul (cf. then John 14:9).] (7) When He says, “Behold I come quickly, … to give every man according as his work shall be” (Revelation 22:12), it is as though we had Paul’s words in our paragraph “writ large,” written out on the Divine scale. In that day preeminently will the “kingdom” come “in power”! The Son, the “Minister” and Representative of God in that day of visitation, will bear the “rod”—of iron (Psalms 2:9). The “spirit of meekness” (Matthew 11:29), on which men have been presuming too far, will give place to the “wrath of the Lamb” (Revelation 6:16). Mutatis mutandis, one might have said to the refractory, rebellious Church at Corinth, in regard to the Advent of Paul, “Be wise now therefore, O ye Corinthians,” etc. (as Psalms 2:10-12). Such flexibility and ready adaptability of Scripture language to such varying purpose; the fact that the same vessel of language will so readily hold such varying contents; such often minuteness of coincident particulars as between the contents—events or series of events, trivial and tremendous,—are not to be dismissed off-hand as fanciful or accidental. Is it not part of the organic interdependence and intercoherence of the One Book which has been, on the human side, the gradual, and largely unconcerted, accumulation of books, in process through many widely separated centuries?] 1 Corinthians 4:20. Word and Power. I. True of Christianity in contrast with other ethical systems.—As to their excellence “in word” they many of them deserve high praise. The religion of Jesus Christ gains nothing by an advocacy which does not do justice to the elements of truth in other religions—particularly moral truth. [As, for instance, the strong filial piety of Chinese life. Yet justice should be done to Christianity. Exaggerated praise is sometimes given to non-Christian systems. E.g. Confucius several times gave the rule, “What ye would not that men should do to you, do ye not do to them.” There is a surface similarity in this to the “golden rule” of Christ. But no such similarity (nor any ground in history) as to warrant the supposition that Christianity has incorporated an article of Chinese morality. As a matter of historical and chronological possibility or probability, it would have been more reasonable to assert that it should have “incorporated” the equivalent saying of Shammai: “What is unpleasing to thee do not to thy neighbour.” These two sayings may show the high-water mark of natural altruism; yet, as is easily seen, and often pointed out, these are negative; they restrain the hand from evil-doing; Christ’s saying, “Do unto others,” etc., sets the hand to busy, active benevolence and well-doing.] Hardly any considerable system of morals, ancient or modern, but enunciates some noble sentiments and precepts; the “Light that lighteth every man coming into the world” (John 1:9) has not left Himself without a witness in heathen minds and hearts in any country or age. Yet two facts are acknowledged by general consent. First that there was never any general agreement as to a moral standard or code of rules for conduct; and next, that, however admirable and noble the “word” of moral teaching might be, the systems never gave, or taught, the power to carry out the teaching and fulfil the code. All fail there. They have offered a marvellously complete analysis of human nature, but they are altogether wanting in motive power, and in practice the machinery of such morality was found to stand still. “Words,” plenty of them, and beautiful and noble; but no “power.” The result of man’s unaided moral experiment, as tried in its most highly developed form,—that of classical antiquity,—and with the greatest advantages, with philosophers for teachers whose names stand highest, beyond all comparison or competition, is exactly gathered up in Ovid’s well-known confession: “I see and approve the Better; I follow the Worse.” And this because power to follow the Better with any steady and persistent steps was not forthcoming. [Not only was the standard varying and uncertain, from teacher to teacher, no finality being attained, progress in ethical inquiry being “progress on a treadmill”; but no adequate motives were supplied for obedience to any one truth taught, no sanctions for the laws laid down; it was open to the individual to deny the cogency of any political or personal prudential “reasons,” and the authority of even the power and loftier dictates of his own nature, when it was at its best. Cicero long ago mockingly pointed out how seldom their moralisings produced much effect upon the lives of the very teachers themselves (Tusc. Quœst., 2). And, above all, nobody himself knew, or could teach others, how to fulfil his own ideals.] “Now as a matter of fact, Christianity has introduced into humanity a moral power, unknown apart from the presence of Christian faith and knowledge. This power has proved itself adequate to the vanquishing of the natural enmity of the heart to self-control and self-denial. The Christian religion has found and revealed a way of rendering virtue—which is admittedly admirable and desirable—actually attainable; has made the path of obedience progressively congenial, attractive, and delightful. There is a general agreement that this is the distinguishing characteristic of Christianity. First, in point of time, comes the provision for pardon; but first in point of real importance comes the provision of a spiritual power, which secures the love and practice of holiness.” [Professor J. Radford Thomson, whose words may stand for many more. But the fact is undisputed.] II. True of Christianity as compared with Judaism.—This had a code, higher and most perfect in its comprehensive and adequate range of directions. And, further, it rooted its most thoroughly symmetrical and perfect code in the personal relation to God: “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have,” etc. [A sceptical lawyer began to read the Bible in order from the beginning, and “pulled up” at last at the Decalogue, with the pregnant exclamation, “Where did Moses get that law?”] Further, and more remarkably still, it stated the true secret of all law-keeping, in its most condensed form: “Love the Lord thy God; love thy neighbour as thyself.” [Though note how little prominent is this latter (Leviticus 19:18), a mere sentence among a series, until, so to speak, disinterred by Christ, and exhibited in all its significance as one of the two cardinal enactments of the whole Law.] Yet, though it was a Divine directory of life, it was annulled “for the weakness and unprofitableness thereof” (Hebrews 7:18). The Law “could not make” the comers to its sacrifices and other ordinances “perfect” (Hebrews 10:1). God erected this fingerpost of duty; the highway of righteous life was in no sort of doubt. But the Law was only a fingerpost; it showed the way, but gave no help to walk in it. It condemned trespass swiftly and sternly, but it gave no direct aid to obedience. “By the Law was the” clearer and clearer “knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20). But in the Law itself was nothing more. [Under the Old Testament order there was no doubt not only knowledge, but obedience, and obedience which meant victory over opposing evil within and around the man. Yet this was not in the Law, but was an anticipation and foretaste of the grace of the Gospel.] Jewish seekers after a life of moral perfectness found all the inner moral division and weakness which the heathen felt and mourned over; they understood it better than the best of heathen moralists could. But all their struggle ended in the moral breakdown and confessed failure of Rom 7:12-24. The Law said, “Do and live,” “Do or die”; but of itself it could not show how to “Do.” It was in word only, not “in power.” III. The kingdom of God has, and brings, power.—In its clearer revelation as to Rewards and Punishments in the future life it has supplied sanctions such as even Judaism could not furnish. In its Central Person, Jesus Christ, it has supplied a perfect Pattern, a living Summary of all perfect human nobility and righteousness of life and character. In its love to that Personal Saviour it has supplied a perfect, a self-acting motive to obedience; a motive which, as matter of fact, has produced results which no other power could effect, and has done this in some drawn from the lowest types and grades of human life. [That love for Christ, moreover, supplies the most perfect legislation for the individual, prompting a very instinct for law where there is no express command.] Yet even in the most perfect Example it is only in a figurative sense that there is “power” to secure obedience and to elevate and purify; the real power is in the man himself, in his own will. Even a motive is not power. Love for Christ is a “power” only in the same quasi-poetic sense as Example is. The real spiritual dynamic that enables the will, and brings men at last to the secret of “power,” is in the working of the Holy Ghost upon, with, in the will of man. “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” makes a man “free from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2). All this is experience in the man who has “entered into the kingdom of God” (Matthew 18:3); or as, with a significant reversal of the polarity of the thought, it is sometimes put, who has “received the kingdom,” and let it enter into him (Mark 10:15). The philosophers do but analyse more clearly and fully and cast into accurate and orderly language what all human hearts more vaguely think and feel on moral questions. No representative question is ever raised by them and discussed which earnest men somewhere have not at some time less definitely recognised and dealt with. [The problems and solutions of Job, e.g., or of Ecclesiastes are not so definitely those of any special age or country or philosophy, as to yield any basis for locating date or authorship. They are the questions and answers of serious men everywhere, always.] Every man’s spiritual life, as he is led up to and into the “Kingdom of God,” recapitulates the moral history of the race. He has his patriarchal age and his Mosaic dispensation, before he comes into the Christian era of his life and experience. [Hence such passages and descriptions as in Galatians 4:3-7 are true, as between Judaism and Christianity and men living on the border-time of both, and as between the days during which the individual is being led “unto Christ” and those during which he lives “in Christ.” In Paul and many of his Christian contemporaries the dispensational contrast and the personal were coincident. They lived, historically as well as experimentally, through the transition from the one age to the other.] The Law showed the way; the Gospel accompanies and directs and upholds the traveller. Conscience is light, not force; knowledge, not help or power. The bitterest of the bitter cup of true repentance is the experience, “When I would do good, evil is present with me”—present, and so much master that, “The evil that I would not, that do I.” “Our moral nature is disordered, and one of the chief evidences of the disorder is the conflict between duty and inclination. Conscience and the will are not at one. We may form beautiful ideals, but we cannot realise them. Desires which are known to be mean and poor often prevail in us against the voice of conscience and even the protests of reason. And often the state of things is worse than that of a conflict in which the bad usually gets the better of the good. In many the result is a state of helpless captivity. In these cases lusts of the body rise to sovereign power and crush down in ignominious bondage every good and wholesome desire. Men and women are degraded far below the level of brutes. In the grip of imperious lusts they are powerless, struggle as they may. When the outward evil is not so great, the triumph of evil is not so conspicuous; but that evil reigns is often lamentably apparent, even to the persons themselves. Often their lives are governed by a selfishness that, regardless of others, seeks to secure everything for themselves. [Culture, with its tendency to fastidiousness of liking and judgment, is often exceedingly selfish. Of itself it certainly has no redemption from self in it.] The will of God, which they know to be the true sovereign authority of the world, is little regarded except in so far as the ordinary usages of society may happen to agree with it. These lives do not conform to any noble standard. And even at their very best there is such a discord between what they are inclined to do and what they ought to do, that their highest achievements in duty are but the result of a hard struggle, not the free, spontaneous movements of souls delighting in the ways of truth and righteousness.” (Dr. W. G. Blaikie.) IV. But the Gospel scheme provides “power.”—It has been a power working with the preacher of the kingdom of heaven. With what sledge-hammer force does the Gospel word, when full of the power of the Holy Ghost, break open the door of the most utterly evil heart, and find admittance for conviction and for Christ! How this power has again and again borne down before it, and swept away in its victorious rush, all the barriers of social pride, of personal reserve or timidity, bringing to open concern the most unlikely hearts! The man also who receives into himself the Spirit of God as a Spirit testifying to his adoption into the family of God (Romans 8:15-17) finds he has received the “Spirit of power” as well as “of love and a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). As a matter of mental and moral scientific analysis, no question is more perplexing, or seems more nearly insoluble, than that of the enabling effect of the Spirit of God upon the human will. But the simplest child of God finds that the same Spirit whose inwelling brings him peace and joy and hope brings power also. Old habits seem like Samson’s bonds of new rope when touched with His fire. The old struggle with the heart and its inclinations still may many times be a severe one; but it ends, not as in Romans 7, in defeat, but in victory. Evil may be “present,” but it rules no longer. The “new creature” is but “new” with the strength of the child, but that strength may be increased until the walk is with the firm and victorious tread of the man in Christ. Self-control, though in no strength of Self, is enjoyed and exhibited; patience and forgiveness of injuries—an impossible task to the natural heart—become possibilities and facts. Every mission-field, every Christian congregation, has its “modern miracles,” its moral miracles: degraded ones lifted out of the slough of gross or cruel sin; the utter, hard, proud, cold worldling-life melted away, and giving place to humility, unselfishness, tenderness, sympathy, self-sacrificing benevolence, and so on. Facts prove Paul’s words true. And only the Gospel of the kingdom of God has ever thus solved the moral problems which were the despair of the noblest ancient philosophers and ethics. The privilege of the regenerate life, moreover, should not be taken to stop short of this possession of moral power. The Gospel gives the moral leverage and the fulcrum—both—with which the world may be lifted. And this is no mere Christian boasting, but an assertion whose truth is verified in the whole history of the modern world. The representative world was sick at heart and corrupt, hastening to political and social ruin and disintegration, when Christianity came and put a new force into man and society. The world took a new start, and began a new life, at the era of the advent of the “kingdom of God.” And if it has seemed to fail in persons or in societies since, it is when it has degenerated into a thing of “words” only, in creeds and pulpits and life; and, indeed, has reverted to the ethics of cultured heathen naturalism in its doctrine of human nature; still bearing the Christian name, wearing the Christian mask, but heathen—natural—at heart, and in all essential principles and motives, and in the force which is appealed to for recovering man from degradation and moral failure and ruin. CASE OF SIN (Also in 2 Corinthians 2:5-11; 2 Corinthians 7:8-12.) 1 Corinthians 5:1. Commonly.—“Actually” (; widely accepted). Among you.—Join with “there is,” not with “reported.” News not only brought by Chloe’s people (1 Corinthians 1:11); more widely spread, reaching Paul from other quarters also. “Such cases not unknown in Roman society, but regarded with horror. Cic., Pro Cluentio, 5, 6, ‘O mulieris scelus incredibile, et prζter hanc unam in vita omni inauditum’ ” (Stanley and Farrar, aptly). This agrees with the true reading; “named” omitted. Father’s wife.—A living, injured husband (2 Corinthians 7:12); probably (not certainly) the father. Hath.—Euphemistic for actual, married possession.1 Corinthians 5:2.—Prefer affirmative to interrogative form (Ellicott, with Auth., against many moderns). Puffed up.—Not about this, but as in 1 Corinthians 4:6. Q.d. “Even this has not pricked the bladder of your inflation, of which I have been speaking to you! Spite of the occurrence of this in your midst, ye are still,” etc. Observe spiritual and intellectual pretensions of highest order, not accompanied by any sufficient, even elementary, moral sensibility! (See Appended Note, from Farrar.) Observe “Did … had done.”1 Corinthians 5:3. Absent.—At Ephesus. Present in spirit.—Not the Holy Spirit. Evans puts very strong meaning into phrase: “It appears from this and from other texts that Paul’s own spirit, illumined … and vivified by the Divine, must have been endowed on certain occasions with a more than ordinary insight into the state of a Church at a distance.” He lays (too much?) stress on Colossians 2:5. “We may infer, then, that St. Paul could on occasions exercise this spiritual gift of supernatural immediate intuition even as our Lord on earth in His own greater measure did when He saw Nathanael, etc. (John 1:51). Elisha: ‘Went not my heart with thee?’ If Elisha, why not St. Paul?” Judged.—Word in itself neutral = “have given my decision.” Sentence held—as if unwilling to let fall—till 1 Corinthians 5:5.1 Corinthians 5:4.—See Homiletic Analysis.1 Corinthians 5:5.— 1. A physical penalty (viz. sickness supernaturally, directly, inflicted by Paul; which might have been fatal, but as directly, supernaturally, was remitted on the repentance of the offender). So Ananias and Sapphira. Bar-Jesus (Acts 12). Such visitation Simon at Samaria feared (Acts 8:24). Paul exercised the power much later on (1 Timothy 1:20) on Hymenζus and Alexander. 2. Consequences more than mere exclusion from Eucharist or the Church. 3. “Many sickly” at Corinth, “many sleep” (1 Corinthians 11:30); i.e. other cases of this form of physical, Divine, chastisement, even of death. 4. See homiletic treatment, further. N.B. “spirit,” not “soul.”1 Corinthians 5:6.—Evans: “Is this a time to parade your lofty privileges of saintly kingship, or to flaunt and flourish your Christian wisdom embroidered with worldly philosophy, when this scandal of the Church stares you in the face? Theological pomp … a moral plague begun.” Leaven.—Proverbial, as in Galatians 5:9. Leaven (except in Matthew 13:33), an illustration of the pervasive working of evil. The man, and the principle of his action, both included in the “leaven.”1 Corinthians 5:7.—In Exodus 12:15 sqq. are found two ideas: “No leaven,” “cut off” an offender. Hence the connection of thought. Perhaps emphasised by an actual or recent Passover celebration (letter written soon before Pentecost, 1 Corinthians 16:8); but too precarious to make these allusions give a very definite date. “Ye are unleavened” does not necessarily mean more than, “Ideally ye are, as being a Christian Church at all.” Purge out.—“On the evening [of the 13th] commenced the 14th of Nisan, when a solemn search was made with lighted candle through each house for any leaven that might be hidden or have fallen aside by accident. Such was put by in a safe place, and afterwards destroyed with the rest” (Edersheim, Life of Jesus, ii. 480; and he adds in a note:) “The Jerusalem Talmud gives the most minute details of the places in which search is to be made. One Rabbi proposed that the search should be repeated at three different times!” Our passover.—“Our”; cf. “We (also) have an altar” (Hebrews 13:10). Omit “for us.” Sacrificed.—True idea; word, however, does not necessarily mean more than “slain.” “Vers. 6–8 suggest the practical use and probable design of the Mosaic ritual” (Beet).1 Corinthians 5:8. Malice.—Not in modern, narrow, sense of mischievous, personal animosity. Broader; “vitiositas,” evil-heartedness; opposed to “sincerity,” the transparent-heartedness in which is “no darkness at all.” Truth.—A word (opposed to wickedness) of the Johannean dialect; but Paul and John “agree in one.”1 Corinthians 5:9. In a [lost] epistle.—[No theological difficulty here. A vast amount of literary material (e.g. Chronicles of Kings of Judah and Israel; or the incompletely compiled material for Gospels of which Luke speaks—not necessarily unreliable accounts) connected with the facts of Revelation has perished. All has been preserved which was needful to serve, or perhaps could serve, the purpose of the Spirit of God in conveying an “official,” Divine, account of the history and meaning and future of God’s Redemption-scheme. These two letters to Corinth, under Him, written for preservation. Any other, having answered its temporary purpose, could be left to the fate of ordinary private letters. All of any permanent value in the lost material is in these preserved.] For a lost epistle, (1) 1 Corinthians 5:2; 1 Corinthians 5:6 are not specific enough to be the injunction referred to; (2) same words in 2 Corinthians 7:8 refer to a previous (this first) letter; (3) “now” contrasts with something written before (but query this?). Against, (1) no trace of it, unless here; (2) “I wrote,” explained as epistolary aorist; (3) doctrinal presumption against the loss of anything from an inspired pen. (More fully discussed in the Introduction.)1 Corinthians 5:10. Covetous.—Paul’s severe estimate of this sin. In Romans 7 regarded as in some sort the typical sin. “The accursed desire of having.” A craving for more, particularly that “more” which is possession of others. (Yet not necessarily this. Cf. Luke 12:15, which shows that covetousness may as well be displayed in the spirit in which a man seeks, and holds, his own.) A cuttle-fish sin with many tentacles; in the case at Corinth reaching out for, not money, but another man’s wife. Idolater.—Earliest-known use of the Greek word here employed.1 Corinthians 5:11. Brother.—In the technical sense, meaning “a Christian.” Presumably, therefore, such a man’s “idolatry” only extended to joining in the heathen public banquets. Cf. “covetousness which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). To eat.—Not merely at the Lord’s Supper, but in any voluntary intercourse in private life.1 Corinthians 5:12. Judging.—In the sense of exercising a right to pronounce and execute a sentence.1 Corinthians 5:13.—“Let him be unto you as a heathen man and a publican.” Relegate him to the “world” “without,” to which he really belongs. Yet there God will “judge” him, as one of “those without,” by my sentence (1 Corinthians 5:5), which will still operate on him “in the world” if so be that he may repent and, at least “in spirit,” be found amongst those “within” once more, “in the day of the Lord Jesus.” .—Whole ChapterI. The dishonour of the Church (1 Corinthians 5:1-2). II. The discipline of the Church (1 Corinthians 5:3-5). III. The duty of the Church towards its Lord (1 Corinthians 5:6-8). IV. The duty of the Church towards the outside world (1 Corinthians 5:9-13). I. 1. How early manifested the impossibility of making the Church, as men reckon its census, comprise exactly the same persons, neither more nor fewer, as does the Church whose census Christ takes! The distinction between the Real and the Nominal; between the Church which is by spiritual union His Body and the Church which is only a baptized Community holding, generally, the same Creed. As if the very Church institution itself were “made subject to vanity” (Romans 8:20), like all other creaturely, earthly life; “vanity” being, for the creature, “thwarted development, stunted growth, subjection to something worse than perishableness, bondage to something worse than decay” (Ellicott, Dest. of the Creature, lect. i.); or as the word radically suggests, “A yearning after an ideal, often nearly attaining, yet somehow doomed always to miss.” The Master foretold it: the tares spring up amongst the wheat; the bad fish are caught in the sweep of the drag-net of the Gospel invitation; at least one guest without a wedding garment sits down at table with the rest, hoping to enjoy the feast. It is a long way from the Church of (say) Ephesians 2:1-10 to the Church in Corinth, amongst whose members was this flagrant sinner. He will never join a Church who waits for a perfect one. 2. How serious the dishonour to the Church itself! No grave looks so black as that which yawns dark, with new-fallen, untrodden snow around its mouth. Sin is never so black as when its darkness and corruption open dark in the midst of a Church. It is high honour to belong to Christ; but the honour brings commensurate responsibility. God’s appeal is: “Ye shall be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44; 1 Peter 1:16). [“For” means: (1) Vindicate your relationship to Me; show the “family likeness,” which is holiness; for your own sake, that your “evidence” may be strengthened. (2) Remember the honour of being Mine. Your character involves Mine; the world will judge of Me and of religion by you. I am holy; take care therefore that you are holy, in friendships, pleasures, bearing, character, all. (3) Make possible the communion I desire and design for you. But you must needs, then, be holy, for I am holy.] Here is a Church involved by one of its members in sin almost unheard of, and always abhorred, in the world. The Church sinks lower than the world! Often its reproach still. Business men complain that “if they find a shabby thing done, a Church does it,” etc. They are not always too just to the Church. Yet more is rightly expected than from the world. But too much is sometimes expected; no fair allowance is made for fallible judgments, and for the almost inevitable complication arising from corporate, committee action, rather than personal. Often difficult to bring evidence sufficient for action in a Church court. Yet the Church should pique herself upon her honour; should make a point of being extra careful, especially in dealing with finance, or with sin within its own membership. “You carry Cζsar and his fortunes;” “You carry Christ and His character.” 3. And if the Church connive at or, [as some here understand] defend and glory in, the wrong, how much greater the dishonour. It is a sign of bad health when evil is tolerated; it means that zeal, watchfulness, love, purity, all, are low. May mean, in some cases, a wicked regard for a “respectable,” “important” offender. Health shows always in a sensitive repugnance to, recoil from, resistance of, evil. Flings it off, as a hand tosses off the burning coal. Instinctively shrinks with pain from even mental touch with it. A healthy body has no rest until it has expelled the very last piece of diseased bone. “Canst not bear them that are evil,” is put by Christ in the forefront of the good things He says (and says first) about, and to, Ephesus (Revelation 2:2). Happy when some voice, friendly, like Paul’s, becomes a kind of objective conscience, saying from without what the subjective conscience ought to be saying from within. Shame when the reproach of the unfriendly world has to awaken or educate the conscience of the Church! 4. A real difficulty, often felt, was not existent here. There was no room to doubt about the fact, or about the character of the fact. “Such a thing ought absolutely never to be heard of in connection with the Church; and absolutely nothing else is heard of” [so Stanley; but perhaps rather, “This is absolutely heard of everywhere”]. Many blemished in Christian character, or strongly, though not with too much discrimination, animadverted upon by the world, can scarcely be touched by Church discipline. Very elementary organizations, in their early days of small numbers and intimate mutual knowledge, can keep closer watch over each other, and can prudently suspend or cast out, for causes not wisely to be touched, or clearly to be judged upon, by larger, complex communities. Sin is a subtle thing, and the measure of responsibility is not always easy to gauge, for admonition or formal sentence. Tares and wheat are at some stages not easy to distinguish. This is not to condone criminal negligence, or weakness, or unfaithfulness to the Holy Ideal of a Church. The obligation lies to carry the practicable to the furthest reach of exactitude. Whenever a fair chance offers, as at Corinth—case clear, evidence abundant—not a moment’s hesitation should be permitted. To act, promptly, definitely, is due to the world, and to Christ. Wherever possible the Church should avowedly stand clear of all complicity with sin. Could here proceed safely, even upon “common report.” 5. A Church should “mourn” over sin. No amount of gifts, wealth, knowledge, numerical importance, prestige, can outweigh the dishonour. No room, no time, for complacent dwelling upon these, whilst sin remains uncondemned. Evil entering, spreading, infecting within, outweighs in seriousness of importance any material, social, numerical advantage. The first question should be, “Are we a holy people?” In days of weakness or decline, the first thing to do is to look for, confess, cast out, Church or personal sin. Joshua learned that there were times when it is of no avail to pray over defeat (Joshua 7:10). “Get thee up (from the attitude of prayer); wherefore liest thou upon thy face?… Up; sanctify the people.” First purification, then prayer, then success. The Church must purge itself from its dishonour. How to proceed? As in II. II. The discipline of the Church.—The constitution and procedure of a Church court. Admirably expository of Mat 18:19-20, with its significant “For.” [Twice, twice only, did Christ use His own new name, His “Church” (Matthew 16:18; Matthew 18:17). In first case referring to dangers from without; in second to difficulties arising within. Matthew 18:19 true, and fully applicable to all Church gatherings, but primarily deals with disciplinary gatherings (e.g. about an “offending brother”).] Notice:— 1. The fundamental thing: “in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” [In Matthew (ubi supr.) lit. “unto the name.” Here, “in.” “Unto” pictorially sets forth the gathering together toward it, as the central point and rallying-place and object of their assembling. Here the movement towards is over; the Church is assembled “in the name.”] This differentiates the gathering from all other meetings of Christian men. Two meet in street; talk of business, family, etc.; no difference between such a meeting and that of many worldly men round them. They meet in Parliament, or on boards of societies, even philanthropic; but their meeting even thus is not a gathering of the Church. But, so soon as they meet “unto His name,” and as long as they meet “in His name,” then a distinctively Church assembly is constituted,—if even of “two or three,”—having all the character, privileges, prerogatives, which belong to the Church. Worship, or business, begins when “His name” is made definitely the object of the gathering. [Cf. the ways of formally opening courts of judicature. In Russia a small, crowned baton lies by the magistrate, who sits under a portrait of the Czar. He sets this baton on end, by his side. That is the emperor come to judgment: “The court is sitting.”] That Head of the Church, who is revealed by “His name,” is the fountain of authority and wisdom in action. “Where two or three are gathered, … there am I; (and therefore) what they agree on earth to ask shall be done of My Father.” 2. This carries with it authority to judge, and “power” (1 Corinthians 5:3) to execute sentence.—The “power” of the Lord Jesus Himself is there. If “he that hath done this thing” is visited with judicial sickness by Paul and the assembled Church (for the “spirit” of Paul is assembled with those who are gathered together [in counting those present don’t leave out Paul and the Lord Jesus Christ, both are really there]), it is “this name, through faith in His name, hath made this man” sick (cf. the reversed parallel of Act 3:16. Paul might have said, “Why look ye on us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to” sicken?) [All this is normal, except the presence of Paul “in spirit,” presumably in order, by his special Apostolic, miracle-working gift, to inflict the extraordinary, abnormal sentence. The rest is essential to every true gathering, in due Church meeting assembled. The “Name of their Lord” is their “objective.” Around It they gather. It gives the meeting special character, cohesion, unity, for Himself is there amongst them. How often loyal hearts go homeward saying, “We have been very near to our Lord there”!] [Any questions as to the seat of authority to excommunicate, are not to be discussed or decided, with any fairness, upon the facts of an elementary time like this. As the structure of the Church grew more complex, by similar specialisation of organ and function to that seen in nature, the meeting for discipline conveniently became, in principle, a disciplinary “committee” of the Church, variously constituted, either advisory to the whole Church, or the depository of its power and the executive on its behalf. All these are matters of prudential, variable regulation. The only appearance of vital principle is in the fact that Paul makes the sentence his own: “I have judged.” The beginning of the pastoral office, and prerogative of admitting to, and excluding from, the visible fold. Yet not without the Church, as at least assessors. Perhaps rather as a jury, the pastor being a judge contributing to, and acting upon, their verdict as to the facts. In ultimate analysis, there is no “power” except that of the Lord Jesus present in the gathering.] 3. The sentence was exclusion, with physical accompaniments.— (1) The very fact of sinning thus flagrantly, revealed a real self-exclusion to have taken place before Church action was taken. Such a man is no real member of the Church, though still on the roll and meeting with brethren, even at the Lord’s Table. [May have been really a member at first, but fallen through unwatchfulness and temptation. May have been a name too hastily enrolled; an unfit, not living, stone, in error or ignorance built into the “house” (1 Peter 2:5). Or, the “living stone,” more likely, may have ceased to grow and live, and so falls out of its place in the living, growing fabric.] (2) So then (a) excommunication here is the ascertaining, the public recognition, and the official registration, of a separation which has been already made by the man’s own sin, entailing the withdrawal of the “grieved Spirit of God” (Ephesians 4:30). [As, similarly, divorce is only permissible where it recognises and registers a real dissolution of the marriage bond by the sin of one of the parties.] Outside the fold the man is exposed—more directly, and without the help and safeguard of the means of grace, and of the prayers and fellowship of his brethren—to the working of the “lion going about,” apparently able to inflict physical harm. The demonology of Job 1; Job 2 is not lightly to be rejected, harmonising, as it does, with this inspired statement of Paul. Yet here, as there, Satan is but the servant of God, with limited power; and here God’s minister to mark His displeasure. If we had known this man, we should probably have seen, or suspected, nothing but a quite natural illness, which we might, or might not, have noticed was coincident with his exclusion from the Church. The Corinthians themselves seem to have had no idea of the moral causes behind the epidemic sickness, and the numerous deaths just now occurring amongst them (1 Corinthians 11:30). (The spiritual, whether good or evil, behind the natural is a pure matter of revelation; but, when revealed, is not an incredible, or unreasonable, explanation of the facts [cf. Trench, Miracles, in initio]. In fact, Bible histories stand distinguished from secular accounts of the same facts—whether actual, or such as might be written—in this, that we are in them taken “behind the scenes” and permitted to see God and the spiritual world actively influencing what in all ordinary cases we only see from the natural side. Bible history is a specimen history, analysed and dissected, so that in other, ordinary, cases we may see where to look for, and how to find, the spiritual behind the natural.) It is contemplated by Paul that this man may die, or even would die. The “flesh” (more than the body?), the seat and instrument of his sin, is to be destroyed [an inexact word, never to be pressed too much]. But the “spirit,” the part of manhood capable of God, and once in fact illumined and indwelt by the Spirit of God, is to be saved. The man, it is presumed, will be brought to consideration and repentance in his illness: “It was good for me that I was afflicted.” “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now,” etc. (Psalms 119:67). “In the day of the Lord Jesus Christ” he will be found amongst the “saved of Jesus Christ.” [Cf. 2 Corinthians 1:14; 1 Corinthians 1:8; Philippians 2:16; Philippians 1:6 (“until”); 2 Timothy 1:12 (“against”); 1 Thessalonians 5:23 (“in the coming”).] (b) The object of excommunication is, quβ the Church, the public clearing of it from all suspicion of complicity with, or toleration of, sin, and the securing from dishonour the very name of Christ; quβ the offender, to make his conscience see the gravity of sin, to arouse to repentance and to amendment (where opportunity offers), and thus to make possible the way for restored communion with God and man. Must not be vindictive, but judicial, and (if possible) reformatory: hence (c) The method, extends only to exclusion from formal connection and from privileges of membership; but not to any attempt to follow a man outside with any direct infliction of temporal, or· social, or personal penalties (1 Corinthians 5:12-13 apply also to an excluded “brother”). Any consequences that follow exclusion should only be of God’s own infliction, generally in the ordinary course of His chastening providence. [Paul’s action in this case was rather the action of God, by His specially accredited and empowered messenger, than anything analogous to the ordinary action of the Church. No precedent in it for ecclesiastical power attempting to pursue into the secular sphere the life, goods, family, of an offender; least of all, of an offender against “doctrine” only.] This is a good case of “binding”; as 2 Corinthians 2:7 is of “loosing.” III. Duty of the Church towards its Lord.— 1. The exodus of the new Israel is now in progress.—In transit from Egypt to Canaan. A very real deliverance has been accomplished. The old bondage has been broken (Romans 6:14, “Sin shall not have dominion over you”). We have had our song of deliverance by the Red Sea. We have had our Sinai, only now the law is written within, on our own hearts. We shall have our Canaan (Hebrews 4:9). A day of redemption lies behind us; another, more complete, “day of redemption” before us (Ephesians 4:30). [Divine history repeats itself; or, reversing order of thought, anticipates itself. The history of Redemption, extending through the ages, has special points at which it summarises itself, on a small scale gathering up all the essential features of the whole process. The Author, both of the Facts and of the Record of them, traced the earlier stages or embodiments of Redemption on lines which are the basal lines of the later, more fully detailed, perfect stage and embodiment in the historical Work of Christ and the founding and history of His Church. This is not a mere happy adaptation of a piece of ancient history (or of a pretty myth of the past). It is one of the thousand illustrations, which gather year by year with cumulative force of evidence to every student of the Bible, of the profound internal harmony, arising from the organic unity, of the Redemption record. This is a case of the authentic discovery and development of the full meaning of the old story and Deliverance. We are thus told, on His own authority, what God “had in His view” in the earlier incidents. The Passover and Exodus (like all in Creation, Colossians 1:16) were “created in Christ.” His own warrant for this is abundant: “The blood of the new covenant” (the blood of the old, Exodus 24:8); His cross is the uplifting of the serpent (John 3:14); He is the manna (John 6:32-33); a pillar of fire to His people (“followeth Me shall not walk in darkness,” ib. John 8:12); the water from the rock (John 7:38); [as He is also Jacob’s ladder, John 1:51; and John finds Him in a trivial regulation about the integrity of the body of the Paschal Lamb, John 19:36; Exodus 12:46; Psalms 34:20]. [Not in pre-resurrection days, but afterwards, when all time or occasion for (alleged) ad homines arguments from, and use of, the Old Testament Scriptures had passed away, and He spoke as having already begun the eternal life of the Incarnate Son, He found Himself in all the Scriptures (Luke 24:27; Luke 24:43-47)].] All the points of prerogative, distinction, privilege, of the Old Israel reappear in the New, purified from their temporary, pedagogic accompaniments. We have a sanctuary and a Shekinah (John 1:14; John 2:21. N.B. when its fleshly veil was rent, the accompanying type had its veil rent too); we have a Sabbath; we have the “circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2:11); we have our “altar” (Hebrews 13:10). So we have a Passover lamb and a Passover supper, the birthday “feast” of the New Israel. (See Appended Note from Fairbairn.) [Fairbairn, Typology, ii. 442 sqq., very full here. The Passover lamb must not be denied to be a real sacrifice in any fear of giving support to “high” doctrine re the Lord’s Supper. Twice God calls it “sacrifice” (Exodus 23:18; Exodus 34:25).] In its combination of sacrifice for release from bondage, of atoning sacrifice for sin, and of feast for sustenance on pilgrimage, it best (better than even the ordinary peace offering) exhibits the whole truth about the Passover character of Christ and His work. The Cross and the Supper combine to exhibit the same whole truth for us. “Is slain.” Then why remain in bondage, with the door open to go out? 2. One emphatic law of the old ordinance is in principle continued unrepealed.—“No leaven with the Passover.” The sprinkling of the blood was not certainly continued in the post-Exodus celebrations. The bitter herbs and the rigorous search for leaven were essential, and continued, with increased stringency of observance, to the last. [Good reason for thinking that, like the modern Samaritan Passover lamb, that of Paul’s day was roasted on a cruciform spit of wood. But no Divine ordaining in this, so far as we know.] The Passover must not be killed “upon leaven” (so Exodus 34:25, literally). “The putting away of the leaven, that there might be the use only of unleavened bread, may also be regarded as carrying some respect to the circumstances of the people at the first institution of the feast.… But there can be no doubt that it mainly pointed, as already shown in connection with the meat offering, to holiness in heart and conduct, which became the ransomed people of the Lord—the incorrupt sincerity and truth that should appear in all their behaviour. Hence, while the bitter herbs were only to be eaten with the lamb itself [as the tears of repentance belong only to the first stage of the spiritual life, the first appropriation of Christ as the soul’s deliverer from bondage and from guilt], the unleavened bread was to be used through the whole seven days of the feast—the primary sabbatical circle—as a sign that the religious and moral purity which it imaged was to be their abiding and settled character. It taught in symbol what is now directly revealed, when it is declared that the end for which Christ died is that He might redeem to Himself a people who must put off the old man with his evil deeds, and be created anew after the image of God” (Fairbairn). “Sin is a malignant leaven— (1) In its nature; corrupting, spreading, assimilating; (2) In its effects upon communities, upon individuals. It works—(a) constantly; (b) imperceptibly; (c) powerfully; (d) perniciously” (J. L., adapted). Preparation for partaking of Christ’s salvation at all involves this. No saving faith is possible where sincere repentance, and (as opportunity serves) “works meet for repentance,” are not found. Many a seeker looks for peace in vain. He has not put away sin. He may not share in the Passover deliverance. The true preparation for approaching the Lord’s Table is a careful examination of heart and life, carrying with us the “candle of the Lord,” searching into every suspected, dark place. To turn away from what might possibly lead to an unwelcome discovery, lest, seeing something too clearly, conscience should constrain us to yield it up, whereas we do not wish to see that obligation, is moral dishonesty; there is something of the “leaven” in it; everything should be “faced out,” swept out, renounced, before we sit down at Table with our Lord in His Supper [e.g. any unforgiving temper towards some fellow-communicant]. We have here a rule of our habitual Christian life. Our Exodus is always in progress. We live in a continuous Passover-tide and a continuous Pentecost, as hereafter we shall celebrate a continuous Feast of Tabernacles. [See the symbolism of Tabernacles in Revelation 7:9. We belong to a people of whose whole life this is one “note,” “Ye are unleavened.” Our whole life is a perpetual “keeping of the feast.” To retain the initial deliverance of our life, to enjoy a perpetual communion with our Lord, to have His Supper continually celebrated with our heart (Revelation 3:20), there must be a perpetual self-cleansing from the leaven, a self-examination for it, an unsparing outsweeping of all. Holiness, perfected holiness (2 Corinthians 7:1), is the norm of the life of deliverance by, and of communion with, the dying, living, atoning, life-sustaining, Passover Lamb of our age, “even Christ.” We have here a rule of the habitual Church life. “No leaven tolerated.” Seek it out; watch for it; cast it, cast persons, out with unsparing strictness of discipline. If the Church is to be an Israel at all, a covenant people of God to-day; if it is not to return in fact to the world, out of whose Egypt God “has called” both “His Son” and His Church (Matthew 2:15); if there is to be a Table in the midst of its gatherings at which the Head will join His members at the Supper; if they are to have Him present in their assemblies for discipline or worship,—let them purge away Sin, personal or corporate. (Heart-sin above all, 1 Corinthians 5:8.) 3. Happy consequences of such purification.— (1) “We keep the Feast,—the Feast! A festival life ours, if we will. Our slain Lamb is, between us and God, a perpetually renewed pledge of a life of liberty, larger and larger, from all bondage, and fear, and guilt, and danger, and sin. (2) “We are a new lump.” [Figure changes as between this and 1 Corinthians 5:7. Rather here, as in Matthew 13:33, the pervasive, assimilating effect of leaven, without the evil connotation.] The Church can then leaven the world. Modern science has shown this side of the fermentative process; not only a token or accompaniment of “corruption,” the break-up of old combinations of matter when “death” has taken place, but also such a break-up by means of a host of minute organisms working towards new combinations, suitable for the sustenance, or to be the vehicle, of new life. For this, in part, does the Lord of the Church put It into the midst of the World. The world is to be saved mediately, through the Church [which actually fastened upon the corrupting, dissolving elements of society in the Roman Empire, and rearranged and reorganised them, to be the abode of the new Christianised life]. Every sinful member, every sinful practice, tolerated, robs the “new lump” of its efficiency for the Lord’s purpose. To purge out the old leaven [e.g. by excommunication] is Duty towards the Church’s Lord, who is the slain Passover Lamb always in its midst. IV. The duty of the Church towards the outside world.— 1. Observe the sharp distinction, “within,” “without,” and this not as a mere accident of attachment to a society or community or non-attachment; goes deeper—“brethren,” “the world.” It lies in the very word ἐκκλησία, they who are of the Church are not only “called,” but “called out.” [Admirably analogous to the classical, political use of the word: “The lawful assembly in a free Greek city of all … possessed of the rights of citizenship, for the transaction of public affairs, … summoned out of the whole population; a large, but at the same time a select, portion of it, including neither the populace, nor strangers, nor yet those who had forfeited their civic rights” (Trench, Syn., § 1).] In a world where all nations are God’s, one nation was called to His side to be His “peculiar people” (Titus 2:14; from Deuteronomy 7:6, etc.; cf. 1 Peter 2:9; Isaiah 41:9). “His very own” where all are “His own.” Children, where the rest are at best only servants, though all are of His household, and all regarded with real interest and care. An inner circle of love and favour and blessing. 2. The boundary, dividing, inclusive, exclusive, line is not always easy to locate. The general direction of it, the principles upon which it is laid down, are obvious and clear, but it is difficult to allot individuals as “without” or “within.” The line is by no means coincident with that traced by Church enrolment and discipline. All methods of Church membership, actual or proposed, are obnoxious to the criticism that they exclude some who are really “within,” and, far more frequently, include, admit, retain, many of those “without.” To eye of Son of Man “sheep” and “goats” are definitely distinguishable. None belongs to neither. [“Yes; I know about the ‘sheep’ and the ‘goats.’ But what about the ‘alpacas’? These are my difficulty,” said half-jestingly, half-seriously, a man of the world.] As a rule, the true line lies within the mapped line of the ecclesiastical geography, sometimes far within. [As the map-makers say, there is an “Ecclesia Proper” and an “Ecclesian World”; cf. “China Proper” and “Chinese Empire,” half attached, loosely held, slightly ruled; “Russia Proper” and the vague “Russia in Asia” or “Russian Empire.”] 3. Tests nevertheless are very definite, many-sided. (a) E.g. put experimentally; take two men, closely parallel in life; difficult to lay finger on anything “wrong” in the man “of the world”; admirable, amiable, excellent in many ways; “comparing (so it is said) favourably with some of the Church,” “better man than your ‘converted’ man.” Unhappily true sometimes; yet go back, dig down to the foundation of both lives. The less admirable (pity!) has behind him a time when he first felt “conviction of sin” [the introduction to a new world, of “things spiritual,” to which the (best type of) “natural” man is a stranger]; knows himself “a sinner”; did then, and still does, make Christ and His work the basis of all life and hope before God. The more admirable, building a far better superstructure, has no such event, no such moral crisis, no such beginning of new, Spirit-taught knowledge; does not understand “sin,” nor himself “a sinner”; underneath the life-building there is no Christ for a sole reliance, (b) Illustrate by this: Before the knowledge of the mechanism of (the newly invented) clocks had travelled from Germany into Italy, the advantages of a public, far-visible dial with hands was so obvious, that many Italian cities set these up; the hands were kept right, by constant adjustment, by an attendant provided with a water-clock or sand-glass. Such “correct time” is the ideal and method of the righteousness of those “without.” [Was very much the righteousness of an Israelite. Was exactly the “righteousness of scribes and Pharisees.”] [It is possible to secure any number of right acts by right regulation from without, according to an external code, which must be very detailed, a code of “cases of conscience,” with new rules for every case that arises.] Italy very soon learned to keep the hands right by mechanism within, in much more exact and perfect fashion, as right at the seconds as at the hours. God secures from within “correct time,” righteousness of life, in those “within”; a new law and a new force are put into the heart. Sometimes a less perfect “time” is kept (pity!), but at least the true method is being made the basis of life. [Or, changing figure a little, in a man “within” the hands go, not too regularly, but at least in right direction now, and in obedience to a new law and power within.] (c) Most absolutely: What is the end of life? What is its relation to Christ? To the man “within,” “To live is (more or less definitely and faithfully) Christ.” The real, deep, fundamental test is there: what is the relation of the heart and the activities to Christ? Even when both men do what appears identically same thing, a “great gulf fixed” of distinction opens up underneath, in reply to that question. 2. Intercourse between “within” and “without,” how regulated.— (1) Sad that it should need “regulation.” A sad tone rings through the Scripture use of “world.” A sadness as of a father who must forbid intercourse between some of his children and the rest; the tone in which, if mentioned at all, one is spoken of whose picture hangs with its face to the wall, in the home. Why cannot “church” and “world,” “within,” “without,” mingle freely, fraternise without “regulation” and “restriction”? “What is wrong with the world? Is it not God’s world? Surely it is not the devil’s?” True; and all the beauty, etc., is for the children of God: “all yours” (see 1 Corinthians 3:22). The history of the world [both as κόσμος and αἰών] is flowing in a channel of God’s digging, and towards God’s destination for it. Yet the word is ethical; the “world” is not friendly, or neutral, but alienated, inimical, dangerous. The “world” is the worldly world, in the New Testament, and in fact. (See Appended Note from Trench.) (2) Some intercourse is necessary. The division-line parts “chief friends,” husband and wife; runs through the midst of homes, friendly circles, groups of relatives; through offices, schools, workshops, markets; parting, sorting out, individuals “right” and “left.” Christianity does not command any forced or unnatural breaking of these bonds; “then must ye needs go out of the world.” [N.B. this said as though monastic, eremitic, celibate segregation were not at all a thing to be contemplated for Christians. To argue this from his words were a reductio ad absurdum; so Paul feels.] The world wants, God wants, the Church in the world, the Christian in the home, in the market, on the bench, on the board, in the seat in Parliament. Is there not a danger to the man “within”? Yet it may be a training and a blessing; is meant to be a blessing to those “without.” Even Christian benevolence will mean much intercourse. (3) Much more is voluntary, and should be modelled after the pattern of Christ’s own. [“Ye are not of the world, even as (i.e. in the same way as, and with the same absoluteness of negation) I am not” (John 17:19). Examine His “unworldliness.”] (a) John Baptist was Elijah in his ascetic aloofness from men; Christ was Elisha in His free intercourse with men. Christ accepted invitations from, ate at table of, Pharisee, publican, sinner (though He was most “at home” at Bethany). But always went in and bore Himself there as the Physician. When the Christian man finds he can do no good, and may himself suffer harm (Christ could not suffer any), he must abstain altogether or withdraw. (b) Deep separateness of origin (“of the world,” “not of”) is the true safeguard for the Christian, the true source of any power for good, in any voluntary intercourse. There should be no sympathy of aim, or community of judgment; no participation, in business or pleasure, which indicates, or ministers to, worldliness of temper, spirit, heart. [Romans 12:1-3, “conformity” may indicate, or assist, an evil metamorphosis. A holy metamorphosis within will save from any wrong “conformity” without.] (c) This affects intimacies, friendships, amusements, marriage. 3. Duty of Church towards world.— (1) To endeavour to fulfil all the purposes for which God calls out a Church, and yet leaves it in the world. The very separateness is a witness for God; instrumentally it may “convict the world of sin.” [As a straight-edge convicts a hand-drawn line, when laid down beside it.] Hence (2) Should “judge” those “within” with unsparing faithfulness. Sin in the world must often be left alone, though condemned by testimony and practice. Sin in the Church must be vigorously, promptly, dealt with. (3) Should not attempt to judge those without. [No question of passing mental or conscientious “judgment.” Cannot help having an opinion, passing a judgment, upon the right or wrong of the life or character of those without. Folly to say, “You should not judge so strictly, should not judge at all.” The awakened sense of “righteousness” and of “sin” makes a mental, moral verdict a necessity. Bad sign of the Church’s own life if it did not “judge” and “condemn” the world’s life and principles. All such “judgments” are of course fallible, on (necessarily) imperfect data; a Christian man will be modest, self-diffident, only condemning severely under the strongest compulsion of evident fact. Not this, but] the Church should not attempt any sort of punitive discipline upon the outside community. [As the “world” should have no disciplinary power within the Church.] The sphere of “the State” is crime in the citizen—Christian or non-Christian; the sphere of the Church is sin in the member. The attempt in Puritan England and Puritan New England to use Church machinery, or Church methods and code, to enforce a Church discipline upon the morals and liberties of even those “without,” broke down. As things are we must leave sin in those “without” to the “judgment” and chastisement of God. The world cannot yet be made a theocracy. It is a difficult, delicate question, needing all the sense and grace a Christian father and mother possess and can obtain, how far the home may be made a little theocracy, how far the Christian should enforce upon non-Christian children or servants, the Christian rule of life and its sanctions, so “judging those without.” 1 Corinthians 5:7. “Christ our Passover,” etc. I. The Victim. II. The Sacrifice. III. Its efficacy. IV. Its appropriation.—[J. L.] 1 Corinthians 5:7-9. Observe the necessity of: I. Repentance. II. Faith in Christ. III. A holy life.—[J. L.] 1 Corinthians 5:7-9. Our Christian Life a Perpetual Passover-keeping.—A continuous entering into liberty from Egyptian bondage, into a journey homewards with God for our Guide. Three features always stamped upon it:— I. The cleansing of the heart.—Must “make ready the upper room,” if Christ is to enter and sup with us, as the perpetual benediction of our life. Not done once for all in the repentance which inaugurated our new life. New discoveries as we carry the candle into the darker corners. We get a keener eye to see “leaven,” as years go on. II. Slaying the lamb.—This done once for all, but not then done with. The Atonement a perpetually new basis of each new day’s life of grace. However high we raise the superstructure, yet this the foundation always. Even in heaven we shall be only sinners whose ground of acceptance is the merit of the slain Lamb. [Too often there is a long parenthesis in the midst of life’s journey—as in the wilderness sojourn of Israel—during which no Passover is celebrated. All the sense of believing rest in the work of the Lamb of God, all the practical efficacy of it in our life, is gathered up around the start on the journey and the eve of entering Canaan; a long, barren, unbelieving, unfaithful tract stretches between.] III. Eating the supper.—This characteristic also to be stamped upon the whole Christian course. Not only a continuous resting upon an atonement which brings deliverance from bondage, but a continuous “peace-offering” feast, a continuous communion with Him who is the Victim, the Supper, the Host at the table—all in one. 1 Corinthians 5:13. The judgment of the Church and the judgment of God. I. One limited; other universal. II. Partial; absolute. III. Disciplinary; judicial. IV. May err; infallible. V. Provisional; final. VI. Temporary in effects; eternal.—[J. L.] 1 Corinthians 5:9-13. (a) I. In the Church; not of the Church. II. In the world; not of the world. Or (b) I. Separation from the Church. II. Separateness from the world. NOTES1 Corinthians 5:2.—Farrar thinks that they were “puffed up” and “boasted” about this very matter. “Though the very Pagans execrated this atrocity, yet he had not been expelled from the Christian communion, nor even made to do penance in it, but had found brethren ready, not merely to palliate his offence, but actually to plume themselves upon leaving it unpunished. This man seems to have been a person of distinction and influence, whom it was advantageous to a Church, largely composed of slaves and women, to count among them.” (Query, all this?) “Doubtless (?) this had facilitated his condonation, which may have been founded on some Antinomian plea of Christian liberty; or on some Rabbinic notion that old ties were rendered non-existent by the new conditions of a proselyte” (something in this); “or by peculiarities of circumstance unknown to us. But though this person was the most notorious, he was by no means the only offender, and there were Corinthian Christians—even many of them—who were impenitently guilty of un-cleanness, fornication, and lasciviousness” (1 Corinthians 5:11; 1 Corinthians 6:15-18; 1 Corinthians 10:8; 1 Corinthians 15:33-34). (Farrar, St. Paul, in loc.)1 Corinthians 5:7.—“Another and still higher element of prophetical import mixed with that singular work of God, which gave rise to the institution of the Passover. For the earthly relations then existing, and the operations of God in connection with them, were framed on purpose to represent and foreshadow corresponding but increasingly superior ones connected with the work and kingdom of Christ. And as all adverse power, though rising here to its most desperate and malignant working, was destined to be put down by Christ, that the salvation of His Church might be finally and for ever accomplished, so the redemption from the land of Egypt, with its ever-recurring memorial, necessarily contained the germ and promise of what was to come; the lamb perpetually offered to commemorate the past pointed the expecting eye of faith to the Lamb of God, one day to be slain for the yet unatoned sins of the world; and only when it could be said, ‘Christ, our passover has been sacrificed,’ did the purpose of God, which lay enclosed as an embryo in the Paschal institution, reach its proper culmination.”—Fairbairn, “Typology,” ii. 445.1 Corinthians 5:10. The World.—“(There are no [passages] which speak of the end of the κόσμος).… From the signification of κόσμος as the material world, which is not uncommon in Scripture (Matthew 13:35; John 21:25; Romans 1:20), follow that of κόσμος as the sum total of the men living in the world (John 1:29; John 4:42; 2 Corinthians 5:19); and then upon this, and ethically, those out of the ἐκκλησία, the alienated from the life of God (John 1:10; 1 Corinthians 1:20-21; James 4:4; 1 John 3:13).… Αἰών, … signifying time, comes presently to signify all which exists in the world under conditions of time; and then, more ethically, the course and current of this world’s affairs. But this course and current being full of sin, it is nothing wonderful that ‘this world’ (αἰών) like κόσμος, acquires presently in Scripture an evil significance.… All that floating mass of thoughts, opinions, maxims, speculations, hopes, impulses, aims, at any time current in the world, which it is impossible to seize and accurately define, but which constitute a most real and effective power, being the moral, or immoral, atmosphere which at every moment of our lives we inhale, again inevitably to exhale,—all this is included in the αἰών, which is, as Bengel has expressed it, the subtle informing spirit of the κόσμος, or world of men who are living alienated and apart from God.” Both words united in Ephesians 2:2 : “the age of this world.” “The God of this world,” 2 Corinthians 4:4; its anti-God. The “age” is the rule of the life of the men of the “world” (Ephesians 2:2, κατά). They are “men of the time,” that and nothing more.—Trench, “Syn.,” §lix. NOTESTwo ; Two TOPICS.—1 Corinthians 6:1-201 Co 6:1-8.—Canon Evans (Speaker’s Commentary) thus exhibits the verbal connection: “Deigneth any one of you (you emphatic), having a matter anent the other (party), to seek for judgment before the wrong-doers and not before the saints? (Are ye so besotted), or do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? And if in your presence the world is to be judged, unmeet are ye to hold judge-courts of the lowest sort? Do ye not know that angels we shall judge—angels! Speak not of secular things! Nay, rather (that I may unmask your folly by a reductio ad absurdum), if secular judge-courts ye should perchance hold (a measure how unworthy of your kingly calling and of your future judicial status!), take men of utterly no account in the Church and set them on the bench! (Them, I say, for such nonentities are equal to the settlement of such trivialities.) To put you to shame I speak it (this last sentence serious, not satirical). So! is there not among you (wise men as you flaunt yourselves) not even one wise man who shall be competent to arbitrate (give’a decision) on the part of his brother? But brother with brother goes to law (which is a breach of charity) and sues for judgment at the bar of unbelievers (which is preposterous). Nay, verily (let alone the absurd length of appealing to heathen men), it is so far quite a defeat to you that you have cause for legal judgments between yourselves.… Why do ye not rather take wrong (than allow or give cause for this ratio ultima of legal judgment)? Why not submit to being defrauded? Nay, but (the very reverse, so far from taking wrong dealt) you deal wrong yourselves, and (what makes it worse) deal wrong to brethren! (Is this possible?) or do ye (with all your boasted knowledge) not know that wrong-doers (of any sort) shall not inherit God’s kingdom?” To this may be added:—1 Corinthians 6:1. Dare.—Q.d. “What is this that I hear of you? Is it really possible?” Bengel: “Grandi verbo notatur læsa majestas Christianorum.” Connect with the “judging” at end of chap. 5: “I do not yet, as a Christian, judge the world; I shall do some day, and even judge angels. I understand a Christian, and can judge him (1 Corinthians 6:12); I do not yet always understand the man of the world; God does, and shall judge him.” Unjust.—Not necessarily meaning doing injustice on the bench. (Cf. the fair character of Gallio.) Perhaps not more than unrighteous, as opposed to “saints” (in a half-technical sense, like “sinners of the Gentiles,” Galatians 2:15).1 Corinthians 6:2.—Observe the estimate of secular things: “the smallest matters.” Cf. “that which is least” (Luke 16:10, expounded by 1 Corinthians 6:8; 1 Corinthians 6:11) = worldly wealth and honour, in many cases. By you.—Lit. in you; as, “in that Man” (Acts 17:31).1 Corinthians 6:3. (Evil) angels.—No hint that the good need to submit to a “judgment.” (See Jude 1:6-8; also the saints glorifying God’s judgments, Revelation 19:3.)1 Corinthians 6:4.—Choose between (a) “set” (imperative) and (b) “ye set” (indicative). Also between two meanings of “them … least esteemed in the Church”; (c) “the ‘nobodies’ of your membership”; or (d) “the secular judges, who, being secular, men of the world, are, in the eyes of the members of the Church, and in comparison with themselves, of no account.” (d) Highly improbable. Adopt (a) and (c); half-ironical counsel.1 Corinthians 6:5.—As usual meaning “to your shaming,” “that I may arouse your sense of shame.”1 Corinthians 6:7. Fault.—A falling away from the ideal of the dignity of being Christians, and from the ideal of brotherly love, essential to the character. .—1 Corinthians 6:1-8 The Christian and Litigation. I. Some limitations to an absolute prohibition of Christian appeal to secular courts to be noted.— 1. The State and the Law were not then Christian, but heathen. Case of Corinthian Church not to be compared with condition of things where government, legislation, justice, are affected by, or based on, great principles of Christianity. The parallel case is rather that of two Christians at issue, of whom one, or both, is inclined to drag the matter before a mocking Mahometan kadi, or before an idolatrous, perhaps persecuting, Hindoo prince. In Christendom, at its lowest worth, the “secular” court is, in a sense, an outer Court of the Church, or at least an annexe. Persecuted English Nonconformists have appealed to English judges, often Christian men. 2. The matter in dispute is supposed to be one wholly between Christian parties. “A family business;” the family’s “dirty linen, to be washed at home.” Paul himself carried the case, between him and the Sanhedrin, before the court of the Emperor Nero. “I ought to be judged … at Cæsar’s judgment seat,” viz. before Festus, Cæsar’s representative (Acts 25:10). The wrong suffered by a Christian at the hands of a non-Christian may not be merely a personal hardship, beginning and ending with the man and the particular case. [In this latter case the Christian had better suffer, especially if the wrong be put upon him because he is a Christian. 1 Peter 4:19 then applies: “Commit … unto a faithful Creator.” “The Lord is at hand.” Also Matthew 5:38-45 : “Resist not evil.” “Turn other cheek.” “Let … have cloke also.”] But Christians may happen to represent society. Vindication of his own purely civil right may be needful for sake of social order. [This rule is to be very reluctantly applied, with earnest prayer and great watchfulness over his spirit, lest self, or anger, or pride, or revenge, insinuate themselves into the public spirit of his appeal to law. Matthew 5:44 very earnestly then to be remembered: “Love … enemies. Pray for them that despitefully use you.”] 3. Matthew 5:34-37 (“Swear not at all.… Your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay”) applies to an ideal society within an ideal kingdom of God. In practice, in the real, complex, actual social order, Christ (silent before, Matthew 26:63) and Paul (2 Corinthians 1:23) did speak upon a confirmatory oath. One general rule explains and justifies: “Whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil”; Christians have to do with fallen men and an evil world. In dealing with these, abatement from the ideal is forced upon them in use of litigation in secular courts. But, within the Church, keep to the ideal. So here, in this section. II. Between Christian and Christian, and in “biotics” merely (1 Corinthians 6:4), litigation before secular tribunals is to be discouraged [unless as last resort]. 1. It is an insult to the dignity of the Church and its Lord. “Dare you?”—The thing is treasonable [as when, in the Middle Ages, English law forbade causes to be taken from the King’s courts to that of the Pope]. What jurisdiction have the “unjust” and their courts within the kingdom of Christ? And shall it be a Christian who seeks to introduce the foreign jurisdiction? Does Christ’s law need confirming or superseding, that you appeal to secular? He has given directions for procedure (Matthew 18:15-20). First, “thee and him alone.” That failing, a court of first instance; “two or three witnesses.” That failing, the supreme court, the Full “Church,” presided over by the Lord Himself: “there am I in the midst.” They “agree to ask” His guidance; their decisions—“binding” or “loosing”—are His, “bound” or “loosed” “in heaven.” 2. It is unworthy of your own dignity who are resorting to the secular judge.—You seek, and bow to, his decisions, who shall one day stand before you and have to bow to your judgment? [An obscure topic as yet. See Beet’s note appended. (1) Generally it is the last link of a series of identifications of the saints with their Lord. They “shall be glorified together” (Romans 8:17). Crucified, buried, risen, ascended, hid (as He is) in God, enthroned already with Him (Colossians 3:3; Ephesians 2:6), in like manner they are to be brought forth with Him (1 Thessalonians 4:14), and to be assessors with Him in judgment. (2) Further, as impossible yet to draw up a coherent, consistent programme of the sub-final Age preceding the Parousia and the General Judgment (and even to adjust all the relations between these two last), as it would have been in Old Testament days to draw up a programme of the First Advent of Christ. Yet collate, tentatively (Daniel 7:22-27), “Judgment was given to the saints”; Matthew 19:28 (Luke 22:30), “Ye shall sit … judging the twelve tribes.” In Matthew 25 the faithful servant is made “ruler”; in Luke 19:12 sqq. (Pounds, not Talents) the faithful servant has “authority over … cities.” Revelation 21:24-26 distinguishes between the nations and their kings (outside) and the New Jerusalem and its citizens (within). Also in Matthew 25 it is expressly “all the nations” that are arrayed before the Son of Man, and even those set on the right hand are distinguished from “these” to whom their good offices have been rendered. Are “these” the assessor-saints sitting in judgment with their Lord?] Whatever may be behind all these mysterious intimations, this is clear: The little Church in Gorinth is invested with a dignity elevating it above all earthly greatness. As seen from heaven, the little nuclei here and there in the Roman world, of artisans, slaves, Jews, “not many noble,” etc., are the distinguished factors in human society. Heaven’s eye singles out the Churches as the all-important facts of earth. The Christian man is to disdain outside help and vindication. What can he want higher, better, more authoritative, than a Church tribunal? Moreover, why should he, a peer of the kingdom, submit himself to the nobody, the commoner, outside its pale and honour—perhaps its enemy? Cannot a Christian trust the competency, or at least the brotherly fairness or love, of his brethren? Do not say you cannot have a Church court; nobody to constitute one. [Extreme case on record: an Independent Church died down to three members; two of them, women, expelled for drunkenness, the third, a man.] Brother and brother should submit to brethren. Not secular litigation, but Church arbitration, the first, the favourite, method whenever possible. Respect the brethren, respect yourselves, ye judges of angels! [“All that statesmen, as such, have to do with religion is to be themselves under its power; all that Christians, as such, have to do with the State is to be good citizens” (Dr. Brown, Horœ Subs., Second Series, p. 52).] 3. It is to degrade the Church and the brother in the eyes of the world. “Before the unbelievers!”—Bad enough that brother sues brother at all. Even the world has its proverb, “Dog does not eat dog” (cf. Galatians 5:15). It is a sad “come down” (1 Corinthians 6:6) from what your spirit ought to be. But it is a sadder, deeper descent when the brotherhood, showing its worst side, is dragged into the eye of an unfriendly, cold world; when passions which ought not to be known within the Body are obtruded upon the notice of the world,—selfishness defending itself against, or overreaching, selfishness; jealousy, covetousness, partisan feeling, a too eager grasp at the things of a temporal world, and the like. Have no such feelings at all; but if ye do have cases arising (1 Corinthians 6:4), at least, for shame, keep them from the men of the world. 4. It is an exaggeration of the importance of the matters at issue.—Mere “things pertaining to this life,” “the smallest matters,” are they worth dividing the brotherhood over, and, much more, of dishonouring it before the outside world? If you will have the matter out, I had almost said, find some poor, humble, simple members, and let them judge; they are good enough judges for such business! But there is a better thing still: do not insist on “having it out”! Let it go. [This the meaning of Php 4:5 : “Your moderation.” “Do not stand too stiffly upon your rights. Yield something of what, in the abstract, is really your due. If there cannot be ‘give and take,’ better that you do all the ‘giving,’ than hurt, by an insistence which may become obstinacy, and may lead to estrangement, strife, and division, the peace of the Church.”] Take wrong; be defrauded. The Lord will see your interests safe. “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Why, you are the wrong-doers, the defrauders—brethren! NOTES1 Corinthians 6:2.—“… In the great Day the saints will intelligently and cordially approve and endorse the sentence pronounced by Christ on the millions of earth. Possibly this approval may be a divinely appointed and essential condition, without which sentence would not be pronounced. For it may enter into God’s plan that sentence be pronounced not only by Man upon men, but by men, themselves redeemed from their own sins, upon those who have chosen death rather than life.… It may be that final sentence cannot, according to the principles of the Divine Government of the Universe, be pronounced upon the lost without the concurrence of the saved, i.e. without a revelation of the justice of the sentence so clear as to secure the full approbation of the saved. If so, the concurrence of the saved is an essential element in the final judgment; and they may truly be said to judge both men and angels. That the sentence which the saints will pronounce is put into their lips by Christ does not make their part in the judgment less real; for even the Son says (John 5:30), ‘I cannot of Myself do anything; as I hear I judge.’ ” Also, further, on 1 Corinthians 6:3 : “Thus man and men will pronounce sentence on those mighty powers which have seduced men, but from whose grasp the saints have been saved.… All this reveals a mysterious and wonderful connection (cf. Colossians 1:20) between the moral destiny of our race and that of other races.”—Beet, in loc. NOTES1 Corinthians 6:2.—“… In the great Day the saints will intelligently and cordially approve and endorse the sentence pronounced by Christ on the millions of earth. Possibly this approval may be a divinely appointed and essential condition, without which sentence would not be pronounced. For it may enter into God’s plan that sentence be pronounced not only by Man upon men, but by men, themselves redeemed from their own sins, upon those who have chosen death rather than life.… It may be that final sentence cannot, according to the principles of the Divine Government of the Universe, be pronounced upon the lost without the concurrence of the saved, i.e. without a revelation of the justice of the sentence so clear as to secure the full approbation of the saved. If so, the concurrence of the saved is an essential element in the final judgment; and they may truly be said to judge both men and angels. That the sentence which the saints will pronounce is put into their lips by Christ does not make their part in the judgment less real; for even the Son says (John 5:30), ‘I cannot of Myself do anything; as I hear I judge.’ ” Also, further, on 1 Corinthians 6:3 : “Thus man and men will pronounce sentence on those mighty powers which have seduced men, but from whose grasp the saints have been saved.… All this reveals a mysterious and wonderful connection (cf. Colossians 1:20) between the moral destiny of our race and that of other races.”—Beet, in loc. SECTION.—1 Corinthians 6:9-111 Co 6:9.—Query, is the particular “wrong” and “defrauding” in 1 Corinthians 6:8-9 connected with 2 Corinthians 7:12, the case of “the incestuous person”? Had the father been ready to appeal to a secular court for redress? Some such connection would explain the transition in this verse from “litigation” to “fornication.” [In 2 Corinthians 7:2 Paul uses in negatived connection with himself “wrong” and “defraud.”] N.B., like Romans 1:24 usque ad fincm, this chapter gives a significant glimpse of the every-day corruption of the heathen world, with all the civilization of Greece and Rome. Effeminate.—Euphemistic.1 Corinthians 6:10.—Note in what company we find “covetousness.” Stanley suggests a connection between “thieves” and the lawsuits (but query?). Revilers.—Virulent, foul abuse; generally, not always. John 9:28; Acts 23:4; 1 Corinthians 4:12; 1 Peter 2:13; 1 Timothy 5:14; 1 Peter 3:9; 1 Corinthians 5:11; and here. Inherit.—Cf. Matthew 25:34; James 2:5, “heirs of the kingdom.”1 Corinthians 6:11.—Observe “were … were … were.” Partly historical, partly ideal. In ideal, Faith, Baptism, Renewal, Separation from sins of old character and life, coincide in time; in fact, Baptism may be pre- or post-dated in regard to Faith and Renewal; Separation may very imperfectly accompany the rest. Justified.—Protestantism rightly lays stress upon the relative change involved in pardon of sin; makes this its definition of Justification (Acts 13:38-39). Yet (e.g. Wesley, Sermons) “some rare instances may be found wherein the terms ‘justified’ and ‘justification’ are used in so wide a sense as to include sanctification also; yet in general use they are sufficiently distinguished from each other both by St. Paul and the other inspired writers.” Also, cf. Romans 8:30, where attention is not so much fixed upon the initial act of God as upon the continuously accorded and maintained status of the justified man, covering the whole interval from pardon to glory. Also, no careful adherence here to the ordo salutis (Calvin, in Ellicott). Observe “in … in.” Observe “our God.” .—1 Corinthians 6:9-11I. The kingdom of God.— 1. Observe how the phrase and idea had got cleared in Paul’s mind from all the foolish and ridiculous Rabbinical accretions and anticipations of a great temporal monarchy under Messiah, in which, freed from the Roman or other yoke, Israel should be the nation, and the Gentile world exist for the sake of the Jew. 2. We have here a case of the true Evolution. (1) Israel had been the kingdom of God on earth. As Babylon was Nebuchadnezzar’s, or Egypt was Pharaoh’s, or Damascus Rezin’s or Hazael’s. Jehovah was the only, the real, King of the realm. David, Solomon, etc., were understood to be only viceroys under Jehovah. Jehovah’s law was State law. Idolatry was treason. Citizens were born into the citizenship [cf. in contrast, John 1:13]; Israel, in the midst of the nations, stood distinguished as the nation of God in the land of God. But it never perfectly realised the idea. The land never was cleared of enemies for Jehovah. The people never did perfectly keep Jehovah’s law. They were not satisfied with, or mindful of, the true King Jehovah. At last, when the mob howled wildly around Pilate’s judgment seat, “We have no king but Cæsar,” came the beginning of the end of even this imperfect embodiment of God’s idea. (2) Next, the Church of Christ is made to exhibit “God’s kingdom.” Again there is a separate people, God’s “peculiar people,” but of no one nation, located in no one land. The kingdom is wherever a heart is in which Christ is accepted as God’s anointed King of His new Israel. “Kingdom of God within you.” Every heart won is a new piece of territory added to God’s realm on earth. God’s “royal,” “perfect, law of liberty” (James 1:25; James 2:8) is the State law, and rules the hearts of the citizens of this better setting forth of the “kingdom of God.” (3) “Better,” but not perfect, or ideal. For that we look to Eternity. Heaven is at last the idea of God realised. A people all holy, all happy, in a land without sin or curse; every heart beating pulse and pulse in communion with the King; love to the King the one sufficient, all-embracing law for every subject, written in the heart; God ruling over a race, all His people, dwelling in a world [perhaps “a new earth”] undisputedly His dominion. Thus, as Israel, the Church, the inner Experience of believers, Heaven—God’s recovered idea of a “kingdom of God” has progressively been exhibited “in many parts and in many manners” (Hebrews 1:1); each “illustration” traced on the same lines as its predecessor, with additions, modifications, added detail. II. Its citizens.—Not “the unrighteous.” 1. Only an absolute exclusion when the kingdom of God is Heaven. Separation made (Matthew 25:33; Matthew 25:46). Impossible to conceive of the Holy City admitting “what defileth,” etc. (Revelation 21:27; Revelation 22:15); cannot pass the gates. 2. Very imperfectly attempted in Israel. Levitical law had many enactments whose sanction was, “That soul shall be cut off from among the People.” But those—never actually enforced to any great extent—missed nearly all forms of “unrighteousness” which did not culminate in overt action. 3. Only partially to be accomplished in the Christian Church. In the sub-Pentecostal, almost ideal, days of the Church, the King vindicated the principle by the cutting off of Ananias and Sapphira [the New Testament analogue of the death of Achan]. But God is not perpetually stepping forth in acts of holy self-vindication against sin in His world or in the Church of His Son. All Church discipline, and forms (or tests) of Church membership, are so many humanly devised, often God honoured, methods of endeavouring to keep out the “unrighteous,” or to exclude them when in. But they never can secure more than an approximation to the idea of a kingdom in which no “unrighteous” are found. No method, actual or proposed, ever gets worked with perfect intelligence, or perfect faithfulness; no method of human administration can deal with heart-unrighteousness. 4. There is a perfect, self-acting, discipline of exclusion; a Divine excommunication. Sin means real incapacity for understanding, seeing, entering, the kingdom here; an utter unfitness for heaven, a moral impossibility, hereafter. Sin forfeits justification; the “blood” no longer “cleanses” (1 John 1:7); it negatives the possession of the holiness without some degree of which no man is really regenerate or sanctified, nor can be a child in the family or a citizen of the kingdom. “Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit He taketh away”; the Vine-dresser’s knife executes its sentence of excommunication. The Church must often leave the dead branch still attached to the Vine; or must be ignorant of the fulness of its death. “Be not deceived.” III. Candidates for citizenship.— 1. Who but the “unrighteous”? What a catalogue! “Thieves,” “effeminate,” “drunkards,” cannibals, murderers, sinners of every type, degree, age, race! From such the citizens are recruited! No citizen who was not an alien once. [No quarry from which stones cannot be got fit for Christ’s building. No stone which cannot be utilised by Him. There is really no other stone than such as this in the building.] (Ephesians 2:1-3; Ephesians 2:11-13.) The life-history of every citizen follows the formula, “Such were you, but ye were washed.… Ye are citizens.” 2. To such the kingdom comes by “inheritance.” (True now, and true “when the Son of Man shall come in His glory,” ut supra.) Such became “joint-heirs with Christ” in the possession of the kingdom. By inheritance; a concomitant of the new status, the new life; so certainly as they are “washed,” etc., do they inherit. The “washing,” etc., brings with it, ipso facto, an entering into possession. And as certainly by-and-by, with an unbroken sequence, does the “washing,” etc., go with the “inheriting.” There is no other final goal and resting-place congruous with, and possible for, the renewed citizen life. No entering without a change preceding; no change without the inheritance following. IV. The initiation.—“Washing, “sanctifying” justifying.” (See Critical Notes, above) Paul not speaking with any theological precision of order. Yet if sanctification be only the relative holiness, completed by a “separating” act (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:2), no necessary difficulty to find it followed by “justification” in the ordinary sense of pardon,—the (forensic) discharge from all liability to penalty on account of a broken law; the two acts of God’s grace, separable in thought. coincide in time. Or, better, remember that the status of a justified man is a perpetually renewed grace; underlying all after-developments of the gracious life; assumed as the foundation on which all the superstructure of holiness is reared. Even in heaven, the saint will be there, and will remain there, only as a sinner justified, accepted, for the sake of that “Lamb” in whose “blood” he has trusted for salvation. The basis of all is the objective work of that Christ, who is revealed in His name as exactly what He is to, and for, us. On this rests, and rises, the (subjective) work of the Spirit of God. As the eruption of the leprosy falls off when the new health courses through the system, so these old, foul sins fall away from the life, when the spiritual health is renewed and becomes full, by the entering and indwelling of the Spirit of God. 1 Corinthians 6:11. Perpetual Miracles. I. Changed men a patent evidence of the supernatural.— 1. Age of miracles past? Yes, in the technical sense. Miracles [and Inspiration] by definition coterminous, in time and extent of distribution, with the progressive impartation of Revelation. Outside that process they are not found; Revelation complete, they cease. Revelation and Christ its Centre and Subject are a standing miracle. [The miracles were credentials of the agents and messengers and message; but, still more, themselves parts of the Revelation.] 2. In lower sense, No. God always (and not only in “miracles”) was in closest touch with the visible, material, “natural” order; is still. The converted man, at Corinth or anywhere else, knows that a power has come upon him from without, and that not human, or creaturely, but Divine. Conversion meant the point when the unseen broke in effectively upon him and changed whole current of thought and will and life. The process has its “natural analogies.” “I live by the faith of [this truth, and in this Person] a Son of God, who loved me,” etc. (Galatians 2:20). I.e. a new ruling idea has taken possession and revolutionised life. A new affection is expelling all old evil affections. And this new idea, the new affection, has come with the “demonstration of the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:4; cf. 1 Thessalonians 1:5-7). “No man can say that Jesus is Lord [nor “my Lord”] but by the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3). 3. The man is an evidence to himself, and to others also. Men look at, observe, wonder at, the man whom they knew, who was yesterday “such” as they are; who is now pure, “washed, sanctified,” who has evidently laid hold of a power to do, and be, right which they do not possess; and of the secret of a life, for which no interest, or force of will, or ordinary human motives, can account. “God has touched that man!” A compendious evidence, and striking, appealing to all. II. Vindication of universality of power and applicability of Gospel.—No case it cannot touch, etc. (as in Homiletic Analysis). Workers need this. Temptation in mission-fields, and at home, when evangelistic work is at a discount and conversions are few, to look at the difficulties in the way of producing conviction, and of inducing open confession even where conviction is secured; to adjust expectations to one’s narrower success; to acquiesce in meagre success with the cultured or rich; “our hope is with the poor” [and much Scripture can be quoted!]; to give up hope of the adults: “must not expect much from the generation of to-day, brought up in heathenism, with habits, training, etc., set; our hope is in the children; educate them Christianly.” [Good work, but not to leave other undone.] Every now and again, at home and in mission-fields, God does some such wonders as these at Corinth, and rebukes little faith, and too ready acquiescence in the “hopelessness” of the adult generation. Paul’s success everywhere was mainly with adult heathen, adult Jews. The Evangelical revival of eighteenth century in England began amongst adults, thieves, pugilists, unclean, worldlings, fashionables, every type. Every such case rebukes unfaithful thinkers and workers, and reassures and heartens all faithful but despondent ones. Again and again the Gospel matches itself against adult heathenism, adult sin, and wins. “Such were some of you, but.” It can touch and save all ages, classes, types. III. Happy Paul, happy anybody who can appeal to such personal verifications of the truth of the message he preaches!—How confidently he makes his next appeal, when he can recall a dozen instances where his formula of the spiritual life was verified. How conclusive his appeals and arguments, to the men whom he can claim as evidences of the truth of what he advances. “I know—you know—how true is all I say. Ye were … ye are,” etc. Happy the man who “has his quiver full” of such spiritual children (Psalms 127:5). With such arrows he can meet “in the gate” his own doubts about his “call” or the denial of it by others. Good “letters of ordination” are such plain and unmistakable converts as these. The healed sick are the best diploma of a true physician. 1 Corinthians 6:9-11. I. Delusion.—Its danger. Its folly. Its source—ignorance, from a blinded heart: “the deceitfulness of sin.” All in danger. The worst hope for impunity. II. Inclusion.—Even for such sinners. All may hope for mercy. Its method: “ye were washed,” etc. Into a kingdom, and that of God. III. Exclusion.—The real excommunication. What? Who? Why? How? 1 Corinthians 6:9-11. “Soul, remember.” I. What thou wert, with a gracious sadness. II. What thou art, with a sober gladness. III. How the change was wrought, with a hallowed thankfulness. 1 Corinthians 6:11. The Great Contrast.— 1. With skill of an artist, Paul represents two portraits of same persons: Corinthians,—wretched, polluted, in rags, enslaved by sin;—then, morally changed, cleansed, robed in righteousness, enjoying high Christian privileges. 2. Not to discourage, to wound feelings; to impress two thoughts—(a) impossibility for impure man to partake the blessings of … kingdom; (b) obligation laid on them to renounce sin, live holy life. 3. Therefore, “examine both portraits; mark contrast.” I. Past state of redeemed.—Applicable to all redeemed, everywhere; all sinners, by nature governed and influenced by same principles. Heart impure. Four things true of their past unregenerate state: 1. Void of moral rectitude. Conscience burdened with guilt. Heart’s throne occupied by intruder; they enslaved by sin. 2. Subject to impure influences. Affections defiled. If conscience loses authority, nothing to prevent most debasing slavery. Love of self, of pleasure, of the world—three mighty powers control soul. Every thought, emotion, feeling, under power of one of these. In us—in appearance better than Corinthians—these more successfully checked in outward development. 3. Slaves of wrong habits. Deeds evil. Conscience and affections wrong, deeds must be inconsistent with truth and righteousness. 4. Incapable of spiritual enjoyment. No capacity, no taste, no fitness, for the exalted pleasures of religion, the pure joys of the heavenly world. “New creatures” alone adapted to “new heaven.” A foul, old portrait. II. The present state of the redeemed.— 1. The change. (1) An initiatory act. “Washed;” allusion to baptism, striking emblem of moral cleansing. But evidently also reference to another washing, which alone can take away sin,—work of Holy Spirit on heart. “The commencement of wonderful change in believer’s soul: opening of understanding, impressing of heart, moving of affections, enkindling of new thoughts and desires. Separation from world, conversion to God.” (2) Progressive development. “Sanctified.” No faultless perfection. A process of spiritual cleansing. An ascent by slow, gradual, continued progress. (3) Beautiful completion. “Justified.” Mentioned last, considered first. Three great causes at work in Justification. Illustrate by drowning man saved by rope; the friend who throws the rope, the grasp of the hand, parallel to the Spirit’s exhibition of Christ, Saviour’s work, penitent’s own faith. 2. The means. “The name,” etc. No other could have moved depraved hearts of Corinthians; no other can change a heart 3. The agency. “The Spirit,” etc. Giving effect to the word preached; appealing to conscience, subduing enmity, gaining heart. Application.—Need of calm and solemn reflection. Will produce humility, gratitude, deep, lively sense of mercy of God. Also, evidently no sinner need despair.—Condensed from J. H. Hughes, “Homilist,” New Series, i. 125. MAIN TOPIC.—1 Corinthians 6:12-201 Co 6:12. Lawful.—Here, and in 1 Corinthians 10:23. To be put in quotation marks, “All … lawful.” His own words, or something like them, quoted and misused by the Antinomian party. [Cf. the misuse of Christ’s actual words, Mark 14:58, from John 2:19. Expedient.—Study Paul’s “expediency”; here, 1 Corinthians 10:23; 2 Corinthians 8:10; 2 Corinthians 12:1; Romans 14:13 sq, Compare “All things to all men, that I may … save,” 1 Corinthians 9:22. (See Appended Homilies, more fully.)1 Corinthians 6:13.—Christ ate broiled fish and honeycomb (Luke 24:42) after His resurrection, but only to help affrighted, bewildered disciples to realise that He was not simply a phantasm, but a substantial reality.1 Corinthians 6:15. Take.—“Take “away,” q.d. from Christ to whom they belong and are joined (Evans).1 Corinthians 6:16. Saith he.—Adam; or “saith it,” viz. Genesis. In either case notice that the word is regarded as a fundamental, inspired word of God.1 Corinthians 6:18. Flee.—“When a temptation of lust assaults thee, do not resist it by heaping up arguments against it and disputing with it, considering its offers and its danger; but fly from it, that is, think not at all of it; lay aside all consideration concerning it, and turn away from it by any severe and laudable thought of business. St. Hierome very wittily reproves the Gentile superstition, who pictured the Virgin Deities armed with a shield and lance, as if chastity could not be defended without war and direct contention. No; this enemy is to be treated otherwise. If you hear it speak, though but to dispute with it, it ruins you, and the very arguments you go about to answer leave a relish upon the tongue. A man may be burned if he goes near the fire, though but to quench his house; and by handling pitch, though but to draw it from your clothes, you defile your fingers” (Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living, sect. iii.). He also quotes Augustine: “Contra libidinis impetum apprehende fugam, si vis obtinere victoriam.” Observe imperfect tense, q.d. “Flee, and flee” (Evans). Every sin.—Natural to supply, and read, “Every other sin.” But query? Does he rather put fornication into a category, a genus, with but one species, and that having but one, unique, abnormal, abhorrent example? “Sins” may sufficiently classify and condemn other evil acts. But this? We want another, blacker, more terrible name with which to head its category. Difficulty oftener with “every.” “Common view … that Apostle … speaking in general form, that exact words not to be pressed (‘tales sententi� morales non morose urgend�,’ Beng.), there being some sins, e.g. intemperance, which can hardly be said to be completely without the body. The true force of what … already said … thus seriously weakened: there is no sin which is within the body in the frightful form in which fornication is. By it the whole body, inwardly as well as outwardly, is made over to another, and is utterly separated from Christ.… Intemperance and self-murder involve acts injuriously affecting the body, yet done … from without; but the sin of the fornicator … is, so to say, within the body, and using it as a direct agent and implement.… Fornication is a sin against the personality, in a form and to an extent far beyond that of any other sin of sensuality” (slightly condensed from Ellicott). Without the body.—“They require some motive or weapon other than the body. But this sin stands alone in making the human body, the chosen medium of Christ’s self-manifestation to the world, to be itself a sufficient motive and instrument of sin” (Beet). Observe not “without … within,” but “without … against”; as if others missed, though aimed at; this hits, the body. (So Evans.)1 Corinthians 6:19.—This more than “Ye are (collectively) the Temple” (1 Corinthians 3:16).1 Corinthians 6:20.—It is an over-subtle, over-pressing, use of idea of ransom to endeavour to fix precisely to whom price paid. Analogy of ransom only fits serviceably the two ideas,—bought by the new owner, to deliver from an old, to keep for himself, whose new service is (practically) liberty, and is (absolutely) deliverance from old bondage. 1 Peter 1:19, “Precious blood, (even the blood) of Christ.” Note particularly the true reading here. Last words to be omitted. .—1 Corinthians 6:12-20[Direct, public, homiletic use of whole paragraph plainly possible only under exceptional circumstances and within narrow limits. Particular clauses very available and fruitful. May suggest:] I. A great principle (1 Corinthians 6:12). Its limitations. II. A great sin (1 Corinthians 6:18; 1 Corinthians 6:15). III. A great honour (1 Corinthians 6:17; 1 Corinthians 6:13-15; 1 Corinthians 6:19), of even the body. IV. A great ransom (1 Corinthians 6:20). V. A great obligation (1 Corinthians 6:20). I. A. Christianity is liberty.— 1. From old Jewish law, as such; from external law, as the prime principle of action or guide of life. Not a religion of restrictions, external prescriptions; its “law” is the love of the renewed heart. If this were perfect—in proportion as this love advances to being “made perfect” (1 John 4:17-18)—so far, and then, obedience is perfect. “Love God with all the heart,” “love neighbour as oneself”—these mean, worked out in detail, all piety, all benevolence, taught by the instinct of a renewed heart, needing therefore no command (Romans 13:8; Romans 13:10). Hence Augustine’s bold word, “Dilige, et quod vis fac.” 2. In practice, even the growing love still needs the guidance of external command; to guard from mistakes arising from ignorance, and from the half-enlightened instinct; to defend itself against the blinding and bias of indolence, indifference, self-interest, pressure of example or fear. The Jewish law embodied, in temporary forms and in particular instances, principles, permanent and perfectly general, still binding upon Christians; “under (even that) law to Christ” (1 Corinthians 9:21). The “heart runs in the way of the commandment.” Law and liberty, love and life, coincide. 3. Paul had probably said this; but it had been repeated as, “Do what you like.” True, as a theory of life, but not as working basis of action. “What you like” will be God’s law—not less nor more—when perfect love and perfect judgment are found, and in a perfect world. But so long as, in this complex social order, light is scanty, judgment imperfectly cleared, love only variable or feeble, “what you like” is the true centre indeed from which to strike the circle of Christian liberty, but the radius varies in length from age to age, country to country, person to person, and may widen or narrow the sphere of Christian liberty. B. Three limitations formulated by Paul.— 1. Not expedient; (a) because tending to mastery; (b) because unedifying. 2. Distinctly sinful. (See Separate Homily.) “Expediency,” on Paul’s lips, is a solemnly weighed rule of life, limiting his liberty in even things indifferent; the world’s “expediency” extends liberty, even to things doubtful or wrong, depending as it does upon no higher considerations than of prudence and interest, or even profit. A Christian is lord of this world and its life. His lordship is part of another Lordship, that of Christ (Hebrews 2:5-10; Mark 2:28). “All things are His” (1 Corinthians 3:21). But all do not, or do not equally, help his true, eternal life; many things tend to establish a sway over his will, fatal to his freedom to serve his Lord; these it is “expedient” for him to let alone. “Some actions (e.g. the use of stimulants) tend to create in some persons an irresistible habit. Now whatever deprives us of self-control does us harm, and must therefore be avoided, even though in itself lawful” (Beet). Master of all things, he must first, and at all costs, be master of himself. Otherwise in the individual is repeated that bondage of the designed Master and Lord to that Nature and that World which were designed to serve him; a bondage from which The Man, Jesus, has recovered Man; that He may then recover the individual man, and reinstate him with Himself in Man’s rightful dominion. (The far-reaching teaching of Hebrews, ubi supra.) The Christian must be a co-worker with his Liberator, Christ, in seeing that no new, needless bondage is imposed by his own inadvertence, or by his ill-judged use of an abstract liberty. II. A. Fornication not a thing indifferent.—[Best classical, heathen ethics put it perfectly on a level with the desire for, and indulgence in, food and drink. Physical purity was a thing hardly known outside the Jewish and Christian pale. They hardly regarded the body as part of the true man. Its acts and appetites seemed, in a sense, external to the man himself, and therefore indifferent.] 1. In the animals the three bodily appetites do stand upon same level; in them each is quite neutral, non-moral; needful to sustain, or to hand on, animal life. In man they do not occupy same level. [Jeremy Taylor points out thus one plain distinction: “If a man be hungry he must eat, and if he be thirsty he must drink in some convenient time, or else he dies; but if the body be rebellious, so the mind be chaste, let it do its worst, if you resolve perfectly not to satisfy it, you can receive no great evil by it.”] 2. We cannot state an equality of ratios thus: As “Belly” to “Meats” so is “Body” to “Fornication.” [Probably, so baldly stated as that, not even a Corinthian Christian would have defended the principle which seemed to underlie the arguments (? and the practice) of the Antinomian party.] Not even in the case of the “Belly” was the physical pleasure the design of its creation and co-adaptation to “Meats.” Certainly, in the parallel case, the body was not created for the pleasure. 3. Belly and Food have a mutual adaptation for the sake of the body’s support; yet they have only in view the support of a life which must end at the same time as they are “destroyed” together. So far as the body, in its formation and endowment with the third appetite, has reference to man’s life, it is to that whole complete life which has a capacity for God and Eternity. Food and the food organs co-operate to keep the mere physical and dying part of the man in temporary repair. Man and woman are co-workers with God in reproducing or handing on manhood in its entirety, with a future, eternal, destiny for the body as well as for the soul and spirit. “Belly” has no higher end than “meats.” The body is “for the Lord.” “Belly” and “Meats” perish together when their work is done; “God will raise (not body, but) us.” That is the end and future of the body. The cases are quite distinct. Again, 4. Fornication is paralleled by no other physical sin in its relation to the body. Beyond any other, it finds within the body itself what it makes the means of pleasure. The man makes his very self the instrument of his sin. B. Further reasons arise out of the fact that this sin runs most utterly counter to III. (See also under 1 Corinthians 6:1). III. A great honour, and that for even the body of man.—A. A most intimate oneness with Christ. “One spirit.”— 1. Compare with this the closest friendship based upon similarity of tastes, pursuits, interests, long association from childhood; however closely these may approximate two hearts and lives, yet there are diversities, which may widen into divergencies and divisions. Change on either side—if even only as the result of individual growth, which cannot be enforced to a pattern, and made to proceed in duplicate—may make a very choice, close, intimate association “drop through.” Much more may a wrongly spoken or wrongly understood word, break it up. 2. Compare the bond set up by blood-relationship, as between sisters, or sisters and brothers in same family, with many sympathies in common, and all the bond of “clannishness” to hold them together, and even to make external attack draw the bond only tighter. Yet a brother may become a stranger; there are friends that “stick closer” than brethren. [Proverbs 18:24 is a general observation on human life; though fairly to be applied, as the highest exemplification, to Christ.] The bond between Christian and Christian is often stronger than between a man and his (non-Christian) kith-and-kin; the common understanding of each other’s aims and feelings and experiences is deeper and truer than that which natural kinship gives; Christian affinity is often more than brotherly, sisterly affinity. 3. Nearest to it approaches—and that for a very real and profound reason—the union between a Christian husband and wife, where to all the natural basis of an ideal marriage there is added the common sharing in the life of grace. (See chap. 7, passim.) 4. Yet in these there is association, approximation, assimilation, union, communion—no more. In this other there is unity. In those there is individual life, with its self-contained independence, its possibilities of divergence, its peril of developing antagonism. “The soul of Jonathan was knit to soul of David” (1 Samuel 18:1) comes very near. Yet each heart even then has its penetralia, its Holy of Holies, of privacy, into which no most trusted and beloved foot must intrude, or can be admitted. 5. Here is unity, almost identification. “I live no longer; Christ liveth in me.” As if in the believer the man came into contact and relation with an “extension” of his Lord. Not only two parallel lives, however perfectly conformed to each other, echoing, reflecting, each other—as in the ordinary human unions; but one life. Because of one life principle. [One βίος because of one ζωή.] [Dare we illustrate by seal and impression (Hebrews 1:3), resting on a deeper oneness—the unity of the Godhead? Distinction, with likeness and oneness. Note, “As the Father hath loved me, so (= thus, in that way), have I loved you” (John 15:9).] As if, in a body, intelligence and affection were distributed as life is, so that, e.g., the hand or foot could know each other, or either could know and understand the head, as the head knows and understands them. Not only a similar, or the same, kind of life, but one and the Same life, distributes itself throughout both and all. [Not be overpressed: these are all serviceable analogies, no more; to be criticised and checked each one by the others. No Mystic extreme of a literal merging of the believer and his life into Christ and His life till the man is lost. The individuality, the personality, the Ego, remains unimpaired. “I am I, and He is He; even when I become one spirit with Him.”] 6. To be remembered that the unity rests upon, and is effected and maintained by, the Work and Indwelling of the Holy Ghost (1 Corinthians 6:19, and Separate Homily). See how interchangeably—though not without a reason for, and a propriety in, each chosen expression—are employed the phrases, “The Spirit of God dwells in you,” and “Christ be in you” (Romans 8:9-10); the Spirit dwelling in a man, and yet so the Spirit of Christ, that He becomes the “common element” of life between the believer and his Lord. 7. And thus, further, the Unity was set up in the moment of our faith in (“into”) Christ, and is maintained so long, and only so long, as nothing impairs or hinders, or negatives and interrupts, a continuous believing. 8. What suggestions in all these, avowedly imperfect, and soon misleading, analogies! They help us to climb to a height from which we see rather than reach possibilities that stretch away in length, breadth, depth, height,—a Canaan of blessing spread out before our eyes in fair extent, and One by us—no tempter—saying, “All may be thine, soul!” They guide, not actually leading very far, but sufficiently far to show us the direction in which our thought and heart may prayerfully, hopefully, believingly, venture to go forward and explore. “Partakers of the Divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) opens a wonderful vista before the eyes. 9. What a profound understanding of Christ is suggested. “We have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16; where mind is not “characteristics,” or “the mind which was in Christ,” but a knowledge of His “mind”). Love is a good master-key, unlocking one mind to the entrance of another into its movements and workings. “He who loves me understands me.” (Conversely: “He will never understand or know me; he does not like me.”) But to be partaker of His life! Sharing, as well as understanding, His sympathies [e.g. how Paul “longs after” his people “in the bowels of Christ” (Philippians 1:8)]; making plans, and yet these not a man’s own, but Christ’s in him [Paul lays his plans “in Christ,” cf. 2 Corinthians 1:17]. [Paul “speaks in Christ” repeatedly, as if his were no independent voice.] 10. What a conformity of thought and will and practice to those of Christ Himself is suggested. [“Grow up into Him in all things” (Ephesians 4:15, etc.).] Beginning with inward likeness, the outward expression of my life and His will more and more coincide. The two wills both there [as against Mysticism], but the free-will of man using its freedom to choose to choose what He chooses, and working in coincident movement with His will. B. In all this the body has its part.—The inner union carries the body with it. 1. It has now an object and a destiny; it is not a mere separable accident of the man. It belongs to Christ; it lives “for the Lord.” The Lord does not disdain it; He once made it the vehicle of His self-manifestation. He died “for the body” which He once deigned to wear, in that He died for the whole man; and when the man is raised, His body will not be forgotten. As when God “raised up by His own power” the whole humanity of the Incarnate Redeemer, so will He raise up the whole of our redeemed humanity too. In human thought the body had been the slave, the outcast, the Pariah-part, of man’s complex nature. Now it was elevated and set by the side of its companions, soul and spirit, with an outlook and a hope. 2. If, in any sense, believers are so “one spirit” with Christ that they can be said to be “extensions of Him,” “part of His enlarged Self,” then the body’s “members are His”; He appropriates them for His own. 3. This more definitely, because, not only is the Church, in its totality and aggregate, a Temple within whose precincts dwells the Spirit of God, but also the very body of the individual believer has its own special, peculiar indwelling, and is a veritable shrine of the Spirit upon earth. (See Separate Homily.) IV. A great ransom price.—A. A true and beautiful distinction may be drawn between redemption by price and by power: here by price. Not the redemption of (say) Lot and his fellow-captives by victorious Abraham, but the ransom of a slave by the payment of the price fixed by his owner. Measure the greatness by:— 1. “Blood.”—The last, greatest, most sacred thing a man can give for his fellow-man (John 15:13; 1 John 3:16). “The fountain of life; the first to live, and the last to die, and the primary seat of the animal soul; it lives and is nourished of itself, and by no other part of the human body” (Harvey, in Speaker’s Commentary). Shedding the blood is the most solemn method of self-surrender of life. 2. “Blood of Christ.”—“Of Christ!” Do men hear that? “Of Christ!” “Silver and gold?” Not to be put into comparison. The very blood of the old sacrifices only serves by comparison to bring out this as more gloriously excellent (Hebrews 9:12-13). When it became a question of redeeming man, it must be by the blood-shedding of none other, none less, than Christ! 3. The great deliverance it has wrought.—Said the Roman, “With a great sum obtained I this freedom.” So such a liberty as ours, liberty, that we might have conferred on us the citizenship (Philippians 3:20 true reading)—could be purchased at no cheaper rate. Perfect, “eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9:12). Liberty, and power, to be holy. 4. God’s noblest creature has been redeemed by it.—“What will a man give in exchange for his—a man’s—soul?” God gave this price in exchange for each soul. B. 1. It has redeemed from curse, bondage, death, into blessing and privilege, viz. liberty, peace, life. Fundamentally it is the price of release from Sin as a condemnation and as a power. Satan and death are real, but subordinate, accidental, representatives of the power of evil; evil might have had its dominion in a world where were no Satan and no death. 2. Complementary truth to the release, whether from penalty or power, is the buying for the Redeemer’s purposes and use and glory. 3. Also, by payment of price, debt cancelled, bond cancelled, liability and fear gone. [Illustrate to children by Gregory and slave-boys in the market at Rome. Buying them from the slave-dealer, by putting down so much money. Yet buying for his own purpose. They are not free, but are his slaves now; to be set free by him, indeed, so that they might study, and serve, under Gregory, from love and gratitude, and that they might in turn go to Angle-land to preach to their fellow-countrymen the Gospel and its greater ransom and deliverance.] All this brings: V. A great obligation. [Notice the true reading, 1 Corinthians 6:20. The Religion of the Body.— 1. Non-Christian view of body branches into (1) asceticism, or (2) licentiousness. Suicide was Stoicism confessing itself defeated, confessing that it could not change man, or the world; nothing for it but to get out of it “nobly.” So Asceticism is Christianity confessing itself defeated, and thinking only of self-preservation. [“Are suicides intense egotists?” (Paxton Hood). Disavowing, or in their self-absorption forgetting, that others have claims upon their life and service. Are asceticism, monasticism, simply egotism thinking chiefly of saving itself?] At least this has been the practical issue of the monastic life, though this began in a nobler ideal, and with a fair justification of celibacy in the special circumstances of the time. [Was good even for civil society that there should not be a powerful, hereditary, sacred caste.] Asceticism proclaims that one whole province of human life, one whole side of human nature, can be done nothing with except (like slaves shut down beneath deck of a slave-ship, or like the Devil in Revelation 20:3) to suppress it, keep it under hatches, under lock and key and chained up. [Licentiousness is an acknowledged defeat in another way. Religion, and even temporal motives, cannot control the physical; it must be left to do its will; even the nobler part of man must submit to its imperious demands.] Christianity assumes, and shows, that there is no part of man’s redeemed nature which ought not to, and cannot be made to, “glorify” its Redeemer. It is the one, only religion which has ever taken full account of the body, and laid it under contribution to accomplish any holy end. [In heathenism, ancient and modern, only too common for devotees to “present their bodies a living sacrifice”; which indeed—remembering how sins of the body had played large part in the lives of Roman converts—gives the form to that exhortation (Romans 12:1).] Sensual, impure sin is really heathen, even when decked out with all the beauty that culture and poetry can lay upon it. It gives the lie to one of the profoundest ideas of God in creation. The merely physical unions of the sexes in plants and animals are the beginning of the disclosure of a thought of God, which passes on through the physical side of marriage, and through the mating of two perfectly suited partners (above all, if these be both Christians), up to the final, full exhibition of it,—the union between Christ and His Church. Sins of impurity empty this grand idea of its contents, till nothing but an appetite and its gratification remains; a reversion to the crude, elementary beginnings of God’s order in creation. Christianity with firm, yet kind, hand traces out limits of lawful exercise of appetites, denying anything beyond, “for our good alway” (Deuteronomy 6:24, a far-reaching truth). 2. Glorify Him by keeping the body in health for His service. Noble service is done by invalids and sick persons. But the bulk of work of Christ must be done by those who are in health. Other things being equal, the best body makes the best worker. (1) Cleanliness is therefore part of godliness. It is Christian duty to give body, brain, eye, hands, etc., sufficient sleep to make it morning by morning at its best for Christ’s service. Holidays find their chiefest benefit, and honour, when they send a “run-down” Christian back to office, or shop, or church, with physical powers reinvigorated by rest and change. It is more than folly not to take sufficient, regular meals of good food, even under pressure of the “claims” of God’s work. Some spiritual phenomena, visions, trances, or the like, have sometimes found basis and explanation in a mistaken, overdone fasting. (2) Every habit or indulgence which exhausts the bodily powers, or destroys their health, is sin against Christ’s lordship of the body. Too much pleasure, in any form which leaves body or brain unfit for prayer or thought, or even for that honest work of the daily calling which is really a most important sphere for glorifying Christ, is condemned. There are “sports that kill” the sportsmen soul and body. All intemperance or excess in gratifying any physical desire, eating, drinking, is condemned. There are prudential reasons against such pleasures or sins; such reasons are God’s danger-signals at the entrance of “roads to ruin.” But only two reasons have very much practical force against passion: to the ungodly, hell-fire; to the godly, the love of God and the twin truths, “Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost,” and this—“The body for the Lord (Christ).” 3. Even the dress of a Christian will find a regulating principle here. The body needs covering for comfort and decency. The instinct of taste is implanted, and may have its rightful gratification. No Christian man or woman is required to dress in an ugly, or ridiculous, or eccentric fashion. One supreme question—having taken account of station, means, proportion of expenditure upon dress, claims of Christ’s poor and Christ’s work—settles everything: “Do I—I—not somebody else dressing as I do—glorify God in my body?” [Early Christian women very noteworthy in this respect.] 4. As said above, the consecrated service of the body to the glory of Christ may be wrought out—may be asked for by Him—in its sickness and weakness rather than its health and vigour. The man may not only be employed for Christ; he may also be laid aside for Christ. It may glorify Christ that he should be a concrete example of the patience, peace, resignation, triumph, which grace can work in ordinary human nature. The testimony of sickness is sometimes a powerful argument and appeal. [Faith-healing exaggerates a true principle, of particular application, into an entirely general rule; teaching that Christ is as certainly, and to as full extent, the present Saviour of the body as of the soul; that it dishonours Him for a believer to lie under the burden of sickness as really as to lie under the burden of sin; that faith in Him would now and in all cases remove both.] [We dare hardly censure those holy spendthrifts of the powers of the body which belongs to Christ, who “kill themselves” by excessive labours, and, still oftener, by taking no proper care of their general health, or of the body when exhausted after labour; who “kill themselves” because they cannot stand and see men unsaved, or work undone. Yet, for most servants of God, more moderate labour, making the body last longer for Christ, is better consecration of the body.] 1 Corinthians 6:12. Christian Expediency.—[Combine also for study of this text chaps. 8, 10, and Romans 14. I. A Christian man’s rule in regard to “things indifferent.” “All things are lawful to me” seems strong; it had been made to carry a stronger and broader meaning than Paul intended. Verbally, he is correctly reported; actually, he is misrepresented. Three specimen cases of what he had in mind found here: 1. The observance of “days” by Christian converts—the fasts and festivals of the law of Moses. 2. Circumcision. 3. Eating of flesh, especially such as had been offered to an idol. Intrinsically “indifferent” all these. No natural mark of distinction upon any “day.” Flesh-meat or vegetables equally “creatures of God, nothing to be refused” (1 Timothy 4:4). An “idol nothing in the world” (1 Corinthians 8:4), and never made any real difference to any healthy food. God had been pleased for a time to make some days “holy”; to have disregarded them would have been sin; but the Jewish system was now done away in Christ, and the old schedule of fasts and festivals with it. Circumcision had become a mere piece of surgery. “All such things are lawful to me; I may do or forbear according to circumstances and expediency.” Evident that before expediency can settle a point of conduct for a Christian, it must be quite clear that essential wrong and right are not involved. The business practice, the amusement, the pleasure, must be morally indifferent, before a Christian can permit himself to conform to it. He will remember, too, how much keener his sense of sin should be, how much higher, and stricter, his standard. Not only nothing that violates the letter, but nothing that touches the spirit, of the moral law, is “lawful,” or “indifferent,” to him. There is, then, no question of “expediency.” As to really “indifferent” things, Paul gives four cases of “inexpedient” things. II. (Chap. 8) Paul could with a clear conscience eat any wholesome food; ceremonially “clean” or “unclean” “offered to an idol” or not. The kind of food he ate did not affect his standing before God (1 Corinthians 6:8). Many Jewish converts could not so rapidly unlearn the teaching of years, or get rid of the habit [reading as, e.g., R.V.] of thinking of some things as “unclean,” and so not allowable to eat. Many Gentile converts could not get rid of old ideas and associations, but still ate “with conscience of the idol” [displaced reading of, e.g., A.V.; true in fact]. Idol to them not nothing, but a “devil” (1 Corinthians 10:20-21; a “demon” to Paul also). The unreasoning, needlessly tender, habit of their mind made them attach some importance to it. Moreover, public heathen banquets were so full of sin and sinful associations, that to join in them was likely to be ensnaring (1 Corinthians 6:12, “Not be mastered by any”), and a source of weakness. “Call it prejudice, if you will” (Romans 14:14 sqq.), “he is a weak brother. But if he cannot do these things with a clear conscience, or without danger to himself, he may not do them at all. Doubteth … is condemned. Not of faith … sin.” Conscience, even half enlightened, must be respected and obeyed. Let a man seek for light; but until he gain more, let him follow conscience with the light it has. (Better a faithful judge, doing his best with an imperfect law, than a more perfect law with a less faithful judge. Help conscience, train it, to be faithful, by obeying it, whilst it acts up to all light it has.) Principle touching (notably) amusements. Whole territory of our life ought to be wholly subject to God. In point of fact, Sin and Satan have entered, and in the pleasures of life notoriously been enthroned, and around their seat is a wide area of occupations manifestly belonging to the territory of evil. A group of pleasures still left manifestly good. Between lies a debatable ground of things indifferent, to be apportioned by “Christian expediency.” The boundary of evil tends to widen. “Expedient” readily becomes “inexpedient”; seldom or never the reverse. Christian men must have relaxations. They may only have such as abide these first tests: “Can I take them with a clear conscience? Can I take them without being mastered by them?” Training may have been (like Jewish) in a “narrow” school. Or (as with Gentiles) associations of the things may be full of sins of past life, and they seem sinful to me, or are really snares. These at any rate not “expedient,” probably not “lawful.” A young convert just rescued from the maelstrom of wordliness must say: “A thing doubtful to my conscience or dangerous to my soul is not a thing lawful for me.” III. The weaker brother may still further narrow the range of my liberty (Romans 14:1 sqq.). I am not to harass him with stronger views, on these “doubtful disputations,” when he first enters the Church. The clever pupils in the school of Christ must not force such a man on too fast in his learning. Be tender of his conscience; try to enlighten it, and so establish his principles; help him to strength of Christian character. But to force him to build himself up in knowledge before the foundation is settled, is to “edify” him to his ruin (1 Corinthians 6:19; 1 Corinthians 6:15). May not with sneer, or contempt, taunt him about “weakness,” old “prejudices,” or the like. Granted that his is not the highest type of Christian manhood, neither teaching nor practice of stronger ones must urge trifling with his conscience. “Destroy not with thy meat” etc.; “If meat make … stumble, I will eat no meat,” etc. (Or, again, chap. 1 Corinthians 8:8 sqq.). “To see you eat meat from the idolaltar will make him bold to swallow down his scruples and violate conscience by sitting down to eat with you? Your greater strength of principle or greater knowledge will make him harden his conscience to do what he cannot yet see clearly right, and what also exposes him to the temptations of his old life, perhaps leading him into greater sin than before? Then “walk in love,” abstain. It is no longer indifferent, or “expedient” for you. I.e. If associations or real danger make these things matters of danger to a “weaker” Christian, they may so become matters of conscience to the “stronger” also. 1. Can hardly determine by general rule how far such association with “weaker” ones is to be regarded as extending. Older Christian and newly converted friend; Sunday-school teacher and class; father and children—is that all? Or (as, e.g., total abstainer in England or America thinks) when the “brotherhood” is that of the same nationality or social system, or wide as manhood. 2. Nothing intrinsically wrong in the dramatic way of telling a story, or in setting horses to race against each other. But such an accretion of vice and villainy gather around the theatre and the turf, that for sake of others (if not for his own sake) a Christian gives up any participation in them. He can stop at any point on the inclined plane, can walk on very verge of danger. If weaker ones follow him, they cannot. He is then in part responsible for their ruin. “Bondage to weakness!” No; but to Christlike love for souls. We shall do anything, abstain from anything, rather than by going the full length of the tether of our own liberty, even contribute to ruin one soul for whom Christ died. IV. (1 Corinthians 10:25 sqq.) Feast going on. Strong brother eating quietly whatever set before him, “asking no questions for conscience’ sake,” but thanking the bountiful God for His good gifts (1 Corinthians 10:30). To see what he will say or do, a weaker Christian, or a heathen guest, says: “That … offered to an idol.” In a moment it acquires new character. If it is to cause difficulty to the conscience of the Christian guest (1 Corinthians 10:29), or the heathen makes it a test of his Christianity, then let him put that dish aside. I.e. If a thing has become a test as between religion and the world, and will be so regarded by servants, children, neighbours, then it is no longer lawful, or at least no longer expedient. May be unreasonably so regarded, but cannot afford to dispute. World will have rough-and-ready tests. Its instinct as to what is “worldly” is as a rule very true. Many Christians will abstain altogether for this reason (or for others) from cards or ballroom, who will still play at billiards. Or they distinguish between billiards and bagatelle, or between playing where all are Christians in a private house, and before a mixed company in public. One all-embracing rule: “Do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). V. Circumcision. (See Critical Notes, and Homily on 1 Corinthians 7:19.)—Jewish controversialists gave a revived, accidental importance to circumcision, which made it still “not” even “lawful” to Paul (Galatians 6:14 sqq.). Modern parallelism in Ritualism. In itself matters nothing, except to taste and cost and convenience, what architecture or music shall be associated with Christian worship. “Vestments” mere matter of interesting archζology. Might smile at the fancy for wearing or using a Roman gallows, and the instrument of sore pain to our Redeemer. But when all these things are made to mean doctrine, then, to those whom the doctrine is not true, and even seems to dishonour the priesthood and sacrifice of Christ, these things become “not expedient,” or even “not lawful.”—H. J. F., “Wesleyan Magazine,” 1878 (abridged). 1 Corinthians 6:12. Worldly Expediency. (To Young Men.)— 1. Days of expediency rather than of principle; in politics, in business; even in Church, the question mooted: “How much of new teaching is it expedient to give as yet to the popular ear?” Need not exaggerate danger, as if of these times only. Expediency always gains strength as God is less completely or vividly realised. [Cf. Hebrews 11:27, “Endured, as seeing Him who is invisible.” “So did not I, because of fear of God” (Nehemiah 5:15). “Set, Lord, always before me … not be moved” (Psalms 16:8).] 2. Expediency may never be a rule of Christian action in case of intrinsic, absolute right or wrong; and in cases of relative, accidental wrong or right will always operate in direction of narrowing area of “right,” and adding to area of “wrong.” Of things lawful, some, to Christians, not expedient; never true that, of things not lawful, some are expedient. Matthew Henry suggests (commenting on Daniel 3) several “expediency” pleas often addressed to young men. World tempts, asks, would compel, to fall down to its fashions and ways of thinking and practice; gives “reasons”:— I. “Do not ask you to renounce your own God; only ask a recognition of that of Nebuchadnezzar also. Do not be narrow; think and let think. All truth is ‘relative.’ Be charitable, tolerant, broad. Perhaps idolatry is not after all merely the crude worship of the thing seen; originally, and was to nobler minds, only the use of this to assist to realise the unseen behind, or within it. Some truth in all religions, you know; even in all Christian heresies.” Christianity is intolerant; truth is intolerant of error; such love for Christ as Paul’s (1 Corinthians 16:22), or John’s (2 John 1:10), is intolerant of doctrine, or practice, or persons, that “deny” Him. The Samaritans “feared the Lord, and served their own gods” (2 Kings 17:33). Alexander Severus proposed to put statue of Jesus Christ in his private Pantheon, amongst the other greatest and wisest of the race. Christian heart will have no such compromise. World really intolerant. “Think yourselves right; but must not condemn us as wrong. Tolerate us; we cannot tolerate that you should not see it right to tolerate us.” II. “Only this once”; just the one prostration. Young Christian girl, or wife, “will comply this once,” to win her husband by her outstanding fidelity afterwards. Young Christian man of business “in tight place”; just for this time tempted to do the doubtful (but not obviously wrong) thing; and then no more “tight places,” all plain, sure, right doing and easy, afterwards. But the “once” gives up the principle. No reason for doing once which will not sanction doing habitually. Do it once, and then how the very world that tempted triumphs! “Did you not see Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, bow down?” III. “Absolute power of king would excuse them.” They really only his subjects. Besides, what a benefactor he had been to them! Very hard when sense of obligation seems to plead against duty. “Surely you will strain a point for So-and-so’s sake. Remember your many obligations to him. Think how you will grieve him. Think how you will condemn him by your action.” Very hard this last to a sensitive, diffident, modest spirit. Hard to seem to set up oneself as right, to the implied condemnation of older, wiser, and not less admirable people. Yet nobody can answer for another in matter of conscience. “Every man … his own burden” (Galatians 6:5). IV. “At Rome do as Rome does.” At Babylon, as Babylon. Ungentle-manly to be singular. Carry this far enough, and you will reach: “Amongst devils do as devils do” (Beecher). V. “Have not your forefathers, and the very priests, complied with idolatrous times and monarchs? Are you so much wiser than your fathers?” Very forcible, to those not too confident in their own judgment. VI. “By one act you may save your lives and be of immense service to brethren and against idolatry in future. Did not Knox and others flee to Geneva until storm was over? He who fights and runs away,” etc. Let God take care of the consequences: we must do right. Let Him see to His work and His people. If we perish in the flames, He can do without us. No man is “indispensable” to God. “But we want such as you in the world; reasonable Christians, no fanatics. What good can you do if you make the world cut you, or drop you, from its acquaintance? Very beautiful ideal of yours, no doubt! B-u-t, you know—” No! Second Commandment forbids it. Not lawful; cannot be expedient. [In matter of sensual sin, the only effectual barrier against the rush of the tide of passion is the command of God and its sanction hell-fire. No other motives are strong enough in the moment of the inrush of appetite. The animalism of it, the wrong done to the other party, the moral degradation and the physical consequences of excess and irregularity—none is strong enough to hold back. All are like Samson’s bonds, when the spirit (in this case evil) enters in. (Or, better, like the chains and fetters snapped by the demoniac.) The moment the religious sanction is relaxed, the gate is open to all excess of riot. Expediency, reason, conventionalities of life, reputation—all are too easily overborne. But the waves of passion beat vainly against the breakwater of God’s law and its utmost sanction. At least, if that do not resist, nothing will.] 1 Corinthians 6:19. “Temples of God.”—The Spirit is in the Church (1 Corinthians 3:16-17). He is in the individual Christian too. All Christians together, with their Lord, form the true temple of our spiritual dispensation. But each Christian is a temple too. [Both combined in 1 Peter 2:5. Every stone is alive; the temple is a living temple too. That figure, however, cannot bear the weight of the truth; hardly a possible conception—a living building, built of living stones; other figures must help it, e.g. in a body, every member, part, particle, is instinct with the life of the whole. In a vine every branch is (botanically) a complete little vine; less accurately we say that every member in the Body has a life complete in himself, lived by himself. Every “stone” of the Temple is a temple, with its Divine Tenant. True, “Ye are the temple.” True also, “Your body is the temple.” I. Appreciate the assertion.— 1. “Whither … go from Thy Spirit?” If Divine, then omnipresent, and as really without as within the body; and conversely, however little we understand it, as perfectly within it as around it. But, for the sake of the worshipper, the temple localises the god. Aphrodite was everywhere, but a Corinthian sought her in her temple. Jehovah was everywhere, but the Shekinahcloud over the mercy-seat, for the sake of the worshipper localised, emphasised, His presence within that sacred enclosure. [All words on this topic halt sadly. But the wise man uses them as unhesitatingly as the humblest reader of the Book which teaches him to employ them: with this difference—he knows how imperfectly they exhibit the truth. Figurative language is not necessarily misleading. So] if the figure here be not wholly a falsehood, we are to think of a localised, emphasised, specialised manifestation of the presence of the Spirit within a Christian man’s bodily frame. We do not know how. Nor do we know how or where our own spirit dwells within it. The mystery is not greater in the one case than in the other. Both full of mystery, but both may be, for all that, facts. 2. May illustrate this fact by another; men were once possessed by a demon, or even by seven; in one case a legion of such had taken up their abode within the man. [The facts of demoniacal possession never to be criticised as mere isolated phenomena. They give, and they get, probability if they are found to be part of a harmonious system of spiritual facts, and to have analogies and relations to others. An undesigned, piecemeal self-consistency gives argument for a system, and credibility to its several parts.] I.e. within the one human frame dwelt two or many spirits—two or many persons—the man himself and the demon himself, side by side in mysterious joint occupancy. Jesus constantly distinguished between the spirit and the man: “Come out of the man, thou … spirit!” The demon sat within, enthroned within the debased form, lording it over the manhood of his victim, leaving him a man no longer, stripped as he was of self-control and freedom of will. At the very centre and “core” of the man’s being, the evil spirit had entrenched himself, thence directing the life, and controlling the very acts and speech. Indeed, more than once the man was so completely overborne that, though the man’s organs of speech are employed, it is the demon who uses them to converse with Christ. [E.g. the “Legion”: “We are many.”] The man seems lost. Will, thought, body—all are become scarcely more than the instruments of the evil spirit within. The possessed man’s body is a temple in which the demon is the god. Putting “good” for “evil,” all this closely parallels the “possession” of believers’ bodies by the indwelling Spirit of God. The ordinary temptations of the Evil One come from “without” (so to speak). The Good Spirit also works upon the unsaved man “from without” (in the same sense). On the believer—as in the analogous “evil” case—He works “from within.” 3. Compare the asserted fact with another. Jesus “spake of the temple of His body.” But our Brother is not our brother in this. His frame “had no” special “form or comeliness” beyond that of many of those amongst whom He moved; yet God dwelt within it. But God dwells not in Christians as in Christ. Indwelling in them; Incarnation in Him. Within His body were two natures—the human, the Divine; within the possessed man also were two—the human, the demoniacal; within us—if the words here do not entirely mislead—are the human, and the Divine also. But within us and within the possessed, are two persons. In the Saviour only the one—the God Man. He was the Son. The believer is a man, but “possessed by” the Spirit. [Imperfect, and of necessity inexact, language; readily obvious to criticism, but useful as marking distinctions, which have their basis in differences of fact.] 4. A blessed “possession.” Within the man is an “inward man”; yet more intimately within is the Spirit of God. At the root and source of thought and judgment, making them “spiritual.” At the fount and origin of will, at the very seat of government of manhood, site enthroned the directing Spirit. At the source of affection He has His seat, making every throb and vibration to have its centre and origin with Himself. Holy impulses and desires; holy love for God and for men; strength for good, power over evil; judgment illuminated and brought into agreement with the mind of God; conscience sensitive and voiceful, speaking the mind and verdict of God; will brought into ever more complete and glad submission to, and harmony with, the will of God,—all because the Spirit of God has taken possession of the temple of the body in the name of the Three-One. 5. “Will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth?” cried Solomon, offering his superb Temple to be God’s palace in His capital, Jerusalem (2 Corinthians 6:18). Here is an answer Solomon could not anticipate. “With man?” “In man!” “Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost.” Paul on Mars’ Hill, the Acropolis of Athens with its temples in near sight, cried, “God dwelleth not in temples made with hands.” True, but in temples made by His own hands, the wonderful human body He has builded and compacted together, He consents, delights, to dwell. II. Three results from this.— 1. This indwelling is the test of our being Christians.—“Examine yourselves” (2 Corinthians 13:5). “Christ is in you except … reprobates.” [“Reprobate” is not, rejected without testing, but rejected after testing. “Approbate” metal will stand test, and gets hallmarked; “reprobate” metal will not. The hall-mark of approbate souls is “Christ in you.”] In the unity of the Undivided Trinity this practically is “Holy Ghost dwells in me.” Not an exceptionally strict test; Paul’s ordinary one. [Perfectly general, Romans 8:9. “If a man love Me … abode with Him” (John 14:23). This indwelling in the temple is the life in the Vine. “Christ liveth in me.” “Did ye receive the Holy Ghost when ye believed?” By that test he learned the exact position of the little group of anomalous Ephesian disciples (Acts 19:1-7). Will a man know? When “the Spirit of a Son”—“of His Son”—first enters and tells him that he is now a son, who has believed in Christ (Galatians 4:6), will the entrance of God bring no self-evidence? Did the man know of the entering of the demon into his temple? God took possession of Solomon’s Temple in a cloud of blinding glory, before which even the priests had to retire. If God accept the temple of a man’s heart and being and body, it may not always be with the same overwhelming glory—though it often has been—but it will hardly be unknown and unknowable. 2. The honour of the body (as above). 3. Sin grows in gravity. Enter a temple. Divinity there high-throned; altar not without offerings; but spiders weave festoons of web from pillar to pillar; walls are hanging with thick mildew and mould; every corner holds accumulated dust and filth; rubbish heaps gather outside against the walls. A loaded altar does not atone for such dishonour to the god. So in the human temple, what dishonour is done by the woven web of worldliness, by thick fungoid growths of sloth everywhere, by envy, pride, uncleanness of imagination, accumulating undisturbed in many a dark corner! Happy if outside, in open day, there do not gather even Corinthian sins! “Him that defileth temple of God”—the personal as the collective—“shall God defile.” Dishonour the glorious Tenant; the tenement may be left to ruin and dishonour. How many things this principle makes unlawful to a Christian! Like the altars and saints in Romanist side-chapels, diverting from the Christ upon the highaltar, so do many things divide and divert from the supreme honour due to the Spirit of God. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. The Christian’s Obligation to a Holy Life.—Three facts in context deserve attention: 1. Sinners of every class are excluded from heaven; 2. Sinners of every class have been changed; 3. Those changed are under immense obligations to a holy life. Text contains three facts:—I. Christian’s body the temple of God.—Three ideas suggested: 1. Special connection with God. As with Temple of old, as with a good man (“Thus saith high and lofty One,” etc., Isaiah 57:15). 2. Special consecration to God. Body dedicated to God, with all its powers and functions. 3. Special manifestation of God. In good man’s body God specially displayed; more of God seen in good man’s life than elsewhere throughout the world. II. Christian’s being the property of God.—“Not your own.” Does not mean— 1. Your personality not your own. You will never be absorbed in God. 2. Your character not your own. Character the creation of moral being, an untransferable thing. It does mean our existence absolutely at His command. He has a sovereign right to do with us whatever is pleasing in His sight. Christ has laid on us the strongest conceivable obligation to a holy life (Revelation 14:5). III. Christian’s duty to glorify God.— 1. What is that? To make Him more glorious than He is, impossible. To fulfil the end of our being. A holy mind is glorified in realisation of its ideals. [Sir C. Wren is glorified in the realisation of his idea.] God glorified in man when man realises in his life God’s ideal of a man. 2. Will include two things—(a) That the human body be under absolute government of soul. The crime and curse of humanity, that matter governs mind, body rules soul. (b) That the human soul be under the government of supreme love to God. Love (1) always seeks to please the object; (2) always reflects the object; (3) always lives in the object.—“Homilist,” New Series, iii. 370 (condensed). (See Appended Note also, following below.) NOTES1 Corinthians 6:17; 1 Corinthians 6:19. “Temple” religion.—Paul never forgets the ancient Temple. His words [viz. Romans 1:1] give us a glimpse, and a most beautiful one, into the secret sanctuary of the Apostle’s devotion. He does not, indeed, say, “in the temple of my spirit,” but we may say it for him, and then appropriate it to ourselves. The regenerate soul is regenerate because inhabited by God, the Triune God, through the Holy Ghost. Where He dwells must be a temple; and all the glorious things spoken of the ancient dwelling-place of Jehovah may be transferred to the spirit of the regenerate believer in Christ. The Lord has entered, and with the peaceful majesty of His grace has said to the former usurper, “Go out of him, and enter no more into him!” Concerning all that pertained to the former unholy service—for the heart was still a temple, even in its defilement—he cries, “Take these things hence!” But it is the spirit of the new worshipper himself that hears the command, who is both temple and priest; rather the Christian man, spirit and body, for our whole nature is the temple of the Holy Ghost. There is no more impressive view of personal religion than that contained in the injunction, “Sanctify the Lord—the Lord Christ—in your hearts!” It means that the great concern of our life must be to preserve our spirit inviolate for the Sacred Indweller, to suffer no abomination of desolation to enter the holy place; to take the Saviour’s whip of small cords from His hand, as it were, and use it effectually in cleansing for Him His temple. Nor is there any more terrible threatening than that which says, “If any man shall defile the temple of God”—that is, by any impurity of thought or act pollute the body, which is the framework of the Divine sanctuary, or by any filthiness of spirit desecrate it—“him shall God destroy.” The Apostle lived in the flesh of his bodily life as in a temple; “an earthly house,” indeed, which should be dissolved, but then be built again. He lived in his spirit, however, as in a temple which should never be dissolved, and from which his God should never for a moment depart. And he lived in hope of a better day and a more glorious service, when spirit and body should be reunited and glorified as the eternal dwelling-place of God in Christ.… Your body is part of that temple; let every act and office of your physical nature be offered in your priestly ministration.… You shall become a man in God as well as a man of God; a man in Christ as well as a servant of Christ. Joined to Him you will be one Spirit with Him, and your advance to perfection will be rapid and sure.—Dr. Pope, “Sermons,” pp. 181, 183.1 Corinthians 6:19. The Sacredness of the Body.—About forty-five years ago, a funeral was passing through the streets of Carlisle, Penn. It was the burial procession of John Hall Mason, the son of the eminent Dr. Mason, President of Dickinson College, one of the most powerful and eloquent preachers in America. The son was distinguished for his piety and talents, and his death had cast a gloom over many hearts. Many gathered to the funeral, from far and near, and especially young men. After the services at the house had been performed, and the pall-bearers had taken up the bier, a great concourse obstructed the entrance, and great confusion and noise ensued. The bereaved Doctor, observing the difficulty, and following closely the pallbearers, exclaimed in solemn, sepulchral tones: “Tread lightly, young men! tread lightly! You bear the temple of the Holy Ghost.” These sentiments, as though indited by the Holy Spirit, acted like an electric shock: the crowd fell back and made the passageway clear. Through the influence of these words a most powerful revival of religion sprang up and swept through the college, and extended over the town. NOTESA. 1. Observe: With this chapter commences a new section of the Epistle; the topics, and perhaps their order, suggested by a letter of formal inquiry brought from Corinth: vii. Marriage; viii. Things offered to Idols; ix. Support of Ministry; x. Lord’s Supper and Love-feast; xi. Women in Public Services, Lord’s Supper; [x., xi. Public Worship, sundry topics connected with;] xii. Spiritual Gifts; (xiii. parenthetic, “Charity”;) xiv. Spiritual Gifts resumed; xv. The Resurrection.2. Observe also: Stanley thinks the questions were proposed by the loyal party, and, on the whole, most likely by the Gentile element in the Church. “The tendency to celibacy was at this period … strong” “in the Gentile world generally.” [But celibacy by no means meant personal purity.] Others rather see the motive in the Gentile, quasi-philosophic idea that matter was evil, and a celibate’s life nobler, as being “spiritual,” in comparison with marriage.3. Observe further: In all these chapters are good instances of one mode and method of divinely inspired teaching. Particular cases (even of quite temporary importance, and now mainly interesting to us historically, as, e.g., much in chap. 11) are examined with constant reference to, and are decided upon, great and abiding principles of Divine order for the Church of Christ. [Just as elsewhere the biographies and character portraits, the histories, and their course and consequences, are an integral part of the Revelation. In them God is declaring His will in concrete instances, rather than in general, didactic language.]B. 1 Corinthians 7:1. Good.—Not exactly “morally good,” as if the opposite were sinful. Plainly so, from drift of chapter, and particularly 1 Corinthians 7:35; 1 Corinthians 7:40. Relatively good; “an excellent thing,” in many circumstances, and for many reasons, “but,” etc. Touch.—Euphemistic, for a more significant word.1 Corinthians 7:2. (The) fornications (, accurately).—Q.d. which notoriously abound in your heathen, social surroundings. [Perhaps not specially at Corinth, beyond any other great centre of Gentile life. See Introduction.] Own.—“Christianity allows no polygamy.” “Own … own” are interestingly different in Greek, having a slight trace of the different conception, even in Judaism, of the respective propriety of husband and wife in each other. On his side is something of ownership; on hers of exclusive relation. Have.—Like “touch,” is euphemistic; expanded in 1 Corinthians 7:3.1 Corinthians 7:3.—follows the ancient, correct, expressive reading: “Let not married persons fancy [as, e.g., Edward the Confessor] that there is any perfection in living with each other as if they were unmarried.”1 Corinthians 7:4. Power.—Obviously is the sense of “authority.” N.B. the perfect equality of the sexes; a particular case of a great principle asserted for the woman by Christianity.1 Corinthians 7:5 Fasting.—Omit, as Acts 10:30 (“certainly”); Matthew 17:21 (“probably”); Mark 9:29 (“not unlikely”). “These various readings affect materially the teaching of Scripture about fasting” (Beet). Question of textual criticism, basing itself on diplomatic evidence; as likely to have been dropped in a lax age, as to have been inserted by an ascetic one. N.B. Ascetic counsels and practice might create new occasions for the Tempter’s attack. N.B. also how abstinence is valued, not for prudential or selfish reasons, but according as it affects the spiritual life and its exercises. Everything dealt with here with delicacy of thought and language, and every topic lifted up into, and judged in, the light of great spiritual verities. Be together [not “come”], again euphemistic.1 Corinthians 7:6.—See Bible-class Talk, infra.1 Corinthians 7:7.—Paul evidently now unmarried, or at least wifeless; was he a widower? Only facts are: The prevalent Jewish judgment that a man of twenty sinned in remaining unmarried even so long; that a member of the Sanhedrin must be married. Inferences from 1 Corinthians 9:5 and 1 Corinthians 7:8 are very precarious. Philippians 4:3 is now never understood as referring to any possible wife of Paul. Not quite certain that Paul was formally a member of the Council; the one fact is, “I gave my vote” (Acts 26:10, if the word means quite so much). His … gift.—His charism; the word used of the “gifts” of chap. 12 Great rule; in arrest of hard judgments of other people (Matthew 19:11).1 Corinthians 7:8.—How “relative” all these judgments are is evident from, e.g., 1 Timothy 5:9-16.1 Corinthians 7:10.—See Bible-class Talk, infra. Matthew 5:32; Matthew 19:3-9; Mark 10:2-12 [a chapter full of suggestive side-lights upon Christ’s attitude towards home, family, wife, children].1 Corinthians 7:11. If she depart.—Under such a supposed necessity as seems to her to overbear all other considerations [local, not legal, separation or divorce being supposed], at any rate let her not be led to go further and—[A Greek or Roman wife could divorce her husband.]1 Corinthians 7:12. The rest.—Viz. to the unmarried, the widows, [and widowers] (“of whom I just made mention”); and now, further, to those involved in a marriage which has become, by the conversion of one party, a mixed one.1 Corinthians 7:12-17. Sanctified, holy.—Plainly not with a real, only with a relational, holiness. So “unclean” as in Acts 10:14. Husband and children stand in a different, and nearer, relation to Christ, if the wife and mother be a Christian. N.B. the children are holy: a great dictum, with the authority of 1 Corinthians 7:17; 1 Corinthians 7:40 behind it. Let him depart.—The Christian is never to initiate the separation; but needs not absolutely resist it, if the step be taken from the other side. In (not “to”) peace.—Therefore the believer needs not enforce union upon a reluctant unbeliever, or one determined to separate; to acquiesce in the inevitable is peace for both, and the way is open for resuming the old relation, if good may (1 Corinthians 7:16) result from it. Shalt save.—Perhaps hardly so much as, “If you remain with the unconverted one, is it not the sure way to save?” Nor so little as, “How do you know—how can you think—that you will, if even you persist?” Lies between. “Who can tell? Perhaps you may. There is at least a chance.” (He is reverting to 12–14.) But (1 Corinthians 7:17).—“Only,” Difficult to translate, very elliptical. “Indeed, I give hardly any fixed rule, only let this be the great guiding principle.” So ordain I.—Word of full Apostolic authority. [1 Corinthians 14:37 very definite and important upon this point.] Distributed.—Not as 1 Corinthians 7:7; but only of station in life.1 Corinthians 7:19.—Join this with Galatians 5:6; Galatians 6:15.1 Corinthians 7:20. Calling.—From this verse, very largely, rose our common use of the phrase for a man’s occupation or pursuit in life. True we really are appointed to, guided into, this by God. Yet in the word here is only the “sacred” sense: the calling into fellowship of His people. (Was any man ever “called of” God to be a slave?) “Whatever you were when the call reached you and saved you, in that, as a rule, abide.” Cf. 1 Corinthians 7:17-18; 1 Corinthians 7:21; 1 Corinthians 7:24 also.1 Corinthians 7:21. Servant.—“A slave.” Care not.—“Do not anxiously seek liberty.” Use it.—Use what? (1) The condition of slavery, or (2) the opportunity of liberty? Curiously ambiguous. Both senses defended from very early times. For (1) is the general drift of Paul’s advice, “Incline on the whole to make no change.” And this, it is suggested, with the idea in the background, “It will not matter long; the Lord will soon be here.” Also Paul sent Onesimus back to Philemon to be received “as a servant.” For (2) is the asserted unnaturalness of the other counsel, and, as things were, its cruel requirement that a slave should remain at the mercy of such masters as were many of those days, It is pointed out that Paul sent Onesimus back to a Christian master, and at least suggested his manumission. Also that, though certainly the Christian religion has usually wrought great revolutions by the “inoculation” of great principles into the social system, rather than by change imposed ab extra, yet that from the beginning it has favoured, and worked for, manumission whereever possible.1 Corinthians 7:24.—Contrast “Of men … with God.”1 Corinthians 7:25. Virgins.—Might include both sexes (Revelation 14:4). In point of fact (except perhaps in 1 Corinthians 7:26-27) young women are in his thought. Origin here of distinction between consilia and prœcepta. (See again infra, Bible-class Talk.)1 Corinthians 7:26.—A perplexing verse again. well presents the again curiously ambiguous original. On the whole “present” is preferable to “pressing” (q.d. “the pressing cares of the married state”); “distress” being then the uncertainties and dangers involved or risked by being Christians in such times of change and, always possible, persecution. So to be.—How? (1) As he is; (2) As I am; (3) Unmarried; (4) As I go on to say in detail. Probably (1).1 Corinthians 7:28. I spare you.—Choose between (1) “I speak as little and as tenderly as possible”; (2) “I want to save you from such risks and cares and dangers, as, just now, must come upon married people.”1 Corinthians 7:29 sqq.—See Separate Homily.1 Corinthians 7:32. Carefulness.—Favours 1 Corinthians 7:28, (2); as does 1 Corinthians 7:35, latter half. But 1 Corinthians 7:35 also favours (1). Both are true and good reasons for cautious pronouncements. “Without any avoidable anxieties to burden your thoughts.” gives all needful indication of the effect of the different punctuations here, and of the different translations of “There is difference.”1 Corinthians 7:34.—The ideal of “unmarried” life. Would that they all did!1 Corinthians 7:35. Attend upon.—Stanley finds apt illustration of the three leading words of this clause in Luke 10:39-42.1 Corinthians 7:36. Uncomely.—“Unhandsomely” (Evans). Spoken of the parent or guardian, not of the possible husband. He is presumed to wish to do what the need of the case requires. “Very good; the way is quite clear; he may consent to her marrying her betrothed.” Also, probably, “unhandsomely toward her”; not “unhandsomely as regards public opinion about keeping virgin daughters at home.” This only true of Jewish opinion.1 Corinthians 7:37.—Conybeare and Howson, and Stanley, remark that no other statement of a daughter’s position was then conceived or then practicable; she was absolutely under her father’s power. See, for the fearful extent of this power, Pressensé, Early Years, Life and Practice, p. 363. As in the case of slavery, or the position of woman, Christianity did not change the social order ab extra, but ab intra. It attacked the sinful thing, polygamy (1 Corinthians 7:2), directly, by definite prohibition; it left this, not intrinsically sinful, relation between father and daughter to be changed by the working of the principle of the equal dignity of redeemed human nature in all races, ages, conditions, and in both sexes. He speaks here of a father who is not swayed by any external opinion, and who has no necessity arising from any circumstances of his daughter or her betrothed; in the then “present distress” he might do the excellent thing in marrying her, but the more excellent in keeping her at home.1 Corinthians 7:39. In the Lord.—Christian must only wed Christian.1 Corinthians 7:40. I.—Emphatic. Perhaps, q.d., “As well as your Cephas and the rest.” .—Whole Chapter[An indirect treatment is suggested; thus:] Observe— I. How purely Paul deals with such matters. II. How wisely. III. How authoritatively. IV. How spiritually. I. How purely.— 1. His language is euphemistic. “Touch” (1 Corinthians 7:1); “have” (1 Corinthians 7:2); “the debt” (1 Corinthians 7:3); “be together” (1 Corinthians 7:5). [So the true reading, as, e.g., R.V.] Yet only with the euphemism which provides a seemly covering of what, though in itself neutral, has been debased, and has now no native, unshamed, simplicity in which it may present itself to the mind. Nothing of the wrong euphemism which robes sin with a vesture of innocence and even poetry and beauty, till it flaunts itself before us in what should only have been a necessary covering of its repulsive evil. Paul’s language rather indicates than mentions; there is no unhealthy suggestiveness of more than he dares unveil. His thought touches as lightly as may be; his mind and heart look with halfaverted gaze. Model for all who must, on occasion, speak. So the Lord Himself dealt with sin and sinners. “Some (poets) will tune their harps to sensual pleasures, and by the enchantment of their genius well-nigh commend their unholy theme to the imagination of saints” (Edw. Irving, Divine Oracles, Oration I.). 2. The topic must be touched, or the Bible were not a complete directory for life. The young need pure, but plain, words. Every missionary in heathen lands finds the value of such definite, holy, wise, authoritative pronouncement upon what are questions arising every day in heathen life, or in the nascent stage of a Christianised society. Such passages as these lifted up the whole relation between man and woman to the Christian level in the early Christian centuries. Such chapters as these, privately read, still keep the conscience sensitive and the standard true. 3. May be thankful that Bible has such pages, so healthy and pure. The tendency—not to say the aim—of “natural” thinking and writing is always to minimise the sinfulness of sin. Happy for the world that one Book in the world is unaffected by the fashions or the passions of an age, and stands forth unvaryingly the “testimony” of God; an objective standard by which the perverted judgment or conscience may be regulated, an objectivised conscience, to arouse or embolden the conscience within to resume its old, instinctive testimony, when dulled, or drugged, or hardened into silence. 4. Paul and the Bible might say, with Jeremy Taylor: “I have used all the care I could, in the following periods, that I might neither be wanting to assist those that need it, nor yet minister any occasion of fancy or vainer thoughts to those who need them not. If any man will snatch the pure taper from my hand, and hold it to the Devil, he will only burn his own fingers, but shall not rob me of the reward of my care and good intention; since I have taken heed how to express the following duties, and given him caution how to read them” (Holy Living, sect. iii.). Paul speaks of them as under the physician’s necessity, and with the physician’s abstinence from needless words. The Bible supplies abundant material for a holy estimate of sensual sin, even though existent only in thought. II. How wisely.— 1. Recognises that the question arises out of a necessity of human nature, as God has made it. All men not alike (1 Corinthians 7:7) by their very God-given constitution. To have nothing to say on the topic would have been for the Bible to make the same mistake as the philosophies, which disregarded the matter as altogether beneath their exalted notice. Satan (1 Corinthians 7:5), or surrounding conditions (1 Corinthians 7:2), may make the very faculty and desire, which are per se neutral, and have their useful part to play, the occasion of temptation. God has therefore ordained the marriage institution (1 Corinthians 7:9); and, given marriage, there follow reciprocal obligations perfectly legitimate in their fulfilment (1 Corinthians 7:3-5). 2. Yet the freedom and the self-mastery, the self-sufficient continence, of the unmarried have their excellence (1 Corinthians 7:1; 1 Corinthians 7:8; 1 Corinthians 7:32; 1 Corinthians 7:34), and especially in times of difficulty and possible persecution (1 Corinthians 7:26). [Paul should have full weight given to Revelation 14:4 on the side of his slight “preference” for the unmarried condition.] 3.He sees that the order of the world is not ideal in its simplicity, and the complex conditions of life do not permit, in some instances, of hard-and-fast rules. E.g. the very success of the Gospel, finding its way into heathen (or Jewish) homes, would create a difficulty and add a new element of complication to a Christian life. Husband or wife might become Christian, whilst the other remained an obstinate, perhaps persecuting, heathen (1 Corinthians 7:12-16). [Where both are Christians, and indeed as the fundamental principle of the marriage institution, there are to be no separations. The rule is plain. Divorce, only permissible in one case, even then simply recognises a union already broken by the wrongdoer. Nothing else must break it (1 Corinthians 7:10-11).] The Christian must not move in the direction of separation; there is already a blessing to the other party, and to the children, in the fact that one member of the house is Christ’s (1 Corinthians 7:14), and—who can tell?—there may arise a greater blessing yet (1 Corinthians 7:16). Still, the Christian need not, without exception and in all cases, resist separation forced on from the other side. It may be best to acquiesce in the parting; it may do more harm to seek to enforce the continued association; and God is tender of His children, and does not desire what may conduce to strife and misery, and almost make impossible peaceful service to Him (1 Corinthians 7:15). 4. Indeed, the general rule, applying not only to such cases as those particularly under discussion, is: “Make as little change as possible. Where, and what, the call of God which led you to Christ, found you, there, and that, remain; provided always that (as, e.g., with the now neutral circumcision) there is no wrong or right involved.” “Seek to abide therein with God. ‘Do all things as unto God, and as in His immediate presence’ (Bengel) (1 Corinthians 7:17-24). Circumcision is now become a mere piece of surgery; never mind it, either way. As to slavery; be not restlessly anxious for freedom (1 Corinthians 7:21); above all, do not, voluntarily, become any man’s slave (1 Corinthians 7:23); it will be a harder thing there than anywhere to be the freeman of Christ (1 Corinthians 7:22). You are not to choose to give the slave’s absolute subjection of your life, your will, your self, to any but to Christ; to Him you ought to give it; you are the bondservant of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 7:22; cf. Paul’s frequent description of himself in these terms). And if He open the door for freedom, be free, the better to serve Him.” 5. Shall the unmarried “make no change”? “There is no unvarying rule. The Lord has given none. I must not create difficulties for any of you by laying down one myself (1 Corinthians 7:25; 1 Corinthians 7:28). Case by case, each must be dealt with by itself. Though I do judge that, for the present, as things are, and are likely to be, the fewer new obligations man or woman assumes the better (1 Corinthians 7:26).” [And so, in effect, 1 Corinthians 7:32-35. 6. Shall a father consent to, and even promote, or shall he refuse, the marriage of his daughters? Given, as before, that marriage is not per se sinful, but recognised and ordained by God; given also that, in the particular instance, there is no sin,—(e.g. given that both parties are “in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39)—this is obligatory; to disregard this were sin),—let him give consent, if there be any apparent desirableness or necessity in it. He may promote the marriage; the course is quite clear. Still, if he do not desire it, nor the daughter herself desire and require it, he is at liberty to say that she must remain at home with him. “Make no change,” Paul said; but he makes no absolute rule; only saying that, as things are, she is better free (1 Corinthians 7:36-38). 7. Lastly, the bond between husband and wife is lifelong, but not longer. Death gives liberty for remarriage, subject always to this—“In the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39). 8. A perfect code all this for the regulation of home and family life, of marital and parental authority. Removed, on one hand, from undue freedom, such as might become licence; on the other from unnatural, and perhaps impracticable, restriction. Absolute veto, in any direction where the express command of Christ or the original law of marriage plants a barrier. Freedom, where no considerations of moral wrong intervene; but limited by considerations of temporary fitness or of general expediency, variable, modifiable, dispensable, from age to age, from case to case. The inviolable, indissoluble, sacredness of the marriage bond is safeguarded; the mere comfort (1 Corinthians 7:3; 1 Corinthians 7:9; 1 Corinthians 7:15; 1 Corinthians 7:39) of the parties, or of one of them, is not deemed unworthy of consideration. [The possible wider application of these principles to similar cases is suggested by their employment in 1 Corinthians 7:17; 1 Corinthians 7:24. [They not only apply in heathen lands reached by Christian missions to-day, but have analogues at home. E.g. wife with drunkard or adulterous husband, inquiring her duty in regard to him; a wife [or son] converted in, and bound to reside with husband [or father] at, low public-house; man converted in some, not exactly sinful, but exceedingly difficult, position for maintaining a Christian walk.] III. How authoritatively.— 1. Any word of Christ is absolute legislation for His Church (1 Corinthians 7:10). 2. Paul also can, on occasion, claim that his own pronouncements are in effect Christ’s, and carry Christ’s authority with them (2 Corinthians 13:3; 2 Cor. 14:37). 3. If here he gives “permissions,” not “injunctions,” the permissions are authoritative (1 Corinthians 7:25; 1 Corinthians 7:40). The alternation, “oscillation”—not between “yes” and “no” (cf. 2 Corinthians 1:18), but between “good” and “better,” between counsel in a negative sense and consent in an opposite direction—do not indicate any misgiving as to his power to speak, or as to his own soundness of judgment. The absence of positiveness is itself, in these cases, sound judgment. The nature of the case forbids anything further. Even the Lord would have said, would say, no more, in cases where Paul does not; Paul will go no further than his Lord has done or would do (1 Corinthians 7:25). 4. The contrast between Paul and Christ is only as between supplementary and earlier-given dicta, between complementary and primary, but both equally authentative. [The relation of Paul to Christ in this chapter is more nearly analogous to that of the prophets to the Law of Sinai. The one leading, fundamental, Divine utterance having been once given, the prophets and the Apostle deal with the applications of it to the ramifying, multiplying, cases which are ever arising; but not with less Divine authority of utterance.] IV. How spiritually.—Next to this, “Christ says so,” which is the final appeal, the test is the bearing of the matter upon the religious life of the individual. 1. Even the one duty and mutual obligation which differentiates marriage from all other unions between man and woman, may, with consent, be subordinated to a higher duty: from time to time to have special seasons for prayer, and the cultivation of the spiritual life (1 Corinthians 7:5). When its fulfilment is resumed, it is as a safeguard for the spiritual life against fleshly, devilish, temptation. 2. The inconvenience, and perhaps opposition and suffering, which a Christian may suffer from a heathen partner are not indeed to be borne as if of unalterable obligation. “Peace” may sometimes best be secured by acquiescence in the departure of the heathen one (1 Corinthians 7:15). Yet very much should be borne, very long and patiently, for the sake of the blessed effect upon the position, and perhaps hereafter on the heart, of the heathen one (1 Corinthians 7:14; 1 Corinthians 7:16). “What if that one may be saved?” 3. Circumcision, uncircumcision; slavery, freedom,—the Lord’s apportionment was as truly in them all as it was in the “call” (1 Corinthians 7:17). Keeping the commandments is “the whole of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13); the rest is accident (1 Corinthians 7:19). The slave has a freedom, the freeman a bondage, to Christ, which should not be forgotten (1 Corinthians 7:22). Let him bear himself as a man “bought with a price,” and in any, every, station and condition as having God with him for his aid and defence (1 Corinthians 7:24). [ 4. The outburst of 1 Corinthians 7:29 sqq. is dealt with separately.] 5. On all grounds it is worth something to be “without carefulness,”—undue, distracting, anxiety. But it is chiefly worth, as the leisure of mind and heart are leisure for Christ and His service (1 Corinthians 7:32; 1 Corinthians 7:34). A single life finds its glory and its best justification in becoming a consecrated leisure for Him, with the opportunity, Mary-like, of oftener sitting at His feet, “attending upon the Lord Christ (1 Corinthians 7:35) without” Martha’s “distraction.” 6. The father who marries his daughter to a Christian man “sinneth not,” for the highest question is not one of prudence, but of sin. 7. And the one primary, all-embracing, all-qualifying condition of any liberty of action for those who are Christ’s is “Only in the Lord.” The member of the Body must not go beyond the Body for its fellowships. Everything is thus judged in the light of its bearing upon the life in Christ. Next to the fundamental wrong, which bars anything, comes Christian expediency, and this must mainly be estimated by those who are “in Christ,” and who judge by His Spirit’s grace of how their life in Him will be affected. Whole chapter may also be organised homiletically thus, as— A Christian Directory of Relative Duties in Household Life.—A Christian home begins with marriage. First therefore come: I. Husband and wife.—Celibacy has its advantages in its freedom from responsibility (1 Corinthians 7:32 sqq.), its opportunity for choosing one’s place and one’s work for God, with no obligatory reference to any will but His. [Except that the Christian daughter will pay right deference to her father’s judgment and command (1 Corinthians 7:36-38)]. Where it does not occasion difficulty and become a point of assault for the Evil One, a man or woman may choose it, if they will. Yet married life is as honourable a condition. The foundations of a home may be laid with every hope of the blessing of God. It is a “doctrine of devils” to say otherwise (1 Timothy 4:3). It is the safest condition for some natures and physical temperaments. It has its own special helps and endearments. It is traced on the lines of a higher, closer, mystical union. “One flesh” may be all; or the Christian man and wife may make this lead them up to “one spirit with Christ” (1 Corinthians 6:17). See them “heirs together of the grace of life” (1 Peter 3:7), joint-heirs in the same “great expectations,” with a parallel share in the reversionary estate, Life. See them kneeling together, night and morning, “giving themselves to prayer.” Or with special, consentaneous, self-denial, making way for some longer, more emphatic time of joint waiting upon God (1 Corinthians 7:5). Neither wronging the other; each belonging wholly to the other; gladly giving all that may help the other to all purity and holiness of thought and life. And over all the union there is inscribed the Lord’s own law, “No separation.” They were joined for absolute, entire, exclusive, lifelong, property in each other (1 Corinthians 7:10). If unhappily some fatal disagreement should arise, or even the wrong-doing of the husband should seem to compel the wife to quit her husband’s roof, still she belongs to him. She may not give herself to another whilst he lives. [And if his death release her, let her only look at a Christian husband again (1 Corinthians 7:39).] Let her heart be open to a reconciliation and to a return, if a repentant man desire it (1 Corinthians 7:11). Suppose God sends II. Children, then these are “holy.” They are not the Devil’s children, not nobody’s [not Jewish, nor Mahometan, nor heathen]; from their very coming into a home which belongs to Christ, they belong to Him. Born of a redeemed human stock, every child born into a home enters it a redeemed child. Paul himself baptized (at Philippi, and Corinth, certainly) “households,” and—whether or not these happened to include very young children or infants matters little—his act recognised that the baptism and faith of the responsible head of the house carried with it the principle of the baptism of the house. Father, or even mother, becoming converted, the whole household becomes one on which Christ has a larger claim. It is “holiness to the Lord” Christ, from that moment. If the father or the mother stand alone, without sympathy or support, perhaps indeed distinctly persecuted, as a Christian, that one need not despond, nor hastily think of quitting the home. The presence of the one Christian sanctifies the children, and even the opposing partner. And if so in a divided home, how much more are the children “holy” where both parents are agreed, and are one in Christ! They may, with abundant confidence—they will, with no less assurance than if, as proselytes, they had even entered into the Jewish fold—bring them to that baptism which, at its lowest of significance, includes them all in the Christian community, that Christian “Church” whose census man can take. With no less boldness than did a Jewish father, they will claim for their “holy” children, under the sign and seal of the Grace itself, that Holy Spirit who is the gift and grace and privilege of the Christian form of the “covenant before confirmed of God in Christ,” which runs on in unbroken continuity from the day of God’s “promise to Abraham and his seed” (Galatians 3:14-18). Nor will that Lord refuse them Who once and again made the child’s spirit of docility and of simple, direct inclination to believe, the model of the spirit which alone can find its way into the kingdom of heaven, or be greatest when it is in (Matthew 18:3-4). And with how many prayers, and with what thankfulness, will these Christian ones seek to train and lead these, relatively, “holy” children to appreciate and seek a real holiness, by a personal choice of, and trust in, and life for, Christ! If that mother, busy within her home, not able to do outside work for Christ, only helps a Christian husband and Christian children to be holy, she may lie down to die feeling that she has not been an inconsiderable worker for Christ and His Church. III. When the children are old enough to be married, what then?— 1. That Christian father is not to put frivolous, selfish, tyrannous obstacles in the way of his children’s marriage. If the Lord have found for the maiden daughter a Christian man to be her mate, the father should not lightly say they must not marry. He is to remember that all the same reasons which made it better, safer, holier, helpful, needful (1 Corinthians 7:36), for himself and her mother to marry, may point to the right of the girl’s happy, holy union too, for her sake and her suitor’s. Fulfil God’s order once again and lay the foundation of another Christian home: “let them marry.” 2. He needs be swayed by no undue regard for outside opinion. If he think indeed that there is anything in it worth his regard, and that it were an unhandsome thing to compel girl and suitor to wait and wait, whilst her best life is slipping away, let him follow his judgment, and further their marriage [with dowry and outfit perhaps, but certainly] with his consent and blessing (1 Corinthians 7:22). 3. It may be that she has not any strong reason or claim upon her to leave his side; a widower father then may keep his one child to be his comfort. Two parents grown old may lovingly require her attendance and the ministrations of love and duty, so it be not with tyrannous and unfair control over her liberty, but with her free consent. “He may keep his virgin” daughter (1 Corinthians 7:23) till she close his eyes in death. If like Lydia’s or the gaoler’s or Philemon’s, the home has its servants, or even its slaves, then as to IV. The servant in the house.— 1. The foundation of all is that the Lord put him or found him in a slave’s condition. That is his post; there he must stay until the Commander relieves him. 2. The Gospel and its Lord, the God who is its Author, does not forget him, has indeed deigned to ennoble him, lifting him up to the honour of being a freeman in the citizenship of Christ’s kingdom. [The slave might hold office in the Church.] He is a man; a man for whom Christ died. The same redeemed human nature in him as in his master, saves him from any ignoble condition, and gives him rights never conceded before to slaves. He need not therefore fear but that even as a slave he shall have God continually near him. 3. He goes about his work cheerful, content, with an eye in every duty to his Master Christ. Servility, slavish fear, unlawful submission—these are chased out of his life; the servility is out of his heart. 4. As belonging to Christ he is not to be indolent, untruthful, impure, a centre of intrigue and moral corruption, as slaves proverbially were in antiquity. With new rights, owed to Christ, come new responsibilities to Him, and the slave may be, should be, holy, even in an unholy household. And how transformed will the home life be in the one fact that master, mistress, children, servants, all are equally in Christ, and are only apportioned to different stations by Him, for His glory and their mutual help! 1 Corinthians 7:14. “Sanctified by the wife; sanctified by the husband.”—Query, wife named first here (not above in 1 Corinthians 7:12-13) as the case of greater hardship for the one Christian, more affecting to consider, more hopeful for the conversion of the other? Wife will sooner convert husband, than husband wife? I. Great principle of God’s dealings.— 1. Noah’s sons saved with, and for sake of, their father. Lot blessed for Abraham’s sake (Genesis 19:29); Lot’s wife and daughters brought out for their father’s sake; Potiphar’s house blessed for Joseph’s sake (Genesis 39:5); the crew of the Castor and Pollux all saved for Paul’s sake (Acts 27:4)—all “given to him.” How much blessing on an ungodly man’s house or business is accounted for by the presence and prayers of the godly wife, or even the godly servant or clerk? How much blessing on “unholy” children because of their connection with a godly, praying parent? How many a safe journey or voyage because of the presence of one of God’s “peculiar” ones amongst the company? 2. The world blessed for Christ’s sake, though ignorant of Him, or rejecting Him. 3. The Christian Church—this one isolated Christian—“holy” because of the connection with Christ. II. Natural to expect that the one Christian will lead the rest into a real, saving, holy relation to Christ.— 1. By example. Great responsibility to be the first Christian in a family, or family circle; great grace given to meet it. Did the conversion of Andronicus and Junias (Romans 16:7), Paul’s “kinsmen, in Christ before him,” prove the first “prick” of the goad which he really felt? “Who is this Nazarene—what is there in his ‘religion’—that even our own family cannot be kept pure from the taint of heresy?” The one light shining amidst the darkness reveals the darkness to itself, and convicts it (Ephesians 5:13); the first step towards its removal. “Believe, … thou shalt be saved, and thy house” (Acts 16:31); not indeed without their own repentance and faith, but yet the more probably, now that the head of the house has believed. 2. By praying. 3. By direct effort. Part of the purpose of the family institution, that by the training of Christian parents a succession of godly offspring may be secured. Large principle in Luke 22:31-32. Satan desired all (“you”); Christ prayed for one, Peter (“thee”); and saved the rest mediately, though Peter. (“When thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.”) God saves one in a house, a circle, not that that one may simply concentrate thought and effort on self preservation, self-cultivation, but that, through that one, appeal, conversion, holiness, may come to the rest. 1 Corinthians 7:19. The Indifference of Circumcision and Uncircumcision. I. “Circumcision, uncircumcision—nothing.” (Connect with Galatians 5:6; Galatians 6:15.) 1. “These [three passages] describe the same threefold aspect of Christianity with regard to man, which, in speaking of God, is described under the names of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. In this passage … man is viewed chiefly in his relation to the natural order of the world.… In the two … in the … Galatians, the more distinct reference to faith in Christ, and to the new creation wrought by His Spirit, is brought out.” (Stanley, in loco.) 2. (1 Corinthians 7:19.) Circumcision or Uncircumcision nothing for a Christian to be distressed about or hindered by. They do not prejudice his status before God; such external accidents cannot hinder living for God. (Galatians 5:6.) Circumcision [or Uncircumcision] nothing for him to trust to as a sinner for acceptance with God. Faith the one condition, if evidenced as living, saving faith by its work in love to God and to man. (Galatians 6:15.) Circumcision or Uncircumcision nothing for Churches to wrangle about, to compete in propagating, to press upon their members as necessities of salvation. Can they show, do their work and teaching produce, or help and train, “new creatures” in Christ Jesus? That is the aim; all else subsidiary; worthless, or even mischievous, unless it contributes to that. Nothing! Then why insist upon it? Nothing! Then why quarrel over it? 3. Then, don’t tell me what are a man’s accidents of birth or station; does he there walk in all practical commandment-keeping? He may find grace to do it. The level of the supply of grace will rise and fall as the difficulty or disadvantage does. Don’t tell me—don’t let a man tell himself—that he has been baptized; that he belongs to a covenant, Christian stock. Is he a believer, whose faith is plainly rooted in, and is renewing, his heart? Don’t tell me how a Church is winning adherents to its ceremonial, its creed, or confession; don’t let it, on the other hand, boast how it is getting rid of ritual or dogma; don’t let the member boast of his orthodoxy, or of his liberalism. Does this mean a membership of renewed men and women? That only is vital. Yet— II. Circumcision, uncircumcision, may come to be something.— 1. Controversy made it such to Paul. (1) He circumcised Timothy, to give him greater freedom of access to Jewish work (Acts 16:3), and this even after (1 Corinthians 15:1) the circumcision controversy had begun. Had to him become merely “concision” (Philippians 3:2), a mere piece of surgery. Old meaning had evaporated, leaving as residuum a mere cutting of flesh. If it might facilitate work of Christ amongst Jews, it was an innocent, expedient concession to prejudice and training. (2) He refused to circumcise Titus (Galatians 2:3), [or, at the least, if he were circumcised, made it clear that it was not by “compulsion”. or “by subjection”]. Others were making circumcision a co-ordinate, or supplementary, ground of salvation, in a conjunction with faith which really involved disloyalty to Christ, as alone and in Himself a sufficient Saviour. [So baptism at the hands of an episcopally ordained minister in an exclusive line of succession may in some circumstances not be worth a word of controversy, but in others may become a matter involving deepest issues, and requiring most thorough, strenuous discussion. So “ritual” may be merely question of the style and taste of the conduct of public worship; or may become full of significance as to the priesthood of Christ, the sufficiency of the sacrifice of Calvary, the ground and means of the regenerate life; deserving then most earnest discussion. So a creed may become a test of loyalty to Christ and to Truth.] 2. God, had made circumcision much to His people.—The symbol of a complete sanctification of human life—even bodily, animal (Deuteronomy 10:16; Deuteronomy 30:6). The seal between Him and them of a blessing not only promised to them, but thus pledged to them. [As baptism may in parents and in children help faith to claim what God has not only promised, but covenanted to give—Christ and the Spirit.] 3. Should be remembered how the importance of such things varies with God’s appointment or repeal, with the knowledge or the needs of a Church, an age, a generation, an individual. Value relative, not absolute. 1 Corinthians 7:21. “Use it rather.”—It is surprisingly ambiguous to us. [Was it also so to Paul? Did he mean it to read ambiguously, lest the letter should fall into hands of heathen masters, and cause trouble to Christian slaves? (As some assume the number 666 in Revelation 13:18 to be a cipher, intelligible to Christians through orally given and transmitted explanation, but, prudently, left unintelligible to any chance heathen reader.) Would this be “the simplicity which is in Christ”? (2 Corinthians 11:3.)] Like “so to be” (in 1 Corinthians 7:26), can be read in more than one way; like some well-known oracles of Delphi (to Crœsus and others). Said to be unnatural, cruel, to counsel a slave to refuse liberty if offered. Probably so; and this is then parallel to the permission given to a Christian wife to accept her “freedom” from a determined, troublesome, heathen husband, who himself leaves her, without provocation on her part, except that she is Christian. Spirit of paragraph (1 Corinthians 7:17-24) may be summed up thus:— I. Do not force change; do not be anxiously concerned to make a change; where “the call” found a man, “there let him walk.” “Care not.” 1. Very natural to Christians whose providential (1 Corinthians 7:17) place presents difficulties in being godly, to wish themselves somewhere else. The saint-slaves in Cæsar’s household (Philippians 4:22) naturally look wistfully, in some day of special hardship, toward the position of the poorest Roman free citizen in the Church. A modern Obadiah—finding every day in some Ahab’s house, with a Jezebel for a mistress, that he walks constantly as between red-hot ploughshares, every step an ordeal and a peril—wishes he were something else than Ahab’s steward. 2. Feeling shapes itself, “Ah, now! if I were only in So-and-so’s position”; or, “If I had only So-and-so’s husband”; or, “If, instead of what I am, I could only be such-and-such a thing;—then I would serve Christ! If I only had that man’s opportunities, would I not be a saint and a worker!” And a step farther is common, and easy to take: to assume that no thorough-going service, no fulness of happy Christian life, is possible in our actual providential position, and to give up effort and hope, acquiescing in being an average, a minimum, Christian; just holding on; not quite giving up Christ, but no more. And then a step farther: to be fretful under and rebellious against the appointment of the Father, Who guided us to the position, or converted us in it, and has not yet seen fit to open a way out. 3. No. First, is there any sin in remaining in the present position? If there is, then duty is plain: at all costs get out of it. But if not,—as seems likely from the fact that God does not open a way out,—until He does, that is a man’s place, as before God. Christ, the Lord of his life, wants him there for the present—there and nowhere else. To be the light there, the salt, the leaven. For the testing, the moral probation, perhaps the salvation, of some set over him, or in daily association with him. Where He puts a man, converts him, keeps him, there it is possible to live near to God (1 Corinthians 7:24), and to exemplify and honour the Christian profession. [Said a wise mother to her boy, smitten with some boyish longing to be something (other than his apprenticed trade) which had smitten his fancy, and who urged, “I shall never do any good at—; if I were only put to—, then I should do well.’ “Thou has nothing to do but to be what thou is.”—Known to H. J. F.] If it be only difficulty, not sin, that is involved, there is no insuperable barrier to being very holy under any conditions. Conversion in them, no providential way out of them offering itself, set up fair presumption that God says, “Stay there as My witness. I am with thee always. Abide there with Me.” The slave, the circumcised man, the uncircumcised man, the Christian wife of a heathen husband, can glorify, and enjoy, God where they are. II. Accept thankfully God’s providential relief.—“Use it.” 1. The moment He sees that the sevenfold heat of the furnace can, and need, no longer be borne, He will, depend upon it, open the door. Then Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, should “use” their opportunity. Their work for God in the furnace is done; now they are called to continue their work for Him outside. Paul had “learned”—he wrote from a Roman dungeon—“in whatever state therewith”—with dungeon and daily peril from Nero’s capricious, cruel “justice”—“to be content” (Philippians 4:11). Yet when the prison doors were opened, there would have been no “contentment” in not coming out to the wider field, larger opportunities, greater comfort, outside. 2. Whilst under the pressure of the difficulty, nothing forbids earnest, childlike, submissive prayer that a way out may, if it please God, be found or shown; especially if the difficulty verge upon sinful conditions, and an impossibility of retaining the favour of God or being holy. III. The relief, the release, is to be used, not for our own comfort, but for Christ.—The free man, or the liberated, is not his own master. He belongs to Christ (1 Corinthians 7:22). His liberty gives the opportunity of a self-devotion to Christ, unfettered by conditions or the rule of another. If God take off the pressure from the Christian employé, or wife; if His providence “set the feet in a large place” after long “straitness”; grace will be needed to keep in the new conditions as really as in the old. The change means that He desires him to go on with his work for Christ somewhere else, which He chooses shall be more favourable. [Same principle as in the case of the freedom of the unmarried. Miss Havergal is a very ready-to-hand illustration of the consecrated leisure of an unmarried life (1 Corinthians 7:34).] With none of the spirit of bondage, he must use his new position—perhaps its wealth after poverty—with as strict a sense of obligation to his Master, as a slave is forced to recognise towards his. Every added privilege—liberty from persecution, from care, from a trying association, from an unhappy marriage,—all is so much the more facility for serving the Lord Christ. “Use it rather,” but for Christ in all things. IV. Be careful not to create bondage or difficulty for oneself.—The free man is not voluntarily to become the slave of man [whether literally, or in a sense perhaps obliquely glancing at the Corinthian subjection to their party leaders] (1 Corinthians 7:23). In self-created, self-incurred, difficulty or trial, there is still blessing and help, indeed; God never takes the attitude: “There, I told you so. Now you must take the consequences.” But there is no such claim to it as where the “call” finds and saves a man in the bondage. The young girl who does not marry “in the Lord” may lose her religion, or, at the best, has created for herself a bondage or a cross, perhaps for life. Let the Christian remember the dignity of the freedom which belongs to his status in Christ. He will not go into a partnership, or take up a calling or business, which will fetter him, and limit or destroy his freedom to serve Christ and be holy. Keep and “use” liberty “rather.” “Ye are bought with a price.” Your life—yourself—too precious to play into Devil’s hands, or to assume man’s fetters in any sense. 1 Corinthians 7:29-32. “As not abusing it.”—An eruptive burst of solemnly intense feeling. On a higher level than the preceding and following verses. As if all such discussion of small points of prudential regulation were uncongenial. “Brethren, I answer the questions of your letter. But why do I spend—why do ye—so much time and thought upon matters which if the Lord came, or life ended, would in an instant cease to have any importance for us. I answer you, but, above all, this I say,” etc. I. Two great considerations.— 1. “The time is short.” (1) The time has lengthened out to nearly twenty centuries! Yet there should be no haste to assume Paul to have been mistaken in expecting the Parousia during his own lifetime. Remember how closely Christ had associated His coming with the fall of Jerusalem; remember how, practically, the Lord does come to every man in his death-hour. Practically we are ever in the presence of His Coming. (2) “Short” and “has been shortened” (so the Greek). Illustrate by the cell discovered when the French captured Madrid in 1808, and overhauled the Palace of the Inquisition. Its walls iron plates, removable; each night one taken out, and the opening closed up, till at last three only left; then one removed; two left, which closed fatally upon the prisoner. So Paul reminds us how the end is being made to close in upon us; nor have we the power to stay this constant narrowing in of our opportunity for making ready to meet our Lord. Every night, and another “wall” has been removed; our space by that much the narrower, our time shortened by a day. (3) That prisoner might count his days, and, if that were his temperament, might give himself up to some employment, reckoning with all human certainty upon such-and-such a margin of time, and regarding the inevitable end lightly until it was actually upon him. Our danger is that, knowing nothing whether one day or a thousand be ours, and believing (with more or less of reality of faith) that any mistake will be irreparable, we should so give up ourselves to home (1 Corinthians 7:29), pleasure (1 Corinthians 7:30), business (ib.), as to find the end upon us, and ourselves unprepared for the Lord. (4) Time never seems “short” until gone, and too late to repair an error. True of some temperaments more than others. The special danger of young hearts. Time stretches away in such a long, long vista that no end is seen at all. Sir Philip Sidney hits off that characteristic in a well-known description of a pastoral landscape in his “Arcadia,” book i. [Describes proudly high hills with stately trees; humble valleys with silver rivers; meadows enamelled with flowers; thickets full of well-tuned birds; and concludes:] “Here a shepherd’s boy piping, as though he should never be old.” (5) Yet not the danger of young people only and of inexperienced ages of life. The danger of every eager, active nature. Older men, with their half-century or more behind them, are found planning and working and hoping, on a scale and with an intensity which seems to count on staying here for ever. It is the “secular” temper always. A worthy, noble side to it. The restless, untiring, hopeful, inventive energy, to the last planning something new or larger, is a witness to a nature in man made for a larger life than the earthly. Such men vindicate for man a nature which can only in an eternity find room for its development and activity. [True, there is eternity for a harvest, but the sowing-time has each day been shortened, with solemn inevitableness.] 2. “The fashion … passeth away.”— (1) Paul’s word suggests all the incessant change of men and circumstances in our busy life, as the change of scenes and action and “business” in a great stage-play. The Christian is as much an actor in the ever-shifting scene as any other. But. Paul asks men to moderate their eagerness by doing what is so hard to do: “Come off the stage for a few moments. Be a spectator, a critic, instead of an actor. See how things change, and how fast they change! See how little they all mean when the play is over!” (2) [Of course his word only slightly connected with fashion in dress. Yet illustrate by it.] Take up book of old fashion-plates! How you laugh! How grotesque! Yet those odd, absurd dresses were to many objects of life-absorbing, soul-destroying, interest once. “Odd that the actors should lose life over the dress in which they play their parts.” You think so? Look, then—laugh, learn! In an old library, you come across dusty bundle of old political pamphlets and election literature. “Dry as dust!” Yet all England once rang from end to end with that strife. “Never heard of many of these names.” Yet they once were on every lip; around them raged the fiercest party feeling. Yourselves remember some old political contest; to-day you wonder, laugh, at the eagerness you felt. Learn, then, to measure the real importance of the present-day Act of the Drama. Men are losing their souls over it. Yet it is the merest stage-play passion and “business,” passing away. Or, remove from a town, long your place of residence. How soon the newspaper becomes uninteresting. How small the play they are acting there, the little personages, of whom fewer and fewer are known to you! Difficult to keep up correspondence with a friend there; you soon drift into different worlds. As to all the drama of the town’s life, its busy world of buying, selling, marrying, burying, weeping, rejoicing,—you soon find yourself very much “off the stage.” It seems “thin”; but to the actors on those boards there is danger lest they be so swallowed up in it as to forget the end. (3) In truth, we cannot be only spectators. Whether we will or not, we change with the changing scene. Loves, friendship, habits,—all change. We ought to take our part. The passages and personages in the daily drama have their importance. They are our work. The stage is our place, for the time. (4) But we are not to forget, amidst the bustle of the acting and the shifting of the scenery, or the interest of the drama, that all is passing—the play and the actors—and the coming of the Lord is drawing near. Not to let this stage-play of a life make us forget that the world of eternity is the world of reality, and that its first fact is the Coming and Assize of the Lord and Judge. II. A great rule for conduct— 1. “Not abusing it,” or, more exactly, “not using it to the full.” [Illustrate by child with hand thrust into narrow-necked jar of filberts. Hand too full to allow of its being drawn out again. Child too greedy to take smaller handful.] Others besides children make the mistake, and need the lesson. Use the world; you must, you shall; its work is duty. Home has legitimate claims. No reason in religion why a man should feel no natural sorrow or joy. God gave the heart that feels, and the dear ones who give the joy, or, in their removal, cause the anguish. Be the good business man God made you. Some things indeed are out of all question; no place possible for them in a Christian life at all. But for the rest, take care! Do not fill your hand too full! Not quite as full as in the abstract perhaps you might, lest the world get grip upon your heart till you cannot get release at will. Do, enjoy, a little less than is lawful. Keep well within the limit; keep yourself free. Not to the full! [Paul saw how the comforts, pleasures, cares, responsibilities, of home might so steal away, or swallow up, the whole man, as to leave little time, and less and less energy, for the kingdom of God. Men are paralysed with sorrow or stupefied into uselessness; or nurse grief till it becomes a reason for doing less, or nothing, for the Lord, if, indeed, they are not soured and made rebellious towards Him. The very joy in the abundance of God’s gifts may ensnare hearts, until the outlook, the future, the Coming, is forgotten. Danger in buying and selling, whether successfully or unsuccessfully.] [R. Cecil said, “I want to see no more sea, hills, fields, valleys, abbeys, castles; I feel vanity pervading everything but eternity and its concerns, and perceive these things to be suited to children.” The weakness and the strength of the Evangelical school there. The weakness; repellant, e.g., to such as Kingsley (compare, in Wesley’s Journal, his vivid interest in everything). The strength; “This one thing I do.”] When first go to stay by seaside one sound always in one’s ears. Amidst the merry play of the children, behind the music of the shore, in the background of conversation, or reading, or dreamy thought—the roar of the waves. By-and-by we get accustomed to it, and forget it. The spirit of Paul’s outburst is: “Don’t be unpractical. Don’t be unhealthily ascetic. No need to wish, or to try, not to take part in life. But behind all do not lose out of your ears and thoughts the ocean of Eternity, and the coming of the Lord which launches you upon it.” 1 Corinthians 7:6. (Connect with 1 Corinthians 7:12; 1 Corinthians 7:25, and 2 Corinthians 8:8-10.) Permission and Commandment. A Bible-class Talk“Does not Paul say plainly that he writes some things without the help of the Holy Ghost, and simply on his own responsibility?” “For example?” “ ‘I speak this by permission, not of commandment’; and, more plainly (1 Corinthians 7:12), ‘to the rest speak I, not the Lord’; and further (1 Corinthians 7:25), ‘I have no commandment of the Lord, yet I give my judgment,’ etc.” “As to 1 Corinthians 7:6, the difficulty only lies in the English phrase employed. [R.V. makes this perfectly plain.] 2 Corinthians 8:8; 2 Corinthians 8:10 also uses [what are really in Greek] the same phrases, and where the meaning, even in English, is clearer. Paul is making a great Relief collection for poor Christians at Jerusalem. The Corinthians are not too well disposed towards him, and (1 Corinthians 7:20) perhaps a little suspicious about all this money-getting. He had foregone his right to maintenance amongst them, lest there should be any chance for any one to say that he made a gain of them or of the Gospel (chap. 9). So here he will not ‘command’ them to finish up the collection, but gives his deliberately formed ‘advice,’ guided by the Spirit of God; [for when he says (1 Corinthians 7:40), ‘I think that I also have the Spirit of God,’ there is no doubt in ‘I think,’ but only a modestly restrained expression of perfect assurance.] Explain similarly 1 Corinthians 7:6 and its paragraph. ‘In this whole matter of marrying, I do not speak by way of commandment. I do not say “Marry,” for it seems to me just now expedient, because of the present and impending evils of the Church, that a man should have as few ties and responsibilities as possible. But I do not say, “Do not marry”; as an apostle I give you full permission to marry if you wish.’ Is that clear?” “Yes; but go on to 1 Corinthians 7:10.” “Well, next he forbids frivolous, capricious separation between husband and wife, such as was a common scandal in Greece and Rome. ‘I command that there be none of this,’ he says. And then, to make this important point more emphatic, he backs up his own Apostolic judgment with the express words of the Lord Jesus Christ on this very matter (Mark 10:11-12). He adds, therefore, ‘But here the Lord commands as well as I.’ There is no hope that disobedience will be blameless. ‘But (1 Corinthians 7:12) to the rest—the unmarried and the widows—I only say that they are prayerfully and soberly to follow their own judgment of what is prudent or necessary. There is no express word of Christ on record as to this particular point.’ Now 1 Corinthians 7:25 will present no difficulty.” “Does he mean to say that, as to the marriage of their young women, he has no express command of Christ on record, or in the Apostolic oral report of the life of Jesus to fall back upon, but that he once more gives his decision as one found worthy to be entrusted with an apostle’s commission and grace?”—H. J. F., Wesleyan Methodist Sunday-School Magazine, 1876, p. 131 (condensed). [Farrar, in loc., reflects another type of estimate of Paul: “In the abstract, somewhat hesitatingly, and with the confession that he is not sure of his ground, and is therefore offering no authoritative decision, St. Paul on the whole agrees with” those who “regarded celibacy as the only perfect form of life.” In a footnote he adds: “The chapter is the best manual for the ductor dubitantium, because it teaches him ‘that he must not give himself airs of certainty on points where certainty is not to be had’ (Maurice, Unity, p. 429).”] [Bearing on this point are 1 Corinthians 7:10; 1 Corinthians 7:12; 1 Corinthians 7:17; 1 Corinthians 7:25; 1 Corinthians 7:39; 1 Corinthians 4:1; 1 Corinthians 4:17; 1 Corinthians 10:15; 1 Corinthians 11:23 (1 Corinthians 12:3; 1 Corinthians 11:3); 1 Corinthians 14:37 (“my words are the words of Christ”), 1 Corinthians 15:3 (2 Corinthians 1:24), (1 Corinthians 10:8-9); also 1 Thessalonians 4:2; 1 Thessalonians 5:27; Colossians 4:16. NOTESN.B. 1.—See the question discussed in this chapter homiletically treated under 1 Corinthians 6:12.N.B. 2.—Note how Paul here (as in Romans 14, 15.) bases nothing of his reply to the Corinthian questions upon the decree of Acts 15, though dealing so directly in this Epistle with two of its points—fornication and things offered to idols. He is dealing—as Stanley points out—not with the Cephas, the Jewish party in the Church, but with the (self-styled) party of Paul and Apollos; i.e. not with the scrupulous, conservative section, but with the too progressive, too much emancipated section; and these would not be likely to pay very much heed to the decree of a Church council in Jerusalem. Moreover, the Epistle is to become part of the permanent revelation of God to universal mankind. Its very method of dealing with questions and problems of practical ethics is not a small part of its revelation. This question, therefore, is here discussed and determined, not on the basis of submission to an external ordinance, however authoritative, but by reference and appeal to abidingly, universally, valid principles of right reason and right heart. Authority will always have its function and place and use; but the best legislation and its sanctions will be such as are also rooted in the intelligent, moral conviction of a spiritual mind and heart.N.B. 3.—Good note in Stanley as to the “eating meat offered to idols.” “The act of sacrifice amongst all ancient nations was an act, not merely of religious worship, but of social life. In most cases, only a part of the victim was consumed as an offering to the god” [as with the Hebrew “peace offerings,” Leviticus 7:15-18; Leviticus 7:20; Leviticus 17:2-6. Cf. 1 Samuel 14:32 sqq., especially 34]; “the rest fell to the portion of the priests, or was given as a banquet to the poor, or was sold again in the markets for common food, either by the priests, or by such sacrificers as could not afford or did not wish to undergo the expense of the whole victim. Hence most public entertainments, and many private meals, were more or less remotely the accompaniments of sacrifice; most animals killed for butcher’s meat had fallen by the hand of the sacrificer.” [Hence, he points out, the close connection, occasioning some ambiguity in the use of the word for “kill” (e.g. Acts 10:13), between killing for sacrifice and killing for ordinary purposes.] “ ‘Sacrifices’ are enumerated by Aristotle and by Thucydides amongst the chief means of social enjoyment.… At Corinth the conquerors in the Isthmian games used to give a banquet to the people, immediately after the sacrifices, in the temple itself of Poseidon. That these banquets often took place in temples appears from the stories which relate how Claudius and Vitellius, in their ungovernable greediness, rushed in from the streets to partake of the feasts round the altar.” [So in 1 Samuel 9:23 the cook brings up a shoulder which has remained over from the sacrifice and banquet of 1 Corinthians 8:11-13. Cf. also 1 Samuel 2:13-17. “Closely as the whole social life of the ancient world was interwoven with its religious worship” [see how revolutionary for that reason Christianity was socially in, e.g., England: Green, Conquest of England, i. 8, 9], “the decision of this question affected the whole relations of the Christian society with its heathen neighbours; and, in fact, involved all the similar, though more complicated, questions discussed in the first four centuries of the Christian Church, respecting the lawfulness of attending on the spectacles, or receiving the honours, of the Roman Empire.” (Stanley, in loco.) E.g. N.B. 4.—“The council of Ancyra condemned them to a two years’ suspension from the Sacrament who sat down with their heathen friends upon their solemn Festivals in their Idol Temples, although they brought their own Provisions along with them, and touched not one bit of what had been offered to the Idol” (Cave, Prim. Chr., Part I., chap 5.).1 Corinthians 8:1.—New topic, in reply to an inquiry from Corinth, resumed in chap. 10, after a digression, the resumption growing out of 1 Corinthians 9:19-21, and out of the discussion of the, in some respects, analogous Love-feasts and Lord’s Supper. We know … knowledge.—Spoken ironically; q.d. “ ‘We all have knowledge.’ Oh yes! I quite understand that. I said so in the first sentences of my letter (1 Corinthians 1:5). No doubt you are really a very understanding people” (Deuteronomy 4:6). Then with sudden change of tone, almost bitterly: “Well, well; you with your ‘knowledge’! Take care! It may be a danger, instead of a glory or a help.” N.B. 5.—The margin; also same word in 1 Corinthians 8:10 (margin).1 Corinthians 8:2. Thinketh.—Like “I think so,” in Anglican Ordination Service; i.e. not with any doubt, but with all—as he believes, reasonable—certainty. So 1 Corinthians 10:12; Philippians 3:4; (Galatians 2:9). Ought.—In the fitness of things in the Divine life of the soul. But Beet says “must needs know,” for all salvation and spiritual life come through the intelligence (John 17:3). N.B. 6.—“Know … knowledge” have different roots in Greek.1 Corinthians 8:3.—N.B. 7. Evans (in Speaker) makes last clause of 1 Corinthians 8:3 mean, “He (viz. God) is known of him” (viz. the “know something” of 1 Corinthians 8:2). Observe rather how (as in Galatians 4:9) Paul shrinks from saying outright, “He knows God” (Matthew 11:27). Observe also how Paul speaks almost as if in the dialect of John.1 Corinthians 8:4. Nothing in the world.—Not to be joined in the colloquial sense, “nothing in the world.” But, “In the world there is no reality as of a divinity, behind, and corresponding to, the idol.” Observe the slightly variant translation in. Cf. 1 Corinthians 10:19.1 Corinthians 8:5.—The (so-called) Olympian gods, and the crowd of inferior earth-dwelling divinities. No stronger sense to be attached to “there are” than to “there be that are called,” as if allowing any reality to the gods; emphasis is upon “many,” not upon “are”; q.d. “As, in fact, in current belief and speech, there are indeed many such so-called ‘gods.’ ”1 Corinthians 8:6.—As usual, the “Father” is called “God,” yet not so as to exclude the Son from Godhead, any more than to call the Son “Lord” excludes the Father from Lordship. N.B. 8.—The term [the unity of God] is used only by analogy. Though there is one “Divine nature, the unity of God is not a unity of kind, because there are not individuals of the same species, and therefore, as for other reasons, the word is inapplicable to the Divinity. Of all other objects of thought we can imagine fellows or reproductions. But in God there is absolute soleness—; though what lies hidden in the mystery of this essential ONENESS we know but partially. It is wrong to dogmatise upon the nature of a unity to which we have no parallel, and which we cannot define by comparison or illustration” (Pope, Compend. Theol., i. 258). This unity not to be so emphasised as to reduce the Unity to three manifestations of the One God, successive but in different modes—Sabellianism. Paul is still so far a Jew that, speaking in the presence of heathen idolatries and of Jewish sensitiveness, his language is coloured by the Monotheism in which he had been trained from early boyhood. Yet “Lord” is the New Testament appropriation of the LXX. equivalent for Jehovah, and he, above all others, makes it the customary designation of Jesus of Nazareth, his risen Master. [See, as to the practical usefulness of the Unity of God, Romans 3:20 (therefore one way of justification before Him, for Jew and Gentile); 1 Timothy 2:5-6 (therefore prayer should be offered for all men); Galatians 3:20 (most obscure introduction of the thought; perhaps the meaning is—therefore a Promise from Him Who is one and alone in giving it, is a transaction of a different nature to a Covenant, which implies two or many parties); Acts 17:26; Ephesians 4:6; Mark 12:29; Mark 12:33 (one object of worship, therefore one undivided heart-allegiance).] N.B. 9.—Observe the carefully distinguished prepositions, indicating origin, end, midway condition, respectively. The rivers of being came from and return unto God, the Sea, their Source and Good (cf. Ecclesiastes 1:7). Their midway course is conditioned at every point by Christ; all is through Him. [N.B. 9.—Look at John 1:3; Hebrews 1:2-3; in Colossians 1:16 notice how Christ is, like the Father here, made the goal and end; in Romans 11:36 the “through” here connected with Christ, is associated with God. This interchangeableness of God and Christ in such relations, speaks significant things as to Paul’s inspired estimate of the Jesus whom Peter and many still living had known in the flesh and “after the flesh.”] We.—Amongst the “all things.”1 Corinthians 8:7. Important new reading (as in text) now in great favour. Choose between (the old, which meant) “still finding a moral difficulty for conscience in the idol,” and (the new, which means) “still under the influence of inveterately habitual association of ideas.” Both, no doubt, true difficulties to all converts. Robertson (Lectures) aptly parallels a modern instance: “Science has banished an express faith in the existence [of apparitions], yet … much credulity on the subject remains. The statute book is purged from sentences on witchcraft, yet a lingering feeling remains that it may still exist in power.” So, he continues, the heathen deities “were dethroned as gods, but they still existed, to the imagination, as beings of a lower order,—as demons who were malicious to men and enemies to God.” [But does this last satisfy 1 Corinthians 10:20?]1 Corinthians 8:8. Meat.—Wider, of course, than merely “flesh-meat”; distinction drawn in 1 Corinthians 8:13. Equivalent to “what is eaten.” Commend.—For the figure see, e.g., Romans 5:8, or 2 Corinthians 4:2. Notice the reversed order of clauses, as in the new, better reading. The diffident, morbidly scrupulous, are first reassured; then the too confident, inconsiderately “broad,” “liberal” people are cautioned. Notice the marginal literal rendering in the Romans 14:17 is parallel.1 Corinthians 8:9. Liberty.—Really “power”; connected with “are lawful,” 1 Corinthians 6:12; not supposed by Paul to be any unauthorised “liberty,” thus taken by the Corinthian who eats. Right enough, in the light of clear, abstract knowledge.1 Corinthians 8:10. Emboldened.—Literally “built up” a new turn given to the word of 1 Corinthians 8:1. “Ruinosa œdificatin,” Calvin.1 Corinthians 8:11. Perisheth.—Note this present, not future, tense in the best reading. As always, “salvation” and “perdition” are continuous conditions, begun already and simply continued, though intensified, into eternity (so Acts 2:47; 2 Corinthians 2:15). Also note the theological deduction drawn from this; with a force the stronger, just because the point occurs incidentally, an understood and accepted truth, both to Paul and to the Christian, in dealing with whom he makes it a sure basis of appeal;—a man may be even now perishing for whom Christ as much and as really died as for those who are now being saved.1 Corinthians 8:12.—How Paul had learned the lesson of Act 9:4. (See the homiletic treatment of “The Body of Christ,” 1 Corinthians 12:27.)1 Corinthians 8:13.—Different word for “stumble” here from that in 1 Corinthians 8:9. That really is “stumbling-block”; this is (always) rather a trap or snare, which catches, by entangling, the feet. .—Whole ChapterWhole chapter may be grouped around the two clauses of the concluding sentence of 1 Corinthians 8:1. A. The teachings of knowledge (1 Corinthians 8:1-8). B. The teachings of love (1 Corinthians 8:9-13). A. I. The great central truth is the existence and unity of God.—This has been the peculiar work of Israel, to preserve and exhibit the truth about Him. Others might speculate about an Eternal Matter, a self-originated, self-sustained, Creation, eternal a parte ante; Israel knew only an Eternal Creator, “of Whom … to Whom,” etc. Others might confuse Him with His work; Israel knew—and the Church knows—of a personal Creator distinct from His Creation. Others might “solve” the problem of the presence of evil, physical and moral, by a Dualism which conceived of a co-ordinate, independent author and worker of the evil, side by side with the Author and Worker of good; Israel, and the Church, testify to a personal worker and author of evil, indeed, but one who is the creature of God, working in strictest, though enforced, subjection to the limitations of the will of the one only God, and mysteriously subservient to the purposes and glory of that ONE Only GOD. “Unto Whom.” II. The new stage, just then being reached by the world in the unfolding of God’s revelation of Himself, discovered this God in relation to another “personal” existence within His own essence. A “Father,” loving and loved by a “Son,” Who had stepped forth from the unseen, within then very recent years, and in human form had taken His part and place in the history of the race, the historical “Jesus,” the “Christ” for whom Israel had been for ages waiting, the “Lord” in the life and worship and thought of Christians, Jew and Gentile alike. And a yet more profound and mysterious truth connected with this Jesus Christ, the Lord, was coming into view. He is seen standing a Midway Term, a Mediating Condition, making possible, actual, the (intellectually difficult) passage between Creator and Creation: “apart from Him nothing made that was made”; “the worlds framed by the (Personal) Word of God” (John 1:3; Hebrews 11:3). Further, as for their origin, so for their continuous maintenance in order, beauty, life, all created things depend mediately, not directly, upon God, “through” Christ; the God of Providence, as of Creation, is God in Christ. [To a Christian, therefore, Providence is no mere bare, hard, perfect, governmental system, but the rule of a God with a heart; a God Whose heart has been seen and known in Christ. To a Christian, Providence is not only wisdom, but love; not only power, but grace.] III. There is, further, another Creation, another world, with its order and beauty and life and government,—the spiritual; a glorious Sub-section, a grand Episode, in the larger Whole of God-originated, God-sustained Being; taking shape in a Church; repeated, too, in all its essential characteristics, but on a smaller scale, in the new order, beauty, happiness, rule, within the individual life of the Christian. Nowhere is it more true than of the Church and of the Christian, “we are through Him,” viz. Christ. The Church, the individual believer, is nothing, has nothing, becomes nothing, could retain nothing, except through Christ. He and His work and grace are the great underlying, foundation, Condition, assumed in all God’s dealing with them; presupposed in all the new creation from first to last. Remove Him from the facts of the case as between God and man, and all disappears,—Redemption, Pardon, the Grace of the Spirit; all life, knowledge, good; all hope, all heaven. [“Things which are not” have become and, moment by moment, subsist—“we are”—through Christ (1 Corinthians 1:28; 1 Corinthians 1:30).] IV. This once apprehended and made the working basis of thought and practice, “An idol is nothing.” [God and Providence once fully believed in and trusted, all Luck, Chance, Evil-eye, Omens, Astrology, and a host of heathenish fears and superstitions and sinful traffickings with demons and the dead, disappear from Christian life.] The image may have meant in better, earlier, [very occasional] instances an attempt to assist the worshipping instinct and craving in man to realise and approach some Presence vaguely apprehended and believed in, in Nature. But there could be no real correspondence between the idols and the true God. [Paul on Mars’ Hill pointed across to the Acropolis of Athens, with its temples and statues. “God—God that made the world—dwells not even in such glorious shrines as those. God, whose offspring Men are, is no thing of stone or ivory or gold like even those.”] There were—could be—no beings to be represented by the crowds of idols, “gods many, lords many,” in every heathen pantheon. The one Divine Presence and Power and Ruler “in the world” is the God Whom we know; the idol stands for nothing, represents and makes visible no reality, signifies nothing—is a mere piece of carved or molten matter, a work of art perhaps, but nothing to be worshipped or feared, and has no meaning to the religious instinct. [Except in the indirect sense that the Adversary of God and of all good avails himself of the idol, to divert to himself and his “demons” the homage of the worshipping heart in men, and perverts into the occasion of gross sin the very ceremonial of the worship of heathen systems (1 Corinthians 10:20).] V. Hence follows a complete emancipation of the use and enjoyment of the creature from any superstitious restrictions.—All the creation of God is free to man, God’s designated lord of creation. [Woods, streams, mountains are no longer haunted by, possessed by, a host of divinities.] No regard need any longer be had to any connection between a “divinity” supposed in the idol, and the thing useful or needful for man. The food which has been upon an idol altar has lost nothing nor gained anything in that fact. It was morally neutral before; intrinsically it is non-moral still to partake of it. [Hard for any except those to-day living or working in countries and societies beginning to be affected by Christianity, to realise what an emancipation it brings to mind and heart and practice to find the heathen pantheon, whether poetically beautiful or fearsomely dreadful, benignant or malevolent, swept away, and the world seen to be a great temple filled with God, and that God known in, ruling by, to be worshipped in, Christ. It is a revolutionising emancipation. The dread is gone, which perpetually overhung life; the shadow disappears from nature and from the future; there is a new sense of security and freedom. Men breathe freely, walk with a new buoyancy, move and work and enjoy, in a world whose atmosphere is filled with the presence of God in Christ.] VI. One other fact is assumed as between Paul and his correspondents: “Christ died even for a man who perishes.”—Redemption is no fatalism; no hard compulsion which necessitates ultimate salvation. Redemption has brought a grace to every man, which is the basis on which the Spirit and the man himself may co-operate to build up a saved life. All “natural” goodness, all the so-called “innate” knowledge of what is “right” and what “wrong,” all “freedom” and “power” of will toward God and good, all the (often very strong) drawings toward God, and the (often very strong) holdings back from sin; all ability to respond to God’s “command” that men should repent (Acts 17:30); all ability to believe with a saving faith; all knowledge of, sensibility to, love for, Divine things; all the light given even to the heathen;—all are fruits of the redemptive work of Christ, availing literally for all men. This may be followed up or sinned away. It is always enough to make condemnation just, if a man be unfaithful to it; whilst out of it may grow a true salvation. This makes Christ the “light which lighteth every man coming into the world” (John 1:5). Every man is born of a redeemed stock; because of a Redeemer’s grace, every man may be saved. Whatever be the eternal issue of the life of the individual, or his present moral condition—however sunk or degraded or dark—the great facts of the Redeemer’s work remain unalterably facts, independently of any use or neglect of them by the man himself. They are the foundation of all hope for the Christian worker, as he seeks to lift and save others; they are the basis of all work; they are the warrant for prayer for the salvation of souls. VII. Knowledge has its perils.— 1. Such knowledge is no achievement to be boasted of; it is a privilege, a mercy, a favour, a grace. The wisdom of the world does not “know” all this. It is to-day avowedly “Agnostic” in regard to all such questions. It will affirm nothing, will deny nothing; it has no scientific basis or right to say “we know.” The ancient philosophies never reached any certain conclusions on such topics. Each teacher was successful rather in criticising his predecessor’s system and logic than in constructing his own, or in bringing to any restful certainty the mind and heart. God was not, is not, found by searching. The Fatherhood, with its correlative Sonships, Divine and human, was never so much as guessed or suspected. The history of speculation and nquiry, ancient and modern, conclusively establishes this, that upon this last point we have to choose between believing a revelation and complete ignorance; and, further, that as to the existence, nature, unity, creative work, and providential government of God, nothing beyond guesses, which may ripen into hope, are attainable by unassisted reason. 2. So, then, knowledge should be, (a) grateful, (b) humble, and (c) patient towards ignorance or less-advanced knowledge. There is a delight in the winning of knowledge which is intoxicating; there is a glorious sense of mastery when new ground has been occupied, when new worlds of facts have been possessed; the sense of enlargement reveals to a man how glorious a thing is his manhood, with its capacity for apprehending and appropriating such great truths. But the wise man should remember that all he knows is all a gift, a grace. He should be grateful. He should remember how limited, after all, is his knowledge at its widest, and be humble. “There remaineth yet much land to be possessed.” He has only yet made and occupied a small clearing in a boundless forest of dark recesses and intricate growths. Above all, he needs to be patient to those who have not yet reached his point of advance and clear vision. [The sixth-form scholar is impatient with the firstform boy, that he cannot at once see what is to himself so obvious.] He must not forget the days when he was himself toilsomely climbing the hill whose top, with its broad horizon of knowledge, he has now reached. He must keep his sympathy for those whose knowledge is yet only in process towards the relative completeness which is, after all, all he has himself even now attained. Self-sufficiency, self-conceit, unsympathetic impatience with imperfect enlightenment, are some of the moral perils of the man “puffed up” with his “knowledge.” [Even in merely secular, natural knowledge also, error is not far off when this is the temper of an inquirer; the student who would still go on to “know,” must be humble, simple, docile to Nature and its facts. Carelessness and inaccuracy of methods, or their application, are also perils not far away from such students.] B. The teachings of love.— 1. Knowledge and love are in no necessary opposition. They are made for each other. Their union produces the perfect life. They are both found in closest alliance, each perfect, in God. No need to exalt love at the expense of knowledge. Knowledge is not sinful, or godless, per se. (See Paul’s prayer for his beloved Philippians, Philippians 1:9.) The Godlike life needs, embodies, combines, both. Indeed, in the highest sense, and in regard to the highest things, love is the condition of knowledge. Only the man who “loves God,” knows God; or (let us say) can have that life of fellowship with God whose not least precious privilege it is to rejoice to lie all open and “known” to the scrutiny of the eye of God. 2. Love without knowledge is liable to become fanatical, and easily led into mischievous error. Knowledge without love is apt to become, as we have seen, impatient of weakness, cold, hard, repellent, pitiless; in its self-contained, self-satisfied exaltation following out its conclusions to their rigorous, logical issues, regardless of the consequences in other lives. Apt to be lifted up to a mountain-top of self-glorification, and to forget or despise the struggling, troubled, tempted, weaker multitudes on the lower levels of common life. In the region of the clear, cold light of its definite convictions and assured conclusions, it walks confidently, securely, and does not understand or allow for the difficulties and perils of the lives which walk in the mists and darkness of weakness or half-enlightenment. The knowledge of the logical mind is specially liable to be cruelly reckless of what pressing perfectly warranted conclusions to their full length may cost to the men and women who cannot live by logic; who largely follow “custom,” and with difficulty find their way into new paths, whether of belief or practice; who do not readily emancipate mind or “conscience” from long-established ideas, or prepossessions or prejudices; who find it harder than do the men of “knowledge,” to unlearn the mental and moral habits and training of a lifetime. To such, for example, a public banquet in a heathen temple was not yet a thing simply of social and civil life. The place itself was not neutral ground, and the fact that some of the provisions had been offered upon idol altars gave the very food upon the table a moral taint. Let the man of knowledge press them upon the point; they can give him—can give themselves—little or no satisfying reason for their instinctive shrinking from participation. “But you believe that there are no such gods as the idols represent?” “Yes.” “And you believe, too, that the temple floor is part of the world which all belongs to your God?” “Yes.” “And you surely see that a heathen divinity which is really non-existent cannot have affected the food put upon its altar?” “Yes. Y-e-s. But—” “And you understand that God takes no account of you, favourable or unfavourable, merely because of what you eat or don’t eat, or drink?” “Yes.” And yet the habit of regarding the banquet and the food as affected by its consecration to a god is not readily to be uprooted; conscience cannot see clearly yet that, because the idol is nothing, the effect upon the food is morally nothing. 3. Whilst, then, Knowledge lives too readily in an unreal world [almost in a moral vacuum], and takes too little account of the complexity of moral questions in the concrete of daily life, Love says to Knowledge: “Do not disregard the prejudice born of habit, and the difficulty born of half-enlightenment of conscience. Do not by your action force on too fast in his mental development, and in his moral growth, the less-advanced man next you in the Church. Do not stand too stiffly upon, nor exact for yourself too rigorously, the fullest liberty which in the abstract you might claim. His foundation will not carry your building as yours can. Remember he is likely to emulate you, disliking perhaps to be thought weak, fearing perhaps the scornful verdict implied in the very contrast with you; he will try to build as fast and as high as you; he will try to go as far. That respect for conscience and its teaching which is a primary principle of all moral life will be injured. It is part of the foundation of his character; you help him to disturb it. And then, with a shaken foundation, and a building too high for it, if even it were in unimpaired strength, no great wonder if he “perish”; beginning with violence done to his moral sensitiveness, he will go on to some more positive transgression, tempted by the scenes and company into which you embolden him to thrust himself. What wonder if all his ideas, his moral convictions, his practice, come toppling down in soul-destroying ruin! And if he “perish,” what follower are you of that Christ “who died” to redeem and save him? “Knowledge?” “I see as clearly as any of you how absolutely nothing in intrinsic significance are all such accidents of the food I eat. They are nothing to it, or to me; they in no way affect my standing before God. But rather than even contribute to the moral wreck of even one soul, rather than spread a snare for an unwary or unsteady and uncertain foot, I will abstain always and in all circumstances from anything which creates difficulty or danger to my brother’s soul.” Hardly necessary to think that Paul in actual practice abstained from flesh-meat, except in the particular case here under discussion. The “I” is somewhat rhetorical. He is, in part, indirectly suggesting to a Corinthian what his heart ought to make him say. 1 Corinthians 8:1-3. Knowledge weighed in the Balances against Love.—The verdict is: “Found wanting.” I. The reference is special—to knowledge in relation to Divine things. This is due to the special occasion out of which Paul’s words have arisen. But 1 Corinthians 8:2 is true of knowledge on all subjects, in any field of inquiry. 1. True knowledge will only be arrived at by the man who is a patient inquirer; recognising himself the servant, not the master or the maker, of Facts; acknowledging that truth is paramount, and before any question of his own reputation or consistency as a theorist or a teacher. He must never, in his confidence that “he knows,” be so wedded to his own first conclusions as not to admit their modification or complete setting aside, if new light and new facts be forthcoming, especially when these are the result of the inquiry and the work of others. He will be humble, recognising the limitations of his powers, of his field; that his results are often only provisionally and relatively true, and that when absolutely true they are only part of the whole Truth. Nature—Natural Science—has little or nothing to reveal to the man full of prepossessions or prejudices; who will not always have the spirit of a learner; who, confident in his own results, too promptly closes doors, and refuses to allow to himself further inquiry, or to new truth any entrance, in any particular direction. One of the surest results of the widest knowledge is the knowledge how much there is to know, and how little any one man can or does know. (Cf. Homily on “We know in part,” 1 Corinthians 13:9.) 2. The humble, teachable, patient temper is still more emphatically a sine quâ non of all knowledge in relation to Divine things. “The little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Indeed, “the little child alone enters into,” and so arrives at any true knowledge of, “the kingdom of heaven.” The man of prepossessions—against Revelation or any part of its contents, or for Reason, making it the one, supreme organon of knowledge, and the sole test of truth; who will insist that everything, indeed, shall satisfy his reason—will arrive at no true knowledge of God. The man, in spiritual things “wise in his own conceits,” is not really wise. To a “spiritual” man whom “love” has “built up” in real knowledge, it is amusing to hear the dogmatically confident pronouncements upon points of theology and the experimental life. [These two stand in the most intimate association. The heart makes the theologian. The knowledge of God and things Divine is a grace of the same Spirit Who awakens and sustains the experimental life of God within the soul. He will, He can, teach nothing to the man who is not first morally receptive.] He may be a very scantily educated, a very little cultured, man; but on these topics he says, with much pity and some amusement, “Ah, my wise friend, you know nothing yet as you ought to know.” II. Of knowledge and love in contrast we say: 1. Knowledge puffs the man up; love builds him up. Love is the basis of the noblest character; above all, of the distinctively Christian character. This begins in the love of God shed abroad in the heart; this awakens an answering love to God, “because He first loved us.” Love lays all new knowledge under contribution for practical life; it is the supreme, the summarised, Law of life; it is the one adequate, self-acting, reliable, motive power, as well as the director of all Christian activity. Love and knowledge need each other. The sentence is antithetically strong in its form; but facts, and the reason of the thing, agree to make it clear that love alone cannot build up a strong character. Love without knowledge tends to become mere feeble sentimentalism; a mere impulsive, impressionable thing, at the mercy of the latest influence brought to bear. Knowledge ought to give “bone,” rigidity, resistant power, to the spiritual “constitution.” But knowledge alone can make no constitution; love is the health of the soul, without which all the food which knowledge brings, only “puffs up,” not feeds. Thus increase of knowledge may become a real danger to the soul, unless it be turned to practical account, as a new ability to serve God and man better, in loving devotion to both. Turn all new light into new activity. Light should be force. “If ye know, happy are ye if ye do.” 2. Knowledge puffs the man himself up; love seeks to build others up. Paul’s point here. The clear, confident, instructed man, to whom all the idolatry of his old life was now a transparent sham, by the keen vision of his knowl dge, seen through and through in all its empty unreality, was apt to be a selfish man. Proud in his superiority to the vulgar, unreasoning prejudices of the common run of his fellow-Christians; puffed up with a sense of mental grasp and large view; his danger was to live for himself, to pursue his own course, reckless what souls he ran down and wrecked in the unfaltering, unswerving, severely logical, adherence to his own clearly traced path, followed out to its utmost logical consequences. The peril of knowledge is fastidiousness, intolerance, and lack of sympathy for other and less perfect views, a cruel insistence upon its own rights and liberty; summum jus working summam injuriam. Love in its very nature goes outside itself; looks at others, tries to understand their ignorance, the difficulties of their half-enlightenment, both of understanding and conscience; is patient with their slower progress, accommodates its own pace to their slower advancement. Mere knowledge pushes ignorance impatiently aside, and holds on its own way; love stops to help and encourage, and carry forward in its company to its own goal. Knowledge alone is apt to be the intellectual priest or Levite; Love stops to be the Samaritan, seeking to save and build up again the soul in peril, or perplexity, or ignorance. Knowledge says, “This people that knoweth not the law are cursed.” Love says, “Come unto me, ye that are burdened and heavy laden; I will give you rest.” III. Love, and not mere knowledge, brings into fellowship with God.—The Devil knows—none better—how true is everything Paul asserts in this chapter. Conceivable that a man may acquire and retain a full, accurate, trained knowledge of the didactic and controversial literature of divinity in all its topics, whilst losing the love which brought him into union with God. But, the love gone, the life is gone; the link between God and the soul is sundered. If he do not love God, he cannot know God. [How constantly we say, “So-and-so will never know or understand me; he does not like me.”] God will know him, indeed, as He knows all His works (Acts 15:18). But He will “know the proud” man of knowledge “afar off” (Psalms 138:6). There will be no love in God’s knowledge. No affectionate, complacent regard, as a father knows his child, or a friend his friend. The man who loves knows God. They look into each other’s heart, and know each other. 1 Corinthians 8:6. Christian Monotheism.—The Jew was the monotheist of the ancient world. [Modern inquiry and fuller knowledge are making it clear that Cyrus was no such strict monotheist as until recently was supposed. Moreover, the Persian religion recognised as secondary, but independent, Being, the Author and Worker of evil. It was really Dualism, not Monotheism.] The Christian, as well as the Jew and the Mahometan, is a modern monotheist. “To us there is but one God.” The name “Unitarian” is now understood, and has become a convenience; but every Christian Trinitarian claims to be also in the true sense “unitarian”: a monotheist in the strictest sense. (See also further in the Critical Notes.) This Christian belief in the unity of God by no means denies Godhead to the Lord Jesus Christ [or to the Spirit]. [It is understood that all language on this topic is negative of error, rather than positive assertion of truth, and must be accepted and used with that proviso. It walks on a narrow, edgelike path, with pitfalls of error, of overstatement, or deficient statement, on either hand.] With sufficient frequency to make belief in His Godhead secure, are Divine names given to Him, and a Divine position, in the language, affections, life, work, of the men of the New Testament. Yet, prevalently, the name “God” is given to the “Father.” This verse is typical in its style of language in regard to Christ. 1. Something may be due to the “local colouring” of the men, their Jewish race and upbringing, their idolatrous age and surroundings. The unity of God still needed emphasising in the presence of a polytheistic world. Also they had themselves known, or knew well those who had known, the Son of God,—had eaten with, lived with, seen, heard, handled, the Son in the familiar guise of the Man, Jesus, of Nazareth. Perhaps permissible, and in accordance with the analogy of all God’s dealings, to say that they were not yet so far emancipated from their old monotheistic predispositions, as that their habitual language should yet fully express their actual belief in the Godhead of their Master. The heart did, but not yet fully their tongue. 2. More is due to the fact that from (say) Acts 2:22 to (say) 1 John 5:20 the Spirit is, with increasing clearness, revealing the Divine Son. In this verse the language is still transitional. 3. But, after all, there is not only that degree of relative truth in the restricted attribute of the name “God” to the “Father”; there is also the absolute truth which has sometimes been called the “Principatus” of the Father. [Neither this, nor “subordination” in regard to the Son, may be overpressed. They are working conventionalisms of language, rather than exact statements of the whole truth; these latter are, indeed, impossible to us. In Pearson’s well-known, cautious words (Creed, article i.), “Some kind of priority we must ascribe unto Him Whom we call the first, in respect of Him Whom we call the second.… Now this privilege or priority consisteth not in this, that the essence or attributes of the one are greater than the essence or the attributes of the other, … but only in this, that the Father hath that essence of Himself, the Son by communication from the Father.” Above all, add to this, that New Testament language ordinarily has regard to the Father and the Son, as they are seen related, and active, in the working out of Redemption. 4. Multiplied, often verified, experiment in all ages, in all lands, in persons of all ages and types, has shown that, with the smallest exception, the Godhead of the “Lord Jesus Christ” has not only created no difficulty in regard to the Oneness of the Godhead, but has proved to be the truth which has satisfied alike the most cultured intellects and the simplest hearts. For the child, or the heathen, or the untrained adult mind at home, “Jesus” is the “God” with Whom their heart has practically to do. [A thing this, quite distinct from the formal, theologically precise Swedenborgian assertion that the One God is He Whom we know as the Son, Jesus Christ.] History and the reason of the thing show that I. Christian, Trinitarian Monotheism is the one form of teaching about God which has for any long period preserved unimpaired the doctrine of the unity of God.—“The mere abstract unity of the Godbead, which does not include a multiplicity, soon leads to a cold and lifeless Deism; and as soon as it has reached this point, is forced to seek refreshment from the pantheistic religions of nature. After the Jews and Mahometans had rejected the idea of a Son who is of the same Divine essence with His Father, as idolatry, they were fated to find their absolutely monotheistic conceptions of God utterly empty and lifeless, so that they yearned after the warm vitality of Pantheism. This is a phenomenon which is clearly evident from the history of the Jewish philosophers (especially Spinoza) as well as of the Indian and Persian Pantheists. And so, too, it could not but happen that philosophical Pantheism should tread on the heels of German Deism and Rationalism. As long as Theism distinguishes only between God and the world, and not between God and God, it will always have a tendency to Pantheism, or some other denial of absolute Being.… (The) One has taken to Himself all life, and neutralises all the vital fulness of nature. We no longer feel love or joy. There is but One around whom all things move, and He is a cold, mathematical quantity, a point of pure abstraction. Abstract Monotheism has too little life-blood to offer an enduring resistance to the pantheistic deification of nature.… In [the Trinity] we have a Unity; not, however, unloving and lifeless, a cold numerical One, but a complex of living and loving energies—a living Unity embracing a Plurality, and bearing the sacred name of Father, Son, and Spirit.” [Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, pp. 266, 267. To similar effect, and very nobly, Huntington, Christian Believing and Living, pp. 343, 344, who says:] “Two errors divide the unchristianised world between them. Either the personality of God is sacrificed to the infinity, or the infinity is sacrificed to the personality. In the former case men may imagine that they recognise an Infinite Being; but it is only an abstraction, or a principle, or a bundle of laws, or a loose mass of sequences and phenomena, from which the attribute of infinity itself as well as of personal consciousness is soon found to have ebbed away. In the latter case the innate longing for a veritable Divine Person, with personal traits answering to ours, may be met; but it will soon begin to appear that, though a Person remains, the Eternal and Uncreated and Almighty God of glory is gone.… Both the errors spring from desires and demands of man’s nature which in themselves are right.… Despairing to conceive of personality without limitation, some men rush over to Pantheism. Others, despairing of retaining a Deity near enough for love and sympathy who is literally infinite, stop short with a Deity who is not God.… [And he adds:] These implanted wants are wonderfully satisfied in the Divine Trinity. In the Absolute and one only Godhead, all man’s highest, purest, largest, most far-reaching conceptions, stretching away into the regions of Infinitude, Eternity, Almightiness, have their full and complete exercise. In the Incarnate Christ, taking up our humanity, the longing for a personal, sympathising, companionable, Deity is blessedly answered—and yet God is there: there is no loss of the essential and veritable Deity. In the Holy Spirit, the natural desire of the devout mind to connect God with all the operations of the present world, the processes of Creation, the welfare, renewal, revolutions, sanctification of the Human Family, finds its lawful verification.” “I have long thought that without an eternal Logos you must have an eternal cosmos; and I therefore suspect that a monopersonal Theism is impotent against the Pantheist. So that since the controversy has passed from its old atheistic phases, I doubt if either Deist, or Socinian, or Mahometan, will be able to cope with the Pantheist. In short, I doubt if any but a Trinitarian can do so adequately.” (Dr. Duncan, in Colloquia Peripatetica, p. 96.) II. “The conception of the triune God furnishes us with the sole bridge that can fill up the breach between God and the world, … the void which separates the transcendent unity of God from the rich and manifold organisation of natural life.… The Word which becomes incarnate, in order to do and suffer for mankind, and the Spirit who by His power begets fresh life, both stand between God and the world as mediate causes which not only render the creation of the world a possibility, but also guarantee the Divine presence in it, and its return to God. Here we have all the fulness and freshness of Pantheism combined with the truth of Monotheism, whilst the element in which the latter is wanting, viz. a real connecting link between God and the world, is here supplied.… [So particularly by the Incarnation and the Atonement.] We have a connecting link between God and man in the person of the Incarnate Logos, who is the eternal Archetype of the whole creation, and especially of man, and who for all future æons will be the head of the whole body.… The spiritual chasm which yawns between sinful man and the absolutely sinless God-man is filled up by the regenerating and sanctifying influences of the Holy Spirit. Hence the doctrine of the Trinity affords the most important aids in determining our practical relation to God.” (Christlieb, p. 270.) (For the relations of this Doctrine to the spiritual life, see in the Critical Notes.) 1 Corinthians 8:10-13. The Rights of Conscience.—N.B. of even an ill-instructed, half-enlightened, needlessly sensitive, conscience. I. It has rights (1) as against the man himself. It claims to be listened to, and obeyed, especially when restricting liberty and condemning action. The man may grow more enlightened by-and-by, better instructed, clearer in view, and stronger in character. But, until he does, let him rigorously compel himself to obey conscience. The eye will so be kept healthy, and ready to receive new light; the ear will be kept sensitive, and ready to receive new direction from God. More hope, more possibilities, for a conscientious heathen than for a well-instructed Christian who at every step is doing violence to his clear knowledge of wrong and right. “To him that hath, (and is faithful to, even one talent of knowledge and light) shall be given (more light).” God is honoured, Whose gifts both the faculty and any degree of enlightenment it possesses are. Obedience to conscience is the germ out of which all true morality must grow. A man must not do what his conscience forbids. (2) As against the better instructed, fully enlightened Christian. Such a one must deal gently with the “weaker” brother. Especially may he need to abridge his own liberty for his sake. “No doubt, to the large, free, enlightened mind of Paul, all these scruples and superstitions must have seemed mean, trivial, and small indeed. It was a matter to him of far less importance that truth should be established, than that it should be arrived at truly—a matter of far less importance, even that right should be done, than that right should be done rightly. Conscience was far more sacred to him than even liberty.… The scruple may be small and foolish, but it may be impossible to uproot it, without tearing up the feeling of the sanctity of conscience, and of reverence for the law of God, associated with the scruple. Therefore … Paul counsels … to abridge their … liberty.… For two reasons: the first, one of Christian feeling. It might cause exquisite pain to sensitive minds to see those things which appeared to them to be wrong done by Christian brethren.… Further, if any man, overborne by authority or interest were [to eat], not according to conscience, but against it, there would be a distinct and direct act of disobedience—a conflict between the sense of right, and the gratification of his appetites or the power of influence; and then his compliance would as much damage his conscience and moral sense as if the act had been wrong in itself.” (Robertson, Expos. Lectures, in loco.) II. Yet conscience has no absolute right of acquittal.— 1. Look, e.g., at 1 Corinthians 4:4 : “I know nothing against myself, yet,” etc. Conscience holds barely a “court of first instance.” Every verdict must be reported to the Great Judge. He alone knows absolute wrong and right. Conscience is no independently authoritative fountain of law. It does good, though only provisional, service if (as here) a man is led to use what is perhaps an excess of caution. It cannot blamelessly enlarge liberty, if the enlargement mean sin. Conscientious ignorance can only be “excused” when it has led to “sin,” if the man be, as the foundation of all his status before God, a sinner trusting in Christ, and if he have also sought for light with all simplicity and earnestness, and have followed, as before God, all the light he has. 2. Also no regard for another man’s scruples or ignorance may require a Christian to suppress or conceal truth, or to do what to himself is wrong. His conscience in its turn has its rights, and must be obeyed. [Indeed, obviously, the whole field within which Paul’s counsel and its underlying principle are binding or operative, is a narrow one, limited to questions not of absolute, abiding, universal, wrong and right, but only to the relative wrong and right which may vary according to the circumstances of the man or the time, to expediency, or the demand of brotherly forbearance.] [“Christ died” for such! How much will you deny yourself of to save a soul from difficulty or temptation? What father will not banish drink from his table, if his boy is in danger? What teacher will not dress more quietly, if her Sunday scholars are in danger of pleading her example to defend their vanity or waste in dress? What friend will not give up his cards, or his novel, or his opera, if his practice is a stumbling-block, or a real temptation, to his friend—though perhaps very illogically and unfairly so? It would not be the Spirit of Christ which says: “Why should I give up my novel, my billiards, my opera, my alcohol, my cards, for the sake of these poor creatures who cannot use without abusing? For the sake, e.g., of these children, these new converts, these narrow and prejudiced ‘evangelicals’!”] NOTES1 Corinthians 9:1.—Notice the reversed order of clauses in the better-attested reading. Free.—I.c. quâ man; he is always Christ’s “bondservant”; it is of his own choice that he submits to such limitations (1 Corinthians 9:19-22) upon his liberty as, e.g., in 1 Corinthians 8:13; or as this in question, that he should maintain himself by his manual labour, whereas he was also “free” to demand Church maintenance for himself if he had chosen. Apostle.—He had once been the Apostle (Sheliach, the Talmudic equivalent) of the Jewish authorities at Jerusalem to the synagogue in Damascus. [In this, etymological, sense and employment of the word Barnabas is called an apostle (Acts 14:14). So the same popular, freer use derived from the Jewish practice lingers in 2 Corinthians 8:23 (of Luke and the bearers of the “collection”), in Philippians 2:25 (of Epaphroditus). The sense of “among the apostles” as including Andronicus and Junias (Romans 16:7) is very disputable, especially if the latter name be a woman’s, “Junia.”] Now a greater High Priest had sent him forth as His messenger and representative. For this the two needful qualifications were, to have had his commission direct from Christ’s own lips [“I send thee” (Acts 26:17), putting him on an equality with those who heard Him say, “Go ye therefore,” etc. (Matthew 28:19-20)], and to be able, at first hand, and not merely by hearsay or report of others, to assert as a fact within his own knowledge that the Crucified Christ was risen again and was then really living [putting Paul on the footing of Peter and the rest, who could say, Acts 5:32; cf. Acts 1:22 (very explicit); cf. 1 John 1:1]. Important for us that the first link of the chain of historical evidence and testimony should be sound. [If indeed the uniqueness of the position of the apostles in their special selection, commission, and qualification for this testimony, out of the witnesses of 1 Corinthians 15:6, does not make them, not merely the first link, but the strong staple, holding the first link, and itself driven into the solid rock of the facts. The Apostolic company mediated between the Great Fact—the Living, Risen Christ—and the long succession of Christian teachers who must needs receive the truth on evidence of others (supported, indeed, by the subjective evidence of their experience of His working). My … in the Lord.—Observe how the second phrase guards, almost corrects, the first. [Cf. 1 Corinthians 16:23-24 : Christ’s grace; my love.] No independent work; no success of his own. He has no wisdom, strength, success, except as his whole life is “in Christ”; and thus Christ wins the success and does the work through him. It is Christ’s working and power; it is only a question which of the members of the Body He shall employ for any particular part of the great task, and to which shall be “credited” the particular share of the great total result.1 Corinthians 9:2. To others.—Q.d. in their opinion, and by their recognition, “I am not.” Notice “at least,” R.V. seal.—As by-and-by his “crown” (Philippians 4:1), and, then and now, his “joy” (ib.). “At Corinth, at all events, there can be no doubt of the original validity of my commission, or whether it be still running and valid.”1 Corinthians 9:3. Answer.—Apologia, as, e.g., Acts 22:1; 2 Timothy 4:16. A forensic word, like “examine,” as, e.g., in Acts 4:9; Acts 24:8; Acts 28:18; (1 Corinthians 4:3-5).1 Corinthians 9:4. Power.—In the sense of “right”; so in 1 Corinthians 9:12, “to eat and to drink,” q.d. at the expense of the Church.1 Corinthians 9:5. Sister.—In the Christian sense, parallel to “brother” (1 Corinthians 5:11, etc.); “a wife” who is also a Christian “sister.” The brethren of the Lord.—Three long-discussed, influentially sustained, theories: (1) Children of Mary and Joseph, born after Jesus (the IIelvidian theory); (2) Children of Joseph by a former wife (the Epiphanian); (3) Cousins of Christ, children of Mary the sister of the Virgin, assumed also to be the wife of Alphæus (Jerome’s theory). Probably the data are insufficient for a sure conclusion, agreement in which would otherwise long ago have been arrived at. (1) is unquestionably the most natural impression to be gathered from the Gospel history and from the word “brethren.” (2), and in a degree (3), no doubt originated, or found a very strong motive for their propagation and acceptance, in a desire to save the “perpetual virginity” of Mary. (1) accounts best for the prominence in the Church at Jerusalem of the James of Acts 15, and of Paul’s Epistles. Cephas.—Matthew 8:14. [Very precarious speculation has seen another touch of Peter’s domestic life in 1 Peter 5:13, and yet more precariously has made his wife the “elect lady” of 2 John, because of 1 Peter 5:13, which is only “the elected one (fem.) at Babylon.”]1 Corinthians 9:6.—Barnabas was a rich landowner in Cyprus (Acts 4), and needed neither to work for his living nor to ask the Church to maintain him. If (with Bishop Lightfoot, Galatians 2:11) we make Paul’s rebuke of Barnabas’s vacillation occur during Acts 15:30-40, they may have started together with a “soreness” which made Barnabas (or both of them) tenderly irritable, and helped to the “quarrel” (so-called) about John Mark. This the earliest mention of Barnabas by Paul after the separation. [The spirit of even this passing mention may be paralleled by John Wesley’s persistent kindness of thought and speech to and about Whitefield, after their separation over the Calvinist controversy.]1 Corinthians 9:7.—Matters little whether the master or the employé in the vineyard, the owner or only the hired shepherd, be intended. Probably the former. As to the soldier, note the R.V.1 Corinthians 9:8. As a man—Found in Romans 3:5 (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:19); 1 Corinthians 3:3; 1 Corinthians 9:8; 1 Corinthians 15:32 (Galatians 1:11, plur.), 1 Corinthians 3:15; “after man,” as a pattern or norm, but with varying shades of meaning. Here: “According to the sense of what is right, customary amongst men.” Not only does the common judgment of mankind bear him out in his contention, but God has delivered His mind also.1 Corinthians 9:9.—“Deuteronomy 25:4, quoted also in 1 Timothy 5:8, is very conspicuous for its unexpected, sudden, and momentary reference to cattle amid matter quite different” (Beet). [But the whole chapter looks like a succession of legislative dicta, “entered up” in the statute-book with no order or connection beyond that of their succession of actual enactment as the occasion arose.] An instance carrying a far-reaching principle in regard to the interpretation of the Old Testament. If some enactments seem vague, impracticable, trivial, or even minutely vexatious, “unworthy of the attention of such a Book and of God,” we may say: 1. A trivial case may carry a great principle. 2. Some simple precepts have large analogical meanings when transferred to spiritual things. 3. The çy près principle applies here, as in all legislation which is affected by changing circumstances. 4. Only fair to the Bible to bring in common sense, to explain or apply, as in ordinary life. True order of thought, in this and all similar instances, is not up from the temporary, “trivial” case to the higher spiritual analogy, but down from this to the lower and Jesser. In this small enactment we are touching a widely applicable principle of the Divine order, in a very lowly, temporary embodiment. N. B.—This “law of Moses” is also what “God saith.”1 Corinthians 9:10. Our sakes’ altogether.—Not denying the early, lower intention of God, who does, in this passage, “take care for oxen.” Similar to “I have loved Jacob, and hated Esau”; or rather to “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice”; where evidently the negation is not absolute, but comparative, in its force. Our.—Hardly to be narrowed to mean only Christian ministers. Note the change of reading, and of consequent rendering. “Partaker of his hope” meant, “Enjoying the reward he hoped for as he laboured.” This also a general principle, not specialised until 1 Corinthians 9:11; 1 Corinthians 9:14, but a point of Divine “political economy,” which should be embodied in (say) the relations between capital and labour.1 Corinthians 9:12.—Cf. 2 Corinthians 11:12.1 Corinthians 9:13.—Stanley sees in this resumed argumentation, and in the reiteration in 1 Corinthians 9:14 of what had been said in 1 Corinthians 9:11, the probable sign of a resumption of the letter after some pause. [As perhaps a change of amanuensis, or a new morning’s work. Cf. 2 Corinthians 10:1. He presses also “I wrote,” in 1 Corinthians 9:15. Leviticus 6:16; Leviticus 6:26; Numbers 18:8-19. See in connection with 1 Corinthians 8:1.1 Corinthians 9:14. The Lord Christ hath ordained.—Matthew 10:9 sq., Luke 10:7 are quoted [not necessarily from written Gospels] as in 1 Corinthians 7:10. .—1 Corinthians 9:1-14 The Support of a Stipendiary Ministry. I. What the minister has a right (1 Corinthians 9:4-6) to expect from his people.—Maintenance (1 Corinthians 9:14). This right rests upon: (1) The natural fitness and “right” of the case (1 Corinthians 9:7; 1 Corinthians 9:11-12); (2) The Old Testament legislation (1 Corinthians 9:8-10), definitely endorsed and adopted in (3) The words of Christ (1 Corinthians 9:14). II. What the people have a claim to expect from the minister.— (1) That he have all needful credentials (1 Corinthians 9:1-2); (2) That he do his work; he actually “preaches the Gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:14). III. What Christ has a right to expect from His servant.—That in claiming, or enforcing, or using his “right” he shall not “hinder” his Master’s Gospel. I. The central verse of this section Isaiah 1 Corinthians 9:14. All turns around this. 1. To some ears the “rights of the ministry” has an ugly sound. The minister is often expected to be above such considerations, and to let nothing be heard from himself but how he feels the call of his “duties” press upon him. So he does, if he be a minister worthy the name. He comes into the ministry with a “woe” in his ears, as the penalty of any alternative course. He preaches to his people—rich and poor—that Rights mean Duties. The poor need to have this preached to them as certainly as the rich. But Duties also mean Rights. If the “call” of Christ and His Church be such as to indicate that he must make the ministry the one business of his life, then he must be maintained whilst he is fulfilling his “calling.” 2. Paul is discussing the case of the Apostolate. It was no doubt a unique order of men, charged with a function for the Church of their own time, and for the Church of all time, which cannot be repeated by any other set of men, and never needs to be repeated. Once for all they have set Christian dogma upon the firm basis of History. (See Critical Notes.) But the analogy holds good, in this particular matter, between the case of these unique and extraordinary servants of Christ and of the Churches and the ordinary ministry. The inspired and authoritative declaration of 1 Corinthians 9:14—whether paraphrased from, e.g., Matthew 10:9, or a divinely guaranteed report of an unwritten word of Christ (similar to the case of Act 20:35)—generalises the application of the principle. 3. The “ordinance” of Christ foresaw, took account of, provided against, a separated ministry. The Body of Christ has simply, and from the necessity of the case,—a necessity recurring in connection with every growing, enlarging, organisation whatsoever,—followed the analogy—“the law”—of all organised structures in Nature. As complexity increases, as the demands of the organisation multiply and are differentiated, so the organs which meet the demands are multiplied, and become specialised in their function and faculty. The specialisation of work and of officials in the Body began in Acts 4, when the apostles ceased to attempt to do everything in the Church, and “Deacons” (so-called) were told off to a special portion of what had been included in their work. A simple Church, independent of organised fellowship, of small numbers, of simple requirement, may reproduce the early simplicity of pastoral and official organisation. But as it grows, and, above all, if a system of grouped, affiliated, connexionalised, organised Churches comes to form a new Church, it becomes a matter of expedient division of labour to set apart a pastorate, who will need, and should give, a whole and undivided attention to the teaching and “ruling” needed by the enlarged work and community. 4. “A paid ministry” is a theory and a practice which may reasonably be criticised and objected to; but a “sustained, supported ministry” is a necessity of the case. The man must “live” of the Gospel; not “starve” or “struggle” upon it. His “flock” should do their utmost to see that the shepherd is not the worst fed of them all; they should set him free from need and care. And 1 Corinthians 9:5 enlarges the range of this principle of necessary, suitable support. “Life” is not merely food, clothes, house, bed, books, cut down to a minimum of possibility. A “living” is not merely what will keep the man himself out of want. The apostle, or his ministerial successor, is a man, for all he has been called into, thrust into, office. In all ordinary conditions full, all-round manhood means marriage, a “wife,” a home, perhaps children. Celibacy like Paul’s, should always be the exceptional thing, and never compulsory. It has cut off the ministry from the manhood of the Church, in regard to the sympathy which comes from, and only by, experience. It has morally been a snare to the ministry itself, and often a curse to the community. The “fork” of rigid ecclesiastical legislation cannot “expel Nature” from the man, merely because his work becomes specialised, and he himself is separated in order to do it the more effectively. The “recurrence” and the revolt of outraged Nature have often been disastrous, and full of disgrace, to the Christian, and the ministerial, name. The man, though made a minister by the expediency and the necessity of circumstances, has the “right to lead about a wife”; to have his own home, with its solace and its support. And the “living” covers the needful, suitable provision for this also. His “right” is “authority.” His Lord authorises him to requisition his support from his people. This “right” is manifestly in accord with: (1) The fitness of things, and the analogy of ordinary human affairs. Whether he be master or servant, the vine-dresser may reasonably expect that his vineyard shall at least sustain him whilst he cultivates it; the shepherd, be he sheep-master or shepherd-man, may hardly be expected to render all his service gratuitously, or to be content that all the produce and advantage shall go to others, who have done nothing, whilst he goes unsupplied. [Cf. the (perhaps) Virgilian protest:— “Sic vos non vobis nidificatis aves,Sic vos non vobis vellera fertis oves,Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes,Sic vos non vobis fertis aratra boves.His ego versiculos feci; tulit alter honores.”]The minister can indeed never urge the claim of the Owner of the Vineyard (Isaiah 5:2); “the Great Shepherd of the sheep” (Hebrews 13:20), “Whose own the sheep are” (John 10:12), has a claim which no under-shepherd can advance; but, though the “wages” theory is no satisfactory or suitable one for the money-relations between minister and people, the workman might ever claim his “wages,” the under-shepherd his “pay,” his “keep.” Paul and his fellow-or successor-ministers are soldiers on campaign. The war is urgent; there is no respite in the campaign. Discipline and duty, under ordinary circumstances, both forbid that the soldier should need to go foraging for his rations, or should need to combine with his soldering some other means of support. He must not be “entangled with the affairs of this life” (2 Timothy 2:4). The side-occupations, the by-employments, to which he might have to resort, might easily impair his own spirituality, and so his efficiency; indeed, in them he might easily be tempted to do some business with the Enemy. The Enemy will be his provider readily enough, if only he can so divert him from his campaigning and soldierly duty. He looks to his Captain for his support, and his Captain bids him draw upon the Church. They must “honour” the Captain’s draft, and find the soldier’s “salt-money.” And are they not, moreover, themselves in debt to the minister? They owe to him their “spiritual things,” “their own selves also” (Philemon 1:19). It is not repayment, it is only due acknowledgment of their indebtedness, that they should give him such “carnal things” as his need requires. Indeed, it is “sowing” and “reaping.” Will they begrudge, or deny, him a handful, and that of the less valuable produce, of the harvest in their lives, springing, too, from his sowing? Religion means to many, new habits, a new character, God’s blessing, which are very directly and obviously productive, even in their business career (Matthew 6:33; 1 Timothy 4:8). Many a man thus indirectly owes wealth and position—“carnal things”—to the minister whose labours first sowed the seed of eternal life in his heart. “How much owest thou unto thy Lord?” “How much owest thou to thy Paul, thy minister?” If any man should see to it that the ministry is supported, it is that man who owes to the faithful, sympathetic pastor and friend his conversion; his Sabbaths of blesssing, which mean new inspiration for his best life, and multiplying, propagating, reproductive, spiritual help for the work of the weekdays; the spiritual influences in his home; the conversion of his children. Corinth at least should have felt the obligation to see to it that Paul wanted for no “carnal things.” All this is embodied in (2) The Old Testament legislation. (See Critical Notes.) He will take the Jews on their own familiar ground. They did “hear the Law” (Galatians 4:21). Then to the Law they shall go. [No need to disparage such a style of argument, because the Rabbis to an absurd extent so “targumed” Old Testament passages. Their “targum” often employs a perfectly legitimate method, and lays bare a true, Divine, and abiding significance in the temporary or “trivial” enactment or story. The question is in any case one of evidence, and is not to be dismissed with a sweeping, preliminary dictum condemning all. Does Paul’s “targum” approve itself to the spiritual judgment of the profoundest—not always, or of necessity, technically the most “learned”—students of the Word of God? An interpretation of an Old Testament passage occurring, employed, in the New Testament, is adopted, sanctioned, guided, by the Inspiring Spirit.] The great principle in the mind of the Lawgiver is found in Deuteronomy 25:4, in a miniature, temporary, special, concrete form. De minimis curat hœc lex, and for greater matters also. The oxen are not deemed unworthy of His “care,” indeed; but they are part of man’s world, and God is caring for man, is caring for apostles; for workmen of every order and degree, but with not least solicitude for the “workmen” in the Church (1 Corinthians 9:1). The temporary colour washes out of this, as out of so many more, Mosaic ordinances, and leaves us with perhaps a little, but a real, piece of a stuff made for everlasting wear. Your Apostolic, ministerial “ox” plods his way, and hauls along, his heavy drag week after week, year in, year out. Do not muzzle his mouth, or grudge him his mouthful! Such enactments are part of the whole Revelation of God’s mind and will. (3) “The Lord” knew His Father’s mind in this, as in all else, and has put upon the old principle His own universal, generalised shape—the Teacher and Legislator as He is, for a Race and for all Time—and has put it on the Statute-book of His kingdom, “that they who preach … shall live,” etc. His word is final. Beyond it no Church can go, nor behind, nor beside it. The minister’s “right” is formally enacted by the King Himself. II. But the Church has its claim in the matter also.—If a man—though he be a “minister”—work, he has a right to eat. If a man will not work—minister or any man—neither shall he eat. And the man whom the Church is asked to sustain should be unchallengeably a “minister,” who— 1. Can produce his credentials.—Paul could. Point by point he could match the “letters of ordination” produced by Cephas or “the brethren of the Lord,” or by any other teacher whatsoever. Once more (as shown in Critical Notes) it is to be remembered how exceptional were the case and the credentials of an “apostle” [in the strict, narrow sense of the title]. But as in the natural so in the spiritual world, no work of God is isolated. Every fact has its relations, generally its analogies, to many adjacent facts. Evolutionary science has that much of right, in its teaching that a deep, close-drawn unity of idea runs through all the works of God. Earliest and latest, simplest and most complex, lowliest and highest, are all bound together into One Work of God. The Miracle has its relations to the Ordinary; it is not a mere isolated marvel. The Apostolic office was the exceptional, the extraordinary; but it was traced upon lines which are also the foundation lines of the draft of the Ministerial Office. So far as the diversity of facts allows, the analogy holds good between both the apostolate and the ministry. The credentials of both are analogous. The minister of Christ who holds a valid commission, and who may claim support from the Church, has (a) “seen the Lord,” and he so preaches with “the demonstration of the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:4) that he can appeal to a people who are his work “in the Lord.” (On this last point, see the Critical Notes.) He must himself have come into real, personal relations with Christ, and in the indwelling strength and wisdom of Christ he must have been successful in bringing some others into real, personal relations with Christ too. The two things hang together very closely. No man who has really received his commission from Christ, and has by a holy watchfulness kept himself from all which would sever the living, life-giving, strength-imparting connection with Christ implied in being “in Him,” will ever be long together without his accrediting, manifest “work.” On the other hand, no man will ever accomplish such “work” who has not first “seen the Lord.” He must “know Christ”—and that in the widest sense, and to the fullest content of the idea of “knowing” Him—at first hand; hearsay will not do. He will be a theoriser, a speculator, a critic, but not a witness. Like Thomas, like Paul, he must have stood in the presence of the Risen, Glorified Christ, and seen, as by a flash of holy intuition (or rather by the demonstration of the Great Preacher of Christ, the Holy Ghost) One before Whom intellect and heart have bowed down in trustful, reverent, loving adoration, recognising, “My Lord and my God!” And he must often have renewed the holy vision; must often “stand in the Presence” of his Lord, like an ancient prophet [e.g. Jonah 1:3; or like a very angel, Luke 1:19]. And his people will know it. (And they will know it if he has not!) He will speak with a power which their heart and conscience will recognise and will respond to. In his bearing, his words, perhaps his very face, they will see as they gather before him what will make them say, “He has seen Christ Jesus the Lord!” He will be unhappy, and a failure, if his ministry lack this qualification. This will give it a perpetual freshness; every other source of suggestion, every other class of topic, will soon be exhausted, and will soon cease to satisfy hungry souls in his flock. The mere graces of diction, the mental furnishing of mere literary or educational acquirements, will in the long-run do no “work,” certainly none such as is “in the Lord.” A real Church recognises such a man as a true “minister.” His credentials are “read and known of all” (2 Corinthians 3:2). They will sustain such a man, especially will they who are “his work.” (b) No tie so tender, no gratitude so deep, as that between the convert and the man who led him to Christ, between the sheep who is in himself a token of the seeking, patient, watchful, helpful love and work of a real Shepherd. Unhappy the man who year after year can show no “work”! 2. He should be a man who does his work, that for which he was “called” by his Master. (For an examination of the phrase “preach the Gospel,” see Homiletic Suggestion on 1 Corinthians 9:14.) The idler has no “right.” The Church has a claim against the man that he shall show cause for his “wages,” if his idleness bring down the question so low as to become one of work and pay. The work of the true minister of Christ is many-sided, of many types; hardly any line of study but may be made contributory to the cause of the Gospel. Some are set for the defence of the Gospel. The ministerial scholar, or editor, or botanist, or historical student, or tutor, or antiquary, may, if he will, consecrate his work and make it subservient to the cause of Christ’s Gospel. “If he will,”—but he must. It must converge, of his set purpose, upon Christ. It is a grave question, to be decided as the several cases arise, how far subsidiary occupations of time and strength should be allowed or pursued by the man who, to the necessary basis of natural qualifications for the preacher and pastor, has also the two essential marks above analysed (1. and 2.). In the widest sense he should “wait on his ministering.” The Church has that claim. III. Abstract right may be carried to a very mischievous length of practical exposition and enforcement.—The Gospel is not made for the apostle, but the apostle for the Gospel. If the claims of these should seem to clash or compete, the claim and need of the Gospel must stand first. Nothing, not even the abstract “right” of a Paul, must be allowed to “hinder the Gospel of Christ.” The very “right” is only given, indeed, for the sake of the furtherance of the Gospel; it is for the advantage of the Gospel, under all ordinary circumstances, that the ministry should be maintained by the Churches. But in Paul’s case, as he believed, circumstance made it for the advantage of the Gospel, or at least for the obviating of disadvantage and detriment, that his right, the very “ordinance” of his Lord should be waived and should stand aside. To him “to live” was “Christ,”—that dear Name gathered up to itself all Paul’s activities, all his devotion; every motive received its impulse and its direction from that Christ. Of his own eager self-devotion, therefore, he readily chose to set his right aside. His heart and reason, the heart and reason of the true minister, would say that the Lord had the claim upon him that he should. Such a man will, e.g., uphold, or waive, his pastoral prerogatives in a meeting; he will defend himself, or let judgment go against him in silence, when he is misjudged or misrepresented; he will resist, or yield to, the opposition of “unreasonable and wicked men”; as, from one case to another, the interests of the Gospel of Christ may seem to require. In any case of doubtful character the balance will perhaps always be more readily given against himself. It is his debt to his Master that it should be. The Gospel of the Master deserves that consideration! 1 Corinthians 9:10. Hope cheering Labour.—[The verse may be made the occasion of a sermon on the Rewards of Labour and the Returns of Capital.] 1. Diversity of contributors to the ultimate harvest.—Some “plough,” do the preliminary, rough, necessary toil, in manufacturing processes, in all engineering and mechanical trades, in commerce and trade; the “ploughmen” may stand for the unskilled labourers. Some “thresh,” and bring to finished readiness for the consumers’ use all the product of a succession of workers and of the chemistry of nature [i.e. of God in His laboratory within the soil, where the seed is buried and dies, to live again]. The “threshers” may stand for the capitalist, or any (supposed) higher-grade contributors to the final result. Many must co-operate; each beginning upon the basis of the work of another order of workers; and at some point in the chain of production, the blessing and work of God coming in indispensably; if the hungry world is to have its “bread.” 2. There is interdependence of producers.—The ploughman’s work is a necessary preliminary to that of the thresher. The thresher completes the otherwise unfruitful work of the ploughman. Each man is needed. The much-abused “middleman” has arisen out of a need; his work, however selfishly or extortionately or tyrannically it has been used, is in itself only an instance of division of labour, necessitated by the complexity of modern life and business. The man who is not wanted, who does not justify his own place and support, will not long be supported. But the ploughman must not grudge the reward of the thresher, nor must the thresher forget what he owes to the ploughman. And must not forget to give it to him, either. 3. No man should labour, whether ploughman or thresher, without a fair reward for his labour, or without hope of being partaker of the fruits of his toil. The right apportionment of the profits, the fruits, of labour is a growingly difficult problem, [and one on which Christian men may honestly differ as to guiding principles and results; not to be discussed in a neutral Commentary like this]. Labour may be as thoroughly selfish and tyrannical in the matter, as it charges Capital with being. Some of the complexity, the perplexity, of the problem is removed whenever on either side an honest, earnest, sympathetic, painstaking endeavour is made to appreciate the view and the demand of the other. Each side also would need to cease to insist upon absolute, mechanical, doctrinaire, “right.” [In this noblesse oblige; whether it be the noblesse of “superior” station, or of better education and wider views of the complex problem; or of greater ability, financial or other, to go back from the full limit of “rights”; above all, if it be the noblesse of the Christian profession and character. Noblesse should lead the way in concession to prejudice, in patience with ignorance. The Christian spirit should be foremost in softening the rigour of the mere mechanical “political economics,” with their formulation of self-interest working against self-interest.] Logic, “wages,” are not the last words of discussions in times of strained relations and class-conflict. The heart is often illogical, and traverses all theories and formulas; but it rules. The heart understands, if the thresher gets close to the ploughman, and the ploughman tries to understand the thresher. Labour without hope of properly proportioned “partaking,” is the labour of slaves. Such labour, without hope to cheer weariness, to incite to effort, to reward diligence and real work, begets the slavish temper—sullen, rebellious, dangerous. There should be no rigidly mechanical adherence to “rights” on either side; so much time, to a half-minute; so much labour, to a single hand’s-turn; so much wages, to a half-farthing. Brotherliness should “rub down” the hard lines of such a plan of the relations between man and man. [The “lord” in the Saviour’s story who said, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with my own?” is nevertheless a master who gave to some a whole day’s “penny” for one hour’s labour.] To say, “There is no friendship and no religion in business,” is not to utter Gospel, Christian, economics. Let capital leave the door of hope open for the labourer; let not the labourer grudge or make impossible the hope of the employer. All the political economies must adjust themselves according to this fixed, divinely sanctioned principle. [Wherever God is the Employer, He will see to it that His ploughman or thresher does realise the “hope” in which he laboured.] 1 Corinthians 9:12. Note three important things as assumed here. I. Men may hinder the Gospel.—The end of human history is, no doubt, a victory for God and for Goodness, for Christ and His Gospel, and, along with this, a vindication of all the perplexing facts connected with God’s method in leading on the course of history to the goal. Yet one aspect of the ever-present problem of Evil is that the rate and extent of the progress of the Gospel is made dependent upon man’s faithfulness and activity. There have seemed ages of the Church when the Church did nothing to extend, and hardly seemed to keep, the ground previously won for Christianity. No soul will ever be lost, simply and only because a Church or an individual Christian was inconsistent, a stumbling-block, or in apathetic worldliness did not do its duty to that soul. Yet are there none lost who might have been saved if the Church or the Christian had been faithful? What a power, to be able to narrow, or to divert from those dying for it, the river of the water of life—to make the wheels of Christ’s chariot drive heavily, plunged in the sand or the bog of a Church’s indolence or unspirituality or unbelief! [The unbelief of the healthy people in Nazareth prevented Jesus doing all He desired for the need of the sick in Nazareth. How one man, Achan, and he no chief or prince, but only a common man, could hold all Israel in check, and really slay the six-and-thirty Israelites who lay dead in the valley before Ai! Perhaps, on the other hand, 2 Peter 3:12 may mean “hastening the day of God.”] [Illustrate thus: Holland is a country for the most part lying below the level of the sea; it would naturally be covered by the waters. But with long years of patient, watchful industry the inhabitants have built and kept up, around their coasts and along their canals, huge dykes, and these, with a system of gates and locks, keep out the waters. All this is the salvation of Holland. But unbelief can build its walls and barriers around itself, and around a Church, and shut out the tide of blessing which God desires to send upon the “thirsty ground.”] II. Even good men may be in danger of hindering the Gospel.—If, e.g., Paul had insisted too stubbornly on his right to be maintained by the Church, or lawfully to enjoy the company of a wife and the comforts of domestic happiness at the cost of the Church. III. To hinder the Gospel is so great an evil that to avoid it, or even the danger of it, is worth any sacrifice, except of principle; to help forward the Gospel is worth any cost. Everything which will arouse conflict and bad feeling, everything which may, even incidentally and unjustifiably, cause offence, everything which is found to “give place” to the ever-watchful Adversary, and so to put the brake on to the wheels of progress, the Christian man will forego, “lest he hinder,” etc. He will give up his liberty in the matter of amusements, or recreation, lest though remotely he check the work of the Gospel in even one soul; above all, lest he should cripple his own usefulness, or dull the edge of his own spirituality, and so “hinder,” etc. If the work of God seems to lag, to drag, to be hindered, then Churches and individuals should begin anxiously, and with unsparing fidelity, to inquire the cause. [See the inquiry when Achan’s sin blocked the way of Israel’s conquest. No use for Joshua to be humbled on the ground in prayer: “Get up! Search out the sin!” (Joshua 7:10). The saying of the disciples at the supper-table: “Is it I? Is it I?” was better than their earlier saying, “Who is it?”] 1 Corinthians 9:12. The Gospel hindered. I. The progress of the Gospel in the world seems, and surely is, slower than the purpose of God, the desire of Christ, the aim of the Spirit’s work, would lead us to expect.—Faithful hearts yearn for greater, wider, more rapid and sweeping conquests than are actually won. They cannot acquiesce in the actual condition of the matter; they cannot adjust their hope, or activity, to the actual rate of progress. They have a heart, an instinct, within them, which rebels against any such acquiescence and adjustment. They ask, “Why is it? What doth hinder?” The man who is content that the Church—or his own particular, sectional or local Church—should do no more than work on the programme, “As last year,—only more so!” has lost one of the first, simplest tokens of being “in Christ,” and therefore of being in the communion of sympathy with his Lord. II. Replies which are not answers.—1 “It is of no use to fret or be anxious. God is sovereign; things are going as He wills, and as fast as He just now wills they should.” The spirit of the reply of a Baptist pastor to the offer of Carey for India. Not often heard now; yet, if not explicitly taught, it is implicitly embodied in the practice of the Church. There is, always has been, a sovereignty in the measure and time of the outpouring of the Spirit. The Church has actually progressed spasmodically, by Revivals after times of inertia or unfaithfulness; and these have not always seemed given in response to a specially pleading Church. They have sometimes come upon a sleeping Church. Yet, whilst the Church says to God, “Awake, awake,” He says in reply to the Church, “Awake, awake.” (See Dr. Maclaren, Sermons, 2nd series, p. 19 sqq., Isaiah 62:1; Isaiah 62:6-7.) God is covenanted to hear, and to give, and to bless the world and the work of the Church, whenever the conditions are fulfilled by It. At all events, sovereignty or no sovereignty, He is in fact waiting, eager, forward, to give the success which seems hindered. We may count upon Him. 2. The seeming failures cannot mean that the Gospel has found a soil, a race, a heart, for which it has no message, or to whose needs it has no adaptation. That were to charge Him Who has made both heart and Gospel with something less than the perfection of Divine wisdom. History and age-long experiment give no support to such a supposition. On the contrary, the Gospel has conquered, saved, satisfied, sample cases in every land, century, race, temperament, social grade, mental cast, young, old, ignorant, learned, etc. 3. Nor that it has found a race or a heart which does not need it. No other religion as yet has so satisfied and possessed its votaries as that some—sample cases again—have not found a longing for something else, and better, which the Christian faith has supplied. If not before, in the very presentation of this supply the heart learns to know its need. 4. “But the superstitions are so inveterate, the habits of a life-time so hopelessly deep-rooted, the depravity and degradation of heart and conscience and life are such in the the adults, that we must let them go—leaving them to God—and depend upon the young, the coming generation.” But Paul’s Gospel won its triumphs amongst adults, and from inveterate, degraded, deeply depraved heathenism. His Gospel solved the same problems which we face to-day at home or in foreign lands. The Gospel is meant, not only for those who need it, but for those also who need it most. 5. “The Gospel is only to be preached for a testimony to all nations; the actual inbringing of the nations on any wide scale must come with the Thousand Years.” [A large question. Matthew 24:14 is appealed to. To many this reply seems like invoking something to supply a lacking effectiveness in the Gospel; like calling upon Christ to come and do what the Spirit and Word of God have failed in accomplishing.] 6. “We want more money, more organisations, a new Society, or Committee, for this or that.” All good; all needed, perhaps. But the Gospel won its first triumphs, and has often triumphed since, with few or none of these helps. Evidently, historically, these are not all, or the essentials. [One-man power, consecrated, is better than all Committees and organisations, though most productive when working under control and with organisation. Money must be made no substitute for the Spirit of God.] II. [As above, “Men may hinder the Gospel.”] Generally, want of the power of the Holy Ghost is underneath all slow progress. He does what is done, much or little. He would do more, if the conditions on which He co-operates with His Church were better fulfilled by it. [As with Christ at Nazareth, above.] A spiritually low condition of His Church, showing itself in little prayer for the progress of the Gospel, in lack of the spirit of consecration, and issuing in the withholding for self of money, time, family, or anything else needed to the progress and extension of the work, is the great hindrance; it “grieves the Spirit.” Little appreciation of the Gospel at home; therefore little zeal for its propagation, no real faith in, or concern about, its saving power and success; are sometimes “hindrances.” Of secondary importance, but yet real causes, may be, defective representations of the Gospel in the preaching, or in the life of individuals and Churches; it may be overlaid with ritual, or hidden beneath intellectual speculation; it may be made too much a question of philanthropic benefit rather than of redemptive purpose; may now and then be proclaimed in a shape too specially that of a Church or nation. [E.g. must not expect some English modes of working and effort to suit equally well France, or India, or China; only an encumbrance to progress to attempt to transplant methods or some peculiar ecclesiastical constitution into another type of nation and life.]—Suggested in part by remarks in “Homilist,” v., vi. 1 Corinthians 9:8-10. The Law of God is— I. Reasonable. II. Humane. III. Comprehensive. IV. Just.—[J. L.] Or thus:— 1 Corinthians 9:8-10. Principles of Equity. I. Commend themselves to reason. II. Are enforced by the Law of God. III. Are of universal application. IV. Contribute by their operation to the best interests of all.—[J. L.] NOTES1 Corinthians 9:15. Used.—As in 1 Corinthians 9:12. “Have not availed myself of my right, nor urged upon you the Law of Moses and the Lord Christ’s command.” For Paul’s sensitiveness about being misunderstood, sec Philippians 4:11; Philippians 4:17. Glorying.—“Boasting.” Twenty-nine times occurring in a few chapters of these two Epistles (especially in 2 Corinthians 10, 11, 12), and only twenty-six times in all his other writings. (Farrar; who compares the “puffed up” of 1 Cor. passim, elsewhere only Colossians 2:18.)1 Corinthians 9:16. Though.—Better “if” (R.V.).1 Corinthians 9:17.—Choose between two slightly divergent lines of interpretation: (1) In so far as I act voluntarily in foregoing my right to maintenance, I have my reward; in so far as I act without my choice, but under compulsion of the “woe,” I am only His servant, His steward but His bondslave, whose whole service is duty, and needs no thanks; and what then is my reward, that I should thus preach gratuitously? Why, the ability to appeal to men with the more effect, because I am independent (as in 1 Corinthians 9:19-20). My concessions to them have greater force of appeal. (2) More usually, the “reward” is taken simply to mean (as 1 Corinthians 9:18) the privilege, and the satisfaction to himself, of preaching gratuitously. But this would have no self-centering value to Paul, and only would be to him desirable as giving him the vantage-ground for 1 Corinthians 9:19-20. Evans (in Speaker) thinks that 1 Corinthians 9:19-20 formally specify the “reward”; most find it in 1 Corinthians 9:18. The “reward” is hardly one given by God. If it be, yet the act rewarded is done in strength which is entirely grace. There is no such independent worthiness in the man as to claim reward as a right; yet it is fitting that the right act should have its recognition from God. Stanley, happily, says: “This contradiction [i.e. of 1 Corinthians 9:16 to 1 Corinthians 9:15] is … specially characteristic of the Apostle’s style when he speaks, as here, of ‘boasting.’ He can hardly mention a ‘boast’ without instantly recalling it.” He adds: “In one sense he clings to his boast, in another sense the necessity of preaching the Gospel sweeps it away. And thus the construction of 1 Corinthians 9:17 was probably meant to be, ‘Whether willingly or unwillingly, I have a stewardship entrusted to me.’ ” But (he proceeds to suggest) probably as in 2 Corinthians 5:13, with a sudden change of conception (cf. 1 Corinthians 8:3) an intrusive thought gets into the former clause.1 Corinthians 9:19.—Well expounded in Galatians 5:13, compared with 1 Corinthians 9:1.1 Corinthians 9:20.—Keeping the great feasts and observing vows, circumcising Timothy, [but not Titus].1 Corinthians 9:21.—“Under law” in both cases. Too absolute to say that without the article “law” in general, and with the article, the Mosaic law, are meant. Truer statement in Cremer, Lexicon: “The article is usually wanting where stress is laid not upon its historical impress and outward form, but upon the conception itself; not upon the law which God gave, but upon lam as given by God, and as, therefore, the only one that is or can be. So especially in passages where the article is alternately found and omitted, Romans 2:14-15, etc. But that νόμος without the article also means the law which was given to Israel, is clear most manifestly from Romans 5:13” (pp. 430, 431). Augustine’s “law” for a Christian life, “Dilige, et quod vis fac,” is not practically enough. Christian liberty is within the bounds of the will of another—Christ “the Lord.” And this is now the great law of “God”: “Be ye under the law and will of The Son, Christ.” (Cf. John 4:29.)1 Corinthians 9:22. All … all … all … some.—If only he could have said “all” in the fourth instance! But some will “perish for whom Christ died” (1 Corinthians 8:11); no great wonder, then, if some are not saved for whom Paul preached, and used this holy, self-sacrificing versatility, but all in vain! Obviously “all things” has its limits. “To do wrong can save no one” (Beet).1 Corinthians 9:23.—“That I may obtain, in company with these whom I hope to save, the blessings promised in the Gospel” (Beet). Good exposition in 1 Timothy 4:16. .—1 Corinthians 9:15-23 Subject: The Independence of the Minister. The central word of this section is “Free” (1 Corinthians 9:19). I. Free from all men. II. Free, yet under compulsion to preach. III. Free, yet under willing bondage to men’s weakness and ignorance. I. [Sufficient said, in Critical Notes and in Analysis of preceding section, as to the literal, special sense in which Paul used the word and asserted his “freedom.” But the freedom, and the independence it gave him, as well as the ground of appeal with which it “rewarded” him in his approach to men of all classes, coming to them, as he did, a man under obligation to no man,—all these points have their widely applicable analogies in the relations between minister and people still.] 1. If he is to be faithful, he must be free. His people, if they know their own interests, need that he shall be faithful; they should therefore carefully, for their own sakes, if for nothing else, guard against anything which would even appear to put constraint upon him, or limit his freedom of judgment or action. [E.g. the rich man should, with even “gentlemanly” feeling, and much more with a fine sense of Christian propriety, carefully abstain from doing or saying what might seem to “put the screw on,” and the more so if the minister lives very much upon supplies drawn from his pocket. The strong politicians in the Church should let the minister’s politics alone. And so on.] If they want a “man of God” amongst them, who will lift them out of the secular round to a higher level with its larger life, let them give him all freedom to say out all that God gives him to speak. [A Homiletical Commentary of the character of this is not the place in which to deal with the question of the degree of liberty in doctrinal teaching a Church should permit or prescribe to their minister.] Let the congregation, or the meeting, or the council which may be its official representative, for their own good jealously guard their minister’s fullest liberty for feeding and ruling the flock as their pastor. 2. His independence will not be a thing to be obtruded in every face, or a banner to be flung out ostentatiously in every petty skirmish or bit of friction. There are boasters of their “independence” who are simply offensively discourteous in speech; their “freedom” of tongue is only the expression of coarseness of feeling and of mere vulgar pride and self-assertion, in season and out of season. [So Robertson, Expos. Lectures, in loco: “Even the bold unpopularity that cares not whom it offends may be, and often is, merely the result of a contentious, warlike spirit, defiant of all around, and proud in a fancied superiority.”] This “free” Paul can say, “Ourselves your servants,—your bondservants, your slaves,—for Jesus’ sake”; and that to these very Corinthians (2 Corinthians 4:5). The verbal, surface discrepancy runs down to a very real agreement and unity of conception and feeling beneath. The “freest” and most “independent” man is the one who can best concede something, and abridge his liberty “for the Gospel’s sake” (1 Corinthians 9:23). He may give up something of his liberty (say) for peace’ sake; but the Church should not ask it; they have no right to demand it. The loving, wise, patient, diligent, faithful minister in the Church will usually get all the honour he can wisely desire, and all the “freedom” he can wisely use. II. Free, looking manward, Paul is yet under most urgent compulsion, looking Christward. (See “constraineth,” in the Notes on 2 Corinthians 5:14.) 1. No worthy heart can look unmoved upon need or misery, and know and possess the remedy; no worthy heart can refuse the “constraint” so put upon it. The beggars of the street stand silent, simply exhibiting their sightless eyes, or crippled hands, or mutilated members; they know they need say nothing to move really compassionate hearts; their needs have “poor dumb mouths” which “speak for them”; their very necessity is a plea which the tender-hearted patron will not, cannot, resist. [So may we say that, if in our ignorance or weakness we “cannot pray,” if we are brought so low, physically, mentally, spiritually; then if we can only lie helpless before God, exhibiting ourselves in our need, to Him, it will be a most effectual appeal to His heart, a prayer He cannot but hear. He cannot sit upon His throne, and see, and know, and do nothing (Exodus 3:7-8).] 2. The man, who is himself saved, and then for the first time, by contrast and by new insight, understands in any real sense what peril and misery it is to be “lost,” who is daily walking in the blessedness of “salvation” and of fellowship with God in Christ, cannot selfishly keep locked up within his own bosom the news, the secret, of the new possibilities for sinners through the Gospel. He must be an evangelist, telling out the good news; he must be missionary in instinctive impulse, in motive and activity. “Necessity is laid upon him.” And no man will ever be of use as a minister of Christ in whose soul this inward, urgent necessity is not continually present. He should jealously watch against the first beginnings of its decline; he should mourn before Christ over its absence; he should guard it as a most precious possession. 3. But Paul lies under the (almost) coercion of a more mighty impulse still. “Woe is unto him if he preach not.” (See Separate Homily, 1 Corinthians 9:16.) The first, original “call to the ministry” is the Master’s call. And that call is a “claim” which it were rebellion—sin—to ignore, or refuse, or resist. The Church in its “calling” is only the organ of the Spirit of the Master, and has no power, or function, beyond that of ascertaining, so far as man may, who are the men called by Christ. Above all: III. This “free” Apostle is under willing bondage to the prejudices, the imperfectly enlightened conscience, the liabilities consequent or weakness of principle or character in those whom he approaches. 1. His Divine Master, to save him, “humbled Himself,” “emptied Himself,” and, Lord of all as He was, “became obedient,” the servant of His Father’s will, and that even to the length of “dying,” and that dying a death upon a cross (Philippians 2:8). His Master had “stuck at nothing,” of self-surrender and self-sacrifice, when it was a question of saving him and his fellow-sinners. Nothing was too much to do, to suffer, to give up, if only men might be saved. And Paul is His Master over again in this. The Jew found him ready to concede all that involved no unfaithfulness to Christ, and was not inconsistent with the very meaning and raison d’κtre of the Gospel,—ready to accommodate himself in all really indifferent points to the prejudices of a Jew’s education and lifelong habits of feeling and practice. Within the same—happily broad—limits the Gentile, “without the law,” found this Jew, “born, made, under the law” (Galatians 4:4), ready to meet him, to lay aside any Jewish habit or practice, which would stand in the way of their getting perfectly into that touch and that sympathetic understanding of each other without which Paul could do nothing to help him; indeed, a Gentile found no more resolute and steadfast champion of Gentile freedom from the Mosaic ritual law than this ex-Pharisee Paul. Paul would walk with shortened steps by the side of the weakest, that he might lead them to his Christ; keeping to their pace “with equal steps,” lest, by insisting on their moving onward at his own pace, he should leave them behind, fallen out, unable to follow, to become a prey to the Enemy of souls. Anything of innocent concession, of innocent accommodation, to any man, if by any means he might save him. 2. What a model of method and of aim for a minister! Anybody can drive away or cut off a troublesome, obstinate, stupid, prejudiced member from a Church. The business of a shepherd is to keep all his sheep. His aim is to save them,—all. It is too much the inclination of the natural heart to grow impatient with the slow-paced, the mentally sluggish or warped; the men tied hand and foot with what we see to be needless, morbid scrupulosities about trivial points of teaching or practice; too easy to say, “Let them go. We cannot be troubled with such weaklings. We cannot narrow our action, or check our advance in the development of the congregational life, by waiting till these get to see what every man of sense sees already.” But the Church and the minister exist to save even the “weak”; the prejudiced, narrow Jew, the half-instructed, “lawless” Gentile. “If by any means I may save some.” Even one soul is too precious to be neglected, or left behind, or cast over. 3. No pains are too great to find out how to approach a soul, in order to save it. Sympathy means “feeling with.” It means laying oneself alongside of the man; projecting ourselves into his position; getting to his standpoint; trying to understand and see what he sees, as if with his eyes; contracting ourselves to his measure, that we may understand his deepest life; endeavouring to make our heart beat pulse and pulse with his, that then we may understand his difficulties and remove them, and may lead him up and out with us into our higher and larger knowledge and enjoyment and life. [See how Elisha (2 Kings 4:34) applied himself to the body of the child of the Shunammite, mouth and mouth, eyes and eyes, hands and hands, till his own warm life made the cold body beneath him warm again into readiness for life. How every teacher, even on secular subjects, especially in dealing with the young, finds the urgent necessity of sympathetically understanding the pupil’s mind, and entering into his position, if he is to teach, and to give what himself knows.] He who would teach and help and save must begin by serving. 4. The unsympathetic observer cries, “Mr. Pliable!” The honestly narrow Jew says, “What shocking lawlessness! Why, the man makes into matters indifferent some of the most explicit and long-binding laws of Moses! Rank Antinomianism! Rank infidelity!” “No,” Paul would reply, “I am not lawless. I am under law, [and in a very real sense “under The Law”] to my Master, Christ.” If principle were touched, or any point which concerned the honour of His Lord, then no one could be more rigidly uncompromising than Paul. Circumcise Titus? When that meant, either that the Christ was no Saviour, and that the Circumcision must save, or at least that salvation depended upon Christ and Circumcision, Christ being no complete Saviour; then, “No, not for an hour!” (Galatians 2:5). Concede to a Gentile inquirer, or Gentile convert, any liberty in (say) the matter of sexual license? No; such a one “shall God destroy” (1 Corinthians 3:7). Paul is “free” again in an instant, and with all the independence of his freedom—he is no man’s servant to say “yes” and “no” as his master calls for “yes” and “no”—he speaks his mind. Nay, he is the minister of Christ, and independent, first to be loyal to his Master, and next “to save, by all means, some” souls. 1 Corinthians 9:21. The Principle of Law under the Gospel Order. I. “Under law” or “under the Law,” which?—(For a lexical decision, see extract from Cremer in Critical Notes.) A “burning question” to the Hebrew Christian community, the members of which stood, historically and personally, on the line of the “meeting-place of the ages” (Hebrews 9:26). The fire of that day is for all practical purposes extinct in ours. [The council of Acts 15 met on account of this difficulty of practical action. The conflict of Paul’s middle life with the Judaisers shows the urgency then of a decision.] We, standing clear of the temporary controversy, can see that the Law of God is one and continuous through all the dispensations, and as truly extant and binding outside Judaism as within it. If God once speak, His word is man’s law. By His expressed will every man, of every age and race, is bound to shape his life. For a special purpose, arising out of local and national emergency, “The Law” was a thing interjected [between Abraham and Christ], a remarkable historical incident and episode in God’s whole government and ordering of the religious history of the world, and particularly of the covenant people, one in Abraham and Christ. [Two passages are the key to this: Galatians 3:19; Romans 5:20. But it was only a passing, temporary embodiment of permanent principles. Even the Decalogue has local colouring in four of its enactments. Part of God’s expressed will toward mankind is His judgment of and against sin, and the plan on which alone He will be approached by a sinner. These had a local, temporary expression given to them in the ritual law, with its defilements and purifications, and with its sacrifices of atonement, of consecration, of fellowship [sin, burnt, peace offerings respectively]. Detached from [do not say “purified” from] the temporary, national, theocratic accompaniment; stripped of the dispensational, and (e.g. 1 Corinthians 9:9) very temporary enswathement; all local, Jewish colour washed out; the “law” in “The Law” has come forward into Christianity, which is the newer, world-wide, race-suiting form of the one continuous government of the world by the God of Redemption. Every principle of man’s relation to God, or to man, which can be proved to underlie the enactments—even the “trivial ones”—of the Mosaic code and ritual, is in full validity under Christianity. “God is one” (Galatians 3:19) in all the dispensations, and His law is one. The Christian is, e.g., “under the law” about “not muzzling the ox,” “unto Christ,” as a matter of loyal obedience to God in Christ. The “law” in “the Law” of the Passover is still a fully valid part of the Christian scheme (1 Corinthians 5:8). “The eternal morals of the old economy are rewritten in the pages of the New Testament, as the standard of requirement, the condition of the charter of privileges, and a testimony against those who offend” (Pope, Theol, iii. 173). II. The Gospel still employs the principle of a law external to the man.—No doubt an ideal Christian “perfection” requires no code. All the old statute-book is consolidated and codified into one law, “Love.” All obedience lies in germ in the service of Love. A perfectly instructed Love would enact, from instance to instance, a perfect law for the individual. On the basis of the grace of the Gospel, the man whose status before God is that of a sinner accepted for the sake of, and in, Christ, finds the law and the obedience prescribed and secured by even an imperfectly instructed Love, accepted by God. Love is the ideally sufficient motive and force for all obedience. Ideally the life springing from a perfect and perfectly instructed Love coincides with the whole requirement of a perfect Law. The external code says no more, asks no more, than Love teaches and enacts and secures. Very glorious approximation to all this is the privilege of all in Christ, and very glorious embodiments of the possibility and privilege are found in every Church, in every century. But “no code, no law, but that of love,” can only be acted upon simpliciter as between one soul and its God, alone together. God’s law and His government need not only adapting to an individual case, but to men in associated life. The enlightenment of conscience and of love varies as between individual and individual, and between stage and stage of the spiritual growth of the same man. A merely subjective law would be one of continually varying interpretation, and of often mistaken interpretation. Even the greatly advanced Christian man is often in need of an external, objective, absolute, standard. His newborn instinct of love will often be the best, or only, expositor to himself of the external commandment; but, on the other hand, he will often need this to interpret and correct the dim, or hesitant, or biassed verdict or direction given by Love within. “The best Christians need a remembrancer: they obey the law within, but are not always independent of the teaching of the law without.” The law without is the safeguard, and the trainer, and the instructor, of the instinct of obedience within. [So an inborn taste for music, or drawing, or poetry, needs the discipline, and the check, and the help of a constant reference to the best models. A Mozart makes laws in music for others, not without first giving a thorough study and obedience to the laws of his predecessors] And much more does the man who has not yet even the new directing principle of the new, and specifically Christian, life within him, need the external law. It is the straight-edge which convicts of sad irregularity the best line traced by his life. [Kingsley, At Last, chap, i., says all this well, with special reference to the Fourth Commandment: “It would be wiser to consider whether the first step in religious training must not be obedience to some such external positive law; whether the savage must not be taught that there are certain things he ought not to do, by being taught that there is one day at least on which he shall not do them. How else is man to learn that the laws of Right and Wrong, like the laws of the physical world, are entirely independent of him, his likes or dislikes, knowledge or ignorance of them; that by Law he is environed from his cradle to his grave, and that it is at his own peril that he disobeys the Law? A higher religion may, and ought to, follow; one in which the Law becomes a Law of Liberty, and a Gospel, because it is loved and obeyed for its own sake; but even he who has attained to this must be reminded again and again, alas! that the Law which he loves does not depend for its sanction upon his love of it, on his passing fancies and feelings; but is as awfully independent of him as it is of the veriest heathen.…” And the supreme Lawgiver is not even the tenderest and most enlightened Conscience, but Christ. Indeed, the tenderness and the enlightenment are all His grace at work. His own Pattern is the one absolute all-comprising standard of human life in its perfectness. His teachings—and not least those embodied in His acts—are abiding Law for His people. All the express directions of the Epistles are the legislation of Christ for “the kingdom of heaven,” given by the Inspiring Spirit through the Apostolic writers. The Inner Light needs interpreting by, whilst in turn it flashes its own illuminative interpretation upon, the Word without. Under the Gospel Love fulfils the Law,—in principle, perfectly, from the first,—but it needs the support, the defence of itself against its own weakness or ignorance, the education, of an external standard and Law. Gospel Ethics ought to be the noblest and most perfect in practical embodiment, as the result of this co-operation of the internal and the external methods of regulation of a Christian life. III. The text holds the safe middle between two extremes found practically perilous.—A sentence of “Rabbi” Duncan (Colloquia Perip., 109) thus states them: “Ethics without law is as bad in theology as law without ethics.” (He has some pregnant sentences re the former peril (pp. 42–44).] In the one direction tends [or from that quarter comes] all theology which minimises the expiatory, reconciling, atoning element in the death of Christ; which eviscerates the force of the phrases, “forgiveness of sins,” or “the wrath of God,” or which practically leaves out of its scheme any true “anger” in Him; which makes the death only the culminating point of the example, or of the appeal of the love of God to the alienated heart of man. In the revolt from (say) the hard, formal “governmental expedient” theory, and of the “compact” scheme between an angry Father and a loving Son; in the desire to find in theology a worthier and truer place and expression for the love of God toward even those who are alienated from Him and from goodness; there would seem a real danger lest due recognition should not be given to the universal sense of guilt, nor to the way in which even the crudest and least carefully stated formulations of the principle of “satisfaction to Divine justice” have always met and satisfied the demands of the awakened heart and conscience. And this means a defective recognition of the element of law in the relations of God in Christ towards redeemed man. The liability is towards a pattern of life marked by a sentimental goodness rather than Sanctification, and towards a view of Sin which makes it only the fall of the weak child who has not yet learned to walk; or ignorance which misunderstands God; or the limitation of the finite creature. [Teachers and taught, needless to say, are nearly always better, and their lives nobler, than their theory.] The other peril is Antinomianism, “the Heresy of the Christian Church,” the peril of all communities; the shame of all Churches, and creeds, and confessions. It may be the coarse type of Gal 5:13, or Romans 6:1, which took advantage of the freeness with which pardon may be, even repeatedly, sought and found through Christ, and which dared to live in sin, even gross and sensual sin, presuming on the abounding grace of God. More often—though constantly tending to this uttermost practical licence—it has based itself upon theologies which stated unguardedly such truths as “dead to the law through the body of Christ” (Romans 7:4), “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness,” etc. (Romans 10:4), “Ye are not under law, but under grace” (Galatians 5:18); theologies of “imputation of the righteousness of Christ to the believer.” [“Putting a surplice over a sweep, without first washing him,” was hardly a caricature of some extreme forms of this.] The “Antinomian” regards the requirement of perfect holiness as so fully met by Christ that he needs not measure his conduct by any law. Obedience is to him expedient, proper, perhaps rewardable; disobedience may be chastened by a Father, not eternally punished by a Judge. Obedience is to him not a condition of acceptance as to the past or negative salvation, neither is it a condition of acceptance as to the future or positive salvation. But the whole and balanced Gospel knows of no salvation which does not mean holiness of heart and life. It knows of no faith which does not work by love, in all its practical exhibition towards God and man. [The old Jewish desire of a “glorious kingdom of God” for all Israelites, apart from any question of their personal character, reappears in the tendency of every heart to desire heaven, without the trouble of holiness; to make Christ and His cross a convenient help from a deathbed into heaven, although the life may have been spent over self, the world, or in plain sin.] The most conspicuous honour ever done to the supremacy of moral law was seen where Christ hung upon the cross of Calvary. Law is so sacred a thing, Sin that violates it is so terrible a thing, that He who is no sinner, but only the representative of the race of sinners, died, not merely an example, but a “curse” under “the curse of the law.”] [It were strange, if in days when “law” is more completely than ever seen to hold in its grip Creation and God’s order in it, the New Creation should not be thought to run on analogous lines. There is no possibility of trifling with natural law with impunity. In the moral world we should expect it to be as certain that punishment must light—the curse must “come to roost”—somewhere, where law has been broken.] 1 Corinthians 9:16. “Woe … if I preach not the Gospel.”—Do not think the ministry “an honourable profession” for your sons before whom nothing else seems definitely to open, or for yourself—perhaps not exactly successful at anything else; “good pay, good social status, not too much work.” Think of its responsibility; you understand in business what it is to pay for responsibility as well as for ability in employιs: for how much pay will a man undertake to answer for immortal souls? I. A great task—“to preach the Gospel.”—Not to be too narrowly conceived and interpreted. [Even John Wesley complains (Works, xii. 130): “Of all preaching, what is usually called Gospel preaching is the most useless, if not the most mischievous: A dull, yea, or lively, harangue, on the sufferings of Christ, or salvation by faith, without strongly inculcating holiness. I see, more and more, that this naturally tends to drive holiness out of the world.”] 1. A complete Gospel should be preached. (1) The sanctions of the Law of God, the threatenings of the Word of God, are an integral part of the Gospel. [No teacher speaks, e.g., of “fire” so often or so explicitly as Christ.] It is “good news” to know the dangers of disobedience or neglect, as certainly as to know the possibilities of forgiveness and of help toward obedience. A complete human nature includes fear. The whole message of God to men does not disregard this motive. Men need awakening, as well as directing to Christ. “Mere promise-mongers are no Gospel ministers” (Wesley). (2) The Ethics of the Gospel should be preached. To preach a crude, hard, unguarded “Election” led to Antinomianism (“What does it matter how we live, if we are elect?”). So to preach an unguarded “free grace” leads to Antinomianism (“Let us continue in sin; grace will abound; pardon may always be had!”). “The Gospel” is good living as well as good news. St. James’s teaching is as really a part of God’s whole revealed will as is St. Paul’s. Holiness on earth, as well as heaven after earth, is contemplated by the Gospel. It knows of no peace which is not connected with righteousness. “We are created in Christ Jesus unto good works” (Ephesians 2:10). [For a young tradesman to go on year by year contentedly losing money, because his kind, wealthy father year by year clears off his balance for him, “is not business.” So for a “Christian” to be less careful about falling into sin because the forgiving mercy of God is so free, and so constantly cancels “the debt,” “is not Gospel.” 2. Yet the Ethics should be Gospel ethics, distinctively. Christian morals all converge upon Christ. Love to Him is the summary of all motive, the one master-impulse. What He would have done, or been, in our circumstances is often a compendious, but sufficient, rule of action and standard of character. He is Himself the Mercy and the Morality of the Gospel, embodied. Natural systems of morals appeal to the sinner’s own force of character, to his own strength of will, to his self-respect, his self-interest, to some recuperative force within the man himself. In Sin they see only failure because of inexperience or weakness; or the finite, because of its limitations, missing, coming short of ideal obedience; they know nothing of guilt, guilty shame, guilty fears. The motives and the power of obedience, of moral elevation, of growth, are all posited within the man, and are his own. Gospel Morals transfer the centre to God. The whole power is that of the Holy Spirit; man cannot raise himself, or obey of himself. All moral power is grace, a gift, is ab extra, and gratuitous mercy for Christ’s sake. [Every topic of the “Gospel preacher” should be exhibited in its close, direct relation to Christ and to God’s purpose in Christ.] 3. Thus treated—exhibited in relation to Christ—every style of preaching, the utterance of every cast of mind, may be made really “preaching of the Gospel.” The preacher of doctrine, dogma, theology, may be of course only an utterer of theses, mere scientific, professional prelections or disquisitions on Scripture topics; but he may be as really a Gospel preacher—laying the foundation of correct, clear thought, and of intelligent experience, in his hearers—as the fervent evangelist, full of illustration, poetry, wit, pathos, and appealing mainly to the emotions. Theology is the Science underlying the preacher’s Art. The Old Testament may yield up Gospel teaching to a student as really, if not as clearly, as the New. Some men will preach from the Proverbs; others from St. John’s writings. But no style of talent, no method of treating Scripture topics, no special class of topic, must be narrowly excluded as not compatible with “preaching the Gospel.” II. No matter of self-glorification to or by the preacher.— 1. As Christ is central in the matter of the Gospel, so He must be in the preacher’s manner and thought about, and during, and after, his work. Christ must be to the front, the preacher hidden behind Him. Attention must be made to centre upon the theme, not upon the speaker. [“He shall glorify Me” (John 16:14; but not “of Himself,” 1 Corinthians 9:13; quite another thought). The Holy Spirit is the model preacher of Christ and His Gospel. How, in 1 Corinthians 9:9-11, all His “convincing” work moves toward and centres in Christ!] 2. All success is traced up to His power, and must be laid at His feet. [1 Corinthians 2:5; Philippians 2:17, a believing people is brought by Paul and laid upon the altar before Christ, and then his own life is poured out as a libation over the offering.] 3. The preacher is not the discoverer of the Gospel he preaches. It is no credit to him to have such a message to deliver. He can claim none of the deserved plaudits which greet and reward a scientific discoverer or a successful inventor on announcing his new thing. He is barely, only, a reporter. “Ye shall be witnesses—no more—unto Me” (Acts 1:8). 4. He is himself only a sinner whom the Gospel has saved. His whole status before God rests, and will eternally rest, upon God’s mercy to him for the sake of another—Christ. It is an honour which is mercy, as well as responsibility, that he is “put in trust with the Gospel” (1 Thessalonians 2:4). He is only the “earthen vessel”—the crock of common pottery—that holds the golden treasure (2 Corinthians 4:7). An ambassador who was once an enemy, sent to his fellow-rebels. Not a source, but a channel, for the water of life. The honour of his office is not personal, but is reflected from his King. 5. He is unworthy to fulfil such an honourable function; he is, in himself, quite unable to fulfil it aright, or worthily of its tremendous issues. 6. Do not praise the preacher, or congratulate him on his success. His zeal, his skill, his success, are all from the outside, from Christ. Above all: III. He has no choice; he dare not but preach.—[Yet this is constraint, not compulsion. Like Jonah or Balaam, men may refuse the commission of God, or only half discharge it; and must take the “woe” which is the consequence. The model of the spirit of the preacher, called to be the servant of Christ in this work, is, in its culminating example (cf. Psalms 40:6-8, not merely “targumed,” but authoritatively applied to, and expounded of, Christ, Hebrews 10:5-7), Christ Himself, in His voluntary, self-devoting (John 17:19, “I sanctify Myself”) acceptance of the call.] He feels the compulsion of (a) gratitude; (b) compassion for men’s need, and consideration of their danger (perhaps, here, “knowing the terror of the Lord,” 2 Corinthians 5:11; but this not certain); (c) a sense of right; he ought to tell what has been such a blessing to himself; (d) above all, and this here, he dares do nothing else. “Free” as regards man’s power and payment (1 Corinthians 9:1), but bound as to God’s call. [An old missionary, in his journal (penes me), speaking of his “call” to the ministry, writes: “When I am at my best religiously, the impression is the most powerful and persistent. The everlasting salvation of my soul is intimately, if not inseparably, connected with my obedience in this respect.”] No question whether he shall “choose the ministry.” He is “called” to it. God designed him for it “from his mother’s womb.” Pity the man who gets into the work without this call and commission, and who finds it out in later life, when perhaps too late to retrace his steps and undo the past. But “woe” to the man who, being called, will not hear; who ought to preach the Gospel, but who chooses some easier, or more lucrative, or more congenial, line of life! What sin is there like it, to refuse the honour of being an ambassador who may save souls? [Yet how patient God is with reluctant Moses, who is almost petulant and rebellious in his urgent protest against going to Egypt (Exodus 3:11; Exodus 3:13; Exodus 4:1; Exodus 4:10), excuse after excuse, until finally, 1 Corinthians 9:13, “Here am I, but do not send me; choose, and send somebody else.”] Do not envy the “preacher of the Gospel,” even if he be very successful. “Brethren, pray for us.” 1 Corinthians 9:15; 1 Corinthians 9:23. Paul an Example of— I. Self-denial. II. Humility. III. Disinterestedness. IV. Affability. V. High motive.—[J. L.] 1 Corinthians 9:16. I. What to preach: “The Gospel.” II. How to preach: “Without glory to self in any way.” III. Why preach? “Woe.”—[J. L.] NOTES1 Corinthians 9:24.—His own salvation is at stake as well as that of his hearers. He must do all these things, not only as expedients which for his hearers’ sakes may make him a successful soul-winner, but because to do everything he can to ensure success is to discharge faithfully his “stewardship” (1 Corinthians 9:17), and is thus one condition of his final acceptance when he comes to the goal. The comma after “run” in the A. V., and, still more, the “even so run” in the R.V., makes it clear that the reading should not be carelessly taken to be, “Run so that ye may,” nor, “So run as that ye may.” “So” looks not forward to “that ye may obtain,” but backward, to the way racers run who know that they are competitors, the success of one of whom means the failure of all the others. This is not a maxim standing alone and meaning, “Do you run your Christian course in such a manner as to ensure that you will win the prize.” It is a picture gathering up the scene on which Paul and his hearers are gazing. “See the sustained straining, and the concentration of energy; see how nothing diverts attention from the Prize; see the fierce eagerness of competition; remember the long, self-denying training for that moment of supreme effort. That is the way to win your Crown. Run your course like that—so—thus—if you mean to attain.”1 Corinthians 9:25.—Racing, boxing, wrestling, all kinds of athletic contests “for the mastery.” See the rendering. The Olympic games were in Paul’s time still celebrated, and survived the Isthmian, which, however, were more familiar to the Corinthians, and at the time were more important. Nero contended in them, with “an agony to succeed” (Stanley). Ten months’ preliminary training—dieting, etc.—was obligatory on every competitor. [The metaphor of the foot race is found not only in Philippians 3:12; Philippians 3:14; 2 Timothy 4:7-8 (Hebrews 12:1); but in briefer phrases—Acts 12:25; Acts 20:24; Galatians 2:2; Philippians 2:16; Galatians 5:2; 2 Thessalonians 3:1; perhaps Romans 9:15-16. (See Dean Howson, Metaphors of St. Paul.)] A corruptible crown.—At the Isthmus this was of Grecian pine leaves; because these were so valueless intrinsically, the more to be admired was the eagerness of the competitors.1 Corinthians 9:26. Uncertainly.—With no definite goal, keeping to no particular track. Beating the air.—As if fighting a shadow, or merely “lunging about” for practice to the muscles. “It is no ‘practice,’ but the serious contest, I am engaged in.”1 Corinthians 9:27.—See Homiletic Suggestions. Buffet for “keep under.” Lit., by derivation, “Give it a blow that bruises it under the eye—to keep it in its place, as servant, not master. .—1 Corinthians 9:23-27 The Minister’s Care for his Own Salvation.—We see him: I. In Conflict. Then II. Crowned. Or III. Castaway. I. In conflict.— 1. 1 Corinthians 9:23 is transitional. A new thought is introduced, out of which this paragraph grows. The preacher of the Gospel hopes to be, needs to be, a “partaker of the Gospel along with” those to whom he preaches it. He is himself vitally interested in its truth and its success. He may be an apostle; but he is first a sinner, lost and in bondage, and himself needing to hear the “joyful sound” of release and recovery. The trumpet of Jubilee which he is set to sound, proclaims an “acceptable year of the Lord,” in whose happy issues he too hopes to share. He has heard the Gospel, and is rejoicing in its salvation; but if he is to retain his status, he must be faithful to his duty as a preacher, set to “save as many souls as he can.” If he fail personally, he will be a failure officially; no man will succeed in the ministry who does not keep his personal life right. Conversely, if he fail officially, through neglect or unfaithfulness, he will fail personally, His unfaithfulness is sin. (See this and some after points expounded in Separate Homily, “An Apostle’s Peril,” 1 Corinthians 9:27.) 2. A racer, putting all his energies into the race; making no play of his ministry, but most serious and arduous and even exhausting labour. A boxer, matched with a busy, active, dangerous antagonist in his very “body”; finding here again that it is no play to deal with himself. His nature every moment waits to render him secure, and then in his security to gain an advantage over him. Indolence, love of ease and comfort, and even natural weariness, need to be watched, lest they deal deadly blows at his life. He must be ready to return rebuke for suggestion, blow for blow. [“Get thee behind Me, Satan!” said Christ to Peter, who had revolted against the idea of the shame and the bodily suffering of the cross. “Do not think of such a thing, Lord! That be far from Thee! Be propitious to Thyself (lit. Greek); be kinder to Thyself than that!” Had the Master just passed through conflict in anticipatory presence of the cross? And now, with mistaken kindness, His friend, Peter, makes the very suggestion, which, quite innocently, His own holy body may have been making. “Shun the pain!” (Matthew 16:22).] There are dangers of the couch, the arm-chair, the hospitable table, the glass, the pipe, the cycle, many (literal) body-dangers besetting, buffeting, the Christian “boxer.” [Make the very body come obediently “to heel.”] [As there are also dangers in the study,—of dilettante reading and work, known to, condemned by, nobody outside; dangers of success; dangers in days of what seems “failure”; dangers of the infection of the “secular” temper—for the minister may do his work in as thoroughly “secular” a spirit as any business man in the market or the shop.] 3. He is in constant training for his running. He must never suffer himself to get “out of condition.” Things allowable if he were not running a race, or if he were not in the ministry, and bound to “fulfil it” [Colossians 4:17; cf. the R.V. in Revelation 3:2 : “No works of thine fulfilled before God; many things purposed, begun, half done, nearly finished, but “not fulfilled”], are not permissible to him. He must keep himself free, pure, not entangled nor self-ensnared, in the best order of body, mind, heart, to do his work and accomplish his “course.” [“Temperate in all things.” See Separate Homily.] II. Crowned.—[Revelation 3:11 is a warning to an official life that its official “crown” may be given over to, passed on to, worn by, some other who has done more faithfully and effectually work which was allotted to the uncrowned man. Revelation 2:10 is the personal reward of the personal life. And notice] the “crown” of a successful, faithful life is “Life.” “Uncorruptness” in teaching (Titus 2:7, where notice the displaced reading, which was significant in its reiteration of idea), and in that love (Ephesians 6:24) which is the very element of the Christian walk, thus leads up to “life and incorruption” (2 Timothy 1:10). The purifying of the nature from all that belongs to “death” at last made complete; the life which sprang here from “incorruptible seed” at last developed into eternal, indefectible perfection of all its features and capacities; whatever of added happiness “Heaven” may include,—happiness ab extra, dependent upon surroundings, companionships, appointed employments; all this in perfection, with nothing of transitoriness to dim, even as a possibility, the enjoyment of the present; with no remotest possibility of an end, to cloud over as with the gradual closing in of an eternal Night, the Divine glory of the eternal Day of that world’s life;—this “Life” is Paul’s “crown.” The spiritual life here was all the work of Christ in the soul; and to His heart also that after-life which is the expansion, the fulness, the sequel as well as the successor of this, is the crown of this. Finis coronat opus Christi, et Pauli. [What crown is there of all for which men in the “natural” realm “strive for the mastery,” which is incorruptible? E.g. how much of the knowledge acquired by a lifetime of study and self-denying, enslaving labour is merely relative! It is modified, supplemented, made obsolete, almost before the man who won it and wore it is cold in his grave. Or, how distance of time dwindles and “corrupts” away the mere crown of fame and honour given by contemporaries, and not unworthily, to the majority of the famous people of any one century or nation! How unsatisfying the best reward of mere secular labours! How many a hot-browed athlete has found his crown begin to wither and perish almost as soon as it has been placed upon his head!] Or, unhappy alternative: III. Castaway.—(See, again, below.) Of all the “lost,” is the rejection of any man more pathetically painful to imagine than that of the preacher, who has set others to run, who has directed their training and their running, who has enheartened them in their days of faintness or discouragement, who has seen them take the one last step which bears them in death over the line that marks the goal attained; and then himself presents himself to the Judge for “approval” and for crowning, only to be thrust away “reprobate” “castaway”? 1 Corinthians 9:24-27. “Temperate in all things.”—(May be made the basis of a Temperance Sermon.) I. Christian religion honours the body.—Only one that really does. Such religion as Corinthians knew took no account of it; bodily sins and lusts were reckoned things indifferent. 1. Some to-day make almost a religion of bodily exercise. Athletics the god which gets their best devotion. Read nothing else in the paper; can talk on no other topics. That an exaggeration. [Body not everything. Some giants very poor creatures in mind. Dwarfs have done great things. Two most wonderful figures in Europe at end of seventeenth century were two commanders of large armies: William III., an “asthmatic skeleton”; Luxembourg, “the princely hunchback” (Macaulay).] 2 As real an exaggeration to make teetotalism the only devotion, the only religion, the only remedy for human ill. [Easy to understand the “intemperance of temperance people”; not difficult to excuse, or even justify, it. Man who sees most of the wide extent, and dire results, of intemperance; lives in midst of its woe and wreck; finds all efforts, hopes, prayers, defeated by it; finds the thick moral induration of the drunkard-habit turn edge of keenest sword, or most pointed arrow; finds the work of years of painful recovery blighted by outburst of old, mad passion again; may be excused if he feel or speak with “undue” strength. May be forgiven his “madness” when he sees wife, child, friend, minister, dragged down to the slough of the sin and shame of drunkard-life. No doubt, too, if we could make drunken England into part of sober England, we should cut tap-root of nine-tenths of English ills, and solve many a social and economic problem. No doubt total abstinence the only remedy for large percentage of misery and sin; the most practical remedy, as things are to-day. Yet it is exaggeration.] It is not all. Some appeals to the intemperate are only less liable to become mischievous than drink itself. E.g. appeal too strongly to the saving of money effected; may cast out devil of drink by putting in covetousness. Appeal too exclusively to self-respect or strength of will; may make reclaimed drunkard a Pharisee in pride of self. May sometimes only have cured physical mischief by inoculating with moral poison—Be temperate even in your remedy fôr intemperance. True way of regarding question is to make it part of the Christian honour of the body, as an instrument through which Christ is to be served. Highest purpose of education is to make mind a fit instrument for serving Christ. And so too the body is His; He bought it; bought all of the man—body and soul. It is to be kept in best possible order for Him, and His use. Therefore, in mind and body,—temperate in all things. II. What is temperance?— 1. See driver of ancient chariot, or modern four-in-hand; his strong bit; still more, his firm, skilled hand. That perfect control of his team is temperance. Man, boy, drives team of three bodily appetites; mettlesome horses, powerful, sometimes turbulent, in their strength; but they have their work to do. Temperance is having the team well in hand, making them do their work, but no more; do it, at the man’s will; or leave it alone, at his will. Horses must not be allowed to run away with chariot, with man. “Be temperate, lest team carry you over the precipice of ruin here and hereafter.” 2. See chorus on the orchestra, how built up of four classes, masses, of voice. Conductor makes each do its part, but no more. Too much bass, too much treble, equally spoil the music. If tenors (or even one voice) over-assert themselves, they spoil balance and harmony. Conductor makes each do its part, loud, soft, everything, as he will. Mind, body, pleasure, work, intellect, heart, will,—in the perfect harmony of Life, all take their part; no more, no less; nothing dwarfed or stunted; nothing exaggerated or over-grown. Be the conductor in full authority over your choir of gifts, powers, passions; make all temper to a happy balance and wholeness. Drunkard lets one voice out-shout the rest and ruin the music of the life. 3. Intemperance means not having oneself perfectly in hand, having something a man cannot say “no” to. [“Never so let yourself go that you cannot ‘pull up’ at will. Find cannot say ‘no’ easily? Then put foot down, say ‘no’ absolutely. Body wants to be master? Give it a buffet under the eye—that is Paul’s word—to keep it under. Make it know you will be master, the grace of God helping you. Body and mind are partners in business of life; neither is a sleeping partner; but not equal partners; body has some stake in concern, but must not have the management, especially in drinking. Mind—you—must be master. That is temperance.”] “In all things.” Rule for ancient athletes, and for Christians now, for everybody who wants even to win the prizes of life. Nothing really worthy in being a teetotaler, and yet an impure man; a hard worker, yet intemperate in relaxation after hard work. Not too much reading, music, sleep, anything. Every single thing in measure, all in balance. III. In many things—not drinking only—this may mean total abstinence. As to drinking: 1. For every drunkard, or man or woman in danger, a necessity. Such must abstain, or they cannot be Christ’s. 2. For Christians it may become expedient (see Homily on 1 Corinthians 8:9-13). In England, in last century, may not have been. May not be on Continent to-day. Are things, however, coming, or are they come, to such a pass in England, that Christian people must stand clear of what is cursing England as never before? 3. For young people, safety. No guarantee “worth a rush” except conversion; even that sometimes overborne No strength but God’s in them absolutely to be trusted; but total abstinence a safeguard. IV. If not, will not win the prize.—Happily public opinion is beginning to say intemperate people (in every sense) shall not. Also inevitable working of “natural law” forbids. Boys and men handicap themselves physically by any exaggerated or sinful excess. Success even in business means clear head, sober hand, healthy body. Highest work demands body and mind at their best. So Christ’s work demands it. Also if some intemperate men seem to “win,” they lose themselves and are cast away (cf. Luke 9:25; 1 Corinthians 9:27). [Our forefathers bore with intemperate Pitt, and too-convivial Scott, and the sinner Nelson. But, a little later, they would not give Byron his place in Westminster Abbey. To-day not all the witchery of their Shelley or our Swinburne must permit them to take first rank in our national devotion. Day coming when Christianised society will refuse, and say that neither an intemperate man nor an impure man shall lead the national life: “We won’t have it!”] 1 Corinthians 9:26. Christian Progress.—Compare the progress suggested by (a) Running with that suggested by (b) Growth. Four Contrasts. I. (a) Progress, in the outward aspects of it: the life of action and of conflict, of speech, of work.—Every detail of life a step forward towards the goal or backward towards the starting-point, or out of the prescribed course altogether. (b) Progress in the inner life; in strength of character and of principle, greater simplicity and directness of motive; greater abundance in the fruits of grace, in loveliness and Christ-likeness. “Every detail a step.” Then how important every smallest detail. There is nothing which “does not matter.” Everything “matters.” And, further, why fear dying? It is but one more step, to be taken in the same strength as that next preceding and all preceding; the one step which carries the runner over the line which marks the goal attained; but, except for that, perhaps not intrinsically so difficult or so important as many another preceding. Let every detail of life have its right direction, and carry us forward. II. (a) Progress in a definitely marked-out course.—The runner is kept right by rules and bounds imposed from without. (b) The thing that grows is kept right in its progressive development from within, according to the “law” of its very life. The plant or the body obeys the ideal of its kind or order. The oak, the moss, unfold themselves and assimilate and dispose into their structure new material, in obedience to the life within them. No need to watch or take pains that in pattern or kind the leaves shall grow those of the moss or the oak. So the new life in the soul has its ideal and its laws. It will naturally show a developing progress, the features characteristic of the Christ-life appearing of themselves. But the Racer is only kept right as he keeps within bounds prescribed; he may go wrong at any point. On this side stand God’s “Thou shalts”; on the other His “Thou shalt nots.” Within these lies the one, only path to the goal and the prize. If in his advance the racer has not submitted to the direction or the restraint of these, he runs “unlawfully” and “uncertainly.” He may not be surprised if he find himself, after all, “cast away” as the result of the Judge’s verdict. If all other indications of the course fail, the steps of Christ are the supreme summary of all direction. What He did, and, above all, the principles of His words and acts—these are His “steps.” They show the path in which alone progress can be made. III. The progress of growth is solitary; that of running is in company.—The one palm will grow as well solitary in an oasis as in a grove of palms. No tree helps the next to grow. The children in a family grow hearty or weakly independently of each other. As there is a spiritual life which must be lived, and progress which must be made, alone. A man might be, if need were, a great saint in a great solitude. It would be one-sided sainthood. No Christian fellowship or united worship can do the work of the closet and the searched Word. But the progress of Running is progress in company; all the helpfulness of companionship and sympathy is brought into use. The runners in training for athletic contests will secure a friend to run by their side during the last “lap” of the course; by the fresh and unexhausted vigour of the friend to help themselves over the strain of the last portion of their path. The sloth or eagerness of one Christian’s progress will affect the pace of a fellow-runner. His steady pursuit of the prize may decide some feebler, wavering soul just feeling the first strain after the eagerness of the start is over, and beginning to wonder whether, after all, the prize is worth such an effort to win. IV. Growth speaks of a steady, quiet progress; not to be measured from moment to moment, but palpable enough in accumulated results. We see that the plant has grown, or the body, but not the actual growing. Racing puts forward the continuous, eager, straining effort, and the concentration of it upon the one thing—the crown. Our life is no “walk-over” the course; no lounging parade towards the goal; but “racing,” with all the eagerness of competition, where the racers are companions, but not competitors. There is no turning aside to examine the beautiful sculptures and altars by the side of the course; no stopping to exchange greetings with the friends amongst the spectators. [“This one thing I do” (Philippians 3:13) is well illustrated by the last words shouted by the “coach” to the men in the trial eights on the river: “Now then, keep your eyes in the boat; look at the shoulder of the man in front of you; don’t think of anything but the time and the stroke.”] The racer’s progress is possessed by one idea: “The prize,” “the crown.” He sees nothing but that. From head to foot, from the finger-tip of his outstretched hand to the extremity of the foot, which barely touches the ground from one step to another as he strains along, and flies rather than runs—every inch of him, ever muscle in his frame, says, “The Crown!” Everything is made to bend to that; everything in life which will not help progress is discounted or dismissed; all must help to win the goal and the Judge’s award. The Christian man knows what he wants, and makes that the serious, ruling business of his life. [In Hebrews 12:1 are the added ideas of training away all superfluous “weight” every ounce which is not bone or muscle, which will help in running, and of stripping off all encumbering, “clinging” (= “easily besetting”) garments.] Look at the runners. So run, as they do, that ye may obtain. It is not never-ending progress leading to no definite issue; an endless seeking and never finding; an unending effort which attains to no prize. [Edward Irving exclaims, “Probation does not lead to probation, but to issues!” (Divine Judgments, vii.); to “crowning” or “cast away.”] “A great deal of trouble to make Christian progress!” Certainly. But see Proverbs 14:4 : “Where no oxen are, the crib is clean; but,” etc. Nothing is easier than have a clean stable, and to escape the “trouble” of cleansing it; but the indolent man must be content to forego the “increase which is by the strength of the ox.” 1 Corinthians 9:27. An Apostle’s Peril.—Both words, that for “preach” and that for “castaway,” are, themselves or their cognates, so common in St. Paul that we need not overpress the derivational meaning of even the former, or necessarily regard them as saturated with suggestion springing from the imagery of a racer. The herald who has called others and induced them to enter for the prize, who has announced the conditions of the competition and even seemed to be joining in the race himself, comes to the judge’s seat for the crown. “No crown for you; you have not yourself submitted to the rules, have not contended ‘lawfully’ ” (2 Timothy 2:5). And he turns away from the judge’s seat filled with the beginnings of the disappointment of an eternal failure. Probable; suitable to the context; true; but not certainly to be got out of the words. I. An official application of the words.—Pauls peril is from his body.—He “keeps his body under.” Must take this precisely for what he says: not the “flesh,” but the “body,”—a narrower and very definite source of danger. Sin in Gentile life ran most frequently into physical excess. All heathenism, all natural human life, gravitates sooner or later into indulgence of the three physical appetites. Mere human wisdom and morals have no sure reason why these should not be indulged; the tendency is always to treat bodily sins as venial, or even indifferent actions. Strangely enough, also, the same temperament which makes some men, some ministers, seem highly receptive of the Spirit’s enduement of power, appears to expose them to the assault of physical temptation. From high spiritual exaltation to bodily excess is not an uncommon fall. Paul seems to have been by temperament and by special grace in little peril in one particular direction. [1 Corinthians 7:7, as usually interpreted, but the inference is by no means so certain as is generally assumed]. And he may be in some degree identifying himself with his readers, and the “I” not be entirely personal, but rather representative. A real danger to a minister arises from the frequent association with women in the work of his life, whether as grateful and attached hearers, or busy helpers, or the objects of his labours. There are dangers at the hospitable tables of his congregation. Dangers of indolence fostered by the sedentary nature of his work in the study. Nowadays ministerial athletics may become a peril. Paul is in danger from his body; and, further, in two particulars in this very chapter does he give the body a check. “Paul’s refusal of maintenance, and the bodily toil resulting thereupon, and his refusal to eat meat which might injure a weak brother, were blows against the spiritual power of his own body, and tended to make the body more and more a servant of the spirit within” [Beet, in loco. We may add also]: All the physical dangers and suffering which he not only submitted to, but accepted and gloried in (2 Corinthians 4:10; 2 Corinthians 6:5; 2 Corinthians 11:23-27), as the accompaniments of his work for his Master, became, through his persistent, voluntary pursuit of a career which made him run the gauntlet of so many blows upon his body, really in effect his own buffetings of his body. All the exhausting physical toil of the modern ministry; long walks, wearying pastorising; the contact, so repugnant to all the training and instincts of a gentleman, with physical squalor, dirt, disorder, and disease in the fulfilment of his labours; unwelcome exposure to all weathers;—all may be sanctified into blows which “keep the body under.” Asceticism, ingeniously, gratuitously, inventively prescribed, is uncalled for. In the direct application of the possible figure (above), official defect, and condemnation of his official life and work, are most prominent. But not apart from personal unfaithfulness and failure, and a personal rejection. [He regards it as quite possible for a teacher to lose his life’s superstructure and building, whilst himself being saved because on the one foundation (1 Corinthians 3:14-15).] Personal unfaithfulness is by far the commonest cause of ministerial and official failure. Not the apostle only, but the man, has to take account of the liability to be at the last a “castaway.” So then: II. An application of the principle to the personal life.— 1. Every Chris-tion may become a “castaway,” and miss the crown. [The thought, but not the same (original Greek) word, in Luke 9:25. All safety is of God’s grace, with which the man must co-operate; [and the co-operation is in the strength of grace also]. The grace must go all the way, for the peril goes all the way. [To the last the Christian soldier is not on the parade-ground, but on the battle-field. He must hold himself ready for fighting or sudden attack at any moment. No “standing at ease”! Danger never far away.] 2. No man is exempt because of high honour, long service, or great success in the work of God; Paul had all these. Nor because of great gifts or grace at one time enjoyed; Paul had these. Through these, indeed, fatal temptation may reach the soul; e.g. if a man thus honoured and endowed become proud, self-satisfied, self-reliant to the exclusion of dependence upon God’s grace. 3. Each man should know his own liability, his own vulnerable point. Perhaps, safe everywhere else, he may, like Achilles, be in danger at the heel; the lowest part of his nature, that wherein he touches the earthly most nearly, may be the point of attack, rather than the heart or the exalted intellect. 4. Each man should “exercise” himself [Acts 24:16; the physical training of the combatant in the games]. Keeping himself well in hand; taking care that the spiritual is always the dominant element in his life. Yet the self-distrust, the watchfulness over oneself, the fear of the sad possibility of after all missing the prize, must not be so dwelt upon as to become a morbid dread, or a haunting terror, overshadowing with gloomy clouds the “joy of the Lord.” The case of a “castaway” is by God’s grace a very rare one, though a possible one. Moreover, dwell also upon the grace for the faithful, patient, successful running of the course until we say, “I have finished my course” (2 Timothy 4:7). [There is yet a Greater Runner than Paul Who is proposed for our contemplation (Hebrews 12:1-2): “Looking at (as well as unto) Jesus,” who has won His prize. Did He, may we not say, “keep under His” very “body”?] Leading up to the temple of Neptune at Corinth, close by the Isthmian race-ground, Pausanias the traveller saw two hundred statues of victors in the games, ranged in honourable array on either side of the path. What an inspiration to after-competitors! We, too, have our array of victors. Amongst the most distinguished stands the figure of Paul. No “castaway” after all! And the grace which kept him and crowned him may keep and crown any of us! 1 Corinthians 9:24. Six Earnest Counsels on the Race of Life. (A Sermon to the Young.) I. Trifle not; the business is earnest. [“Each word we speak hath infinite effect;Each soul we pass must go to heaven or hell;And this our one chance through eternity;—To drop and die like dead leaves on the brake,Or like the meteor-stone …Kindle the dry moors into a fruitful blaze.Be earnest, earnest, earnest,—mad, if thou wilt!Do what thou dost as if the stake were heavenAnd that thy last deed ere the judgment day.” (Kingsley, Saint’s Tragedy.)]II. Delay not; the opportunity is short. III. Err not; the path is narrow. [“Narrow!” Yes; as the railway lines make a “narrow” track for the engine and its train. But the “narrow” grip of the rails upon the wheels is safety for the travellers. “Liberty” from their compulsion to keep the track is danger, disaster, ruin. Plenty of liberty to run forward, in the only safe direction, with all prudent speed.] IV. Divide not your attention; the work is difficult. [“The children of this world are, in (for the aims and purposes of) their generation, wiser than the children of light.” The “Jack-of-all-trades” danger of some characters.] V. Relax not your efforts; he only that endureth to the end shall be saved. VI. Faint not; the prize is glorious.—[J. L., in part.] NOTES1 Corinthians 10:1.—Notice “for,” true reading, connecting closely with ix. ult. Q.d. “I am not secure from becoming a ‘castaway’; you are not yet sure of the prize; for it is ever a law of God’s people and their life,” etc. I would not … ignorant.—Found (with slight variation) in Romans 1:13; Romans 11:25; 1 Corinthians 12:1; 2 Corinthians 1:8; 1 Thessalonians 4:13. Add (for the thought) 2 Corinthians 8:1. He is a “steward of the mystery,” and is anxious to get what is entrusted to him dispensed. Our fathers.—Evidently the sin animadverted upon in this chapter is the liability and temptation of the Gentile section of the Church. But he is a Christian who still claims “the fathers” as his own; (perhaps some of the Gentiles had been proselytes before conversion to Christianity). The Church is the real Israel; the continuity of the dispensations and of the covenant of God (cf. Galatians 3:7-9; Galatians 3:14; Galatians 3:29) is maintained in the deep unity of One Covenant People, whether for some centuries accidentally Israelite, or now Gentile and Israelite indifferently. As in the parallel fact that he appeals to the Old Testament when dealing with Gentile Christians as well as with Jewish, the whole Past belongs to the new Church,—its Scriptures, its “fathers,” its God. Or, conversely, as here, “the Church in the wilderness” (Acts 7:38) had our Sacraments and our Christ—“whom they tempted” (1 Corinthians 10:9)—before us. Under … through.—Literal, historical, but “in” (1 Corinthians 10:2) passes over to the underlying significance. Quite worthless as bearing upon the question of the mode of baptism, unless perhaps as an ad hominem argument against a certain type of disputant, thus: “The cloud sprinkled them, the sea splashed them with its spray; the only immersion was that of the doomed Egyptians!” But the question how much water should be used is parallel with the question how much bread should be eaten, how much wine drunk, in order to a valid participation in the Lord’s Supper. [The question of the subjects of baptism is of vital significance.]1 Corinthians 10:3. Spiritual.—Not to be discussed apart from the specialised meaning of “spiritual” in chaps. 2, 3. “Belonging to the realm of facts in which God the Spirit and the awakened ‘spirit’ in man, and these in communion by the gracious action of the Holy Spirit upon the latter, are the leading and typical facts.” Very pertinent is Revelation 11:8 : “which spiritually is called Sodom.” Also Galatians 4:24. The Manna (Exodus 16:14-15; Exodus 17:6), with Christ’s comment, John 6:31-32 (and Psalms 78:24). Twice a rock was smitten—a “rock” (tzur) at Rephidim, under Sinai, and at Kadesh a “cliff” (selah); in the first year of the Exodus, and in the last, just before the new start to Canaan, respectively. These are quite sufficient basis for Paul’s use of the Old Testament narrative, without supposing him to sanction or adopt the foolish Rabbinical fables of the rock in Rephidim being an isolated mass which, with its spring of water, gathered itself into a quasi-globular form, “like a swarm of bees,” and, rolling along by itself, or even “carried by Miriam [!],” accompanied the host through their wilderness wanderings. This can scarcely have been anything but an allegory to the Rabbis themselves; and even if it be as old as Paul’s time—which is not certain about anything in the mass of material vaguely called the Talmud, whose earliest written form dates many years later—the utmost that can be said is well put by Dr. Driver: “The particular expression chosen by the Apostle may have been suggested to him by his acquaintance with the legend current among the Jews; but it is evident that he gives it an entirely different application, and that he uses it, not in a literal sense, but figuratively” (Expositor, January 1889). Stanley also points out that “the cloud” and “the sea” are not called “spiritual”; the manna and the water from the rock were already Messianically expounded by the Jewish teachers; whilst, until Christian baptism had been instituted, no use of the cloud and sea would be suggested, and would only occur to a Christian Rabbi like Paul.1 Corinthians 10:5.—Cf. Hebrews 3:7 to Hebrews 4:13 for the general strain of this paragraph. Also cf. “All … all … all … all … many” here with “All … all … all … some” in 1 Corinthians 9:22. Q.d. “I may do all I can do, God may do all He can do, yet some will not be saved. See to it that ye are saved.” [Cf. Christ’s reply: “Few or many, strive yourself to enter” (Luke 13:23).]1 Corinthians 10:6. Examples for us, or “examples of us,” which? Grammatically each finds supporters. Both are true; the former because the latter is true; on the general principle of the paragraph, that the “History of the Church” may be extended backward into even wilderness days. Evil things.—Quite general in reference; and “lust” must not be confined to the sin of 1 Corinthians 10:8. (Cf. Romans 7:7; James 1:15; 1 John 2:16.1 Corinthians 10:7. Idolaters.—In the same sense as in 1 Corinthians 10:14. No sudden and complete lapse is contemplated, but the complicity with, and countenance of, idolatry involved in eating at the public heathen banquets, which of course might prove the first step to a complete relapse. For the history, see Exodus 32:6. Play was in fact, but by no necessary implication in the word, lascivious “play” or “sport.” At Corinth notoriously, but in heathenism everywhere, idolatry was linked with, degenerated into, sensuality; and even made sensuality service to the gods, and a means of enrichment of the Temple treasuries. [Men and women “presented their bodies a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1).]1 Corinthians 10:8.—Numbers 25:1-9 (and Josephus) say 24,000, not 23,000. “Paul follows a Jewish tradition which deducted 1,000 as being the number of those who were hanged by the judges, so that only 23,000 would be killed by the plague” (Evans). Most modern commentators dismiss as valueless all attempts at removing the apparent discrepancy, and would account the discrepancy itself of small importance, as “a slip of Paul’s memory,” or “a slip of the pen of Paul’s amanuensis”; either way obviously regarding his inspiration and that of the Epistle as not absolutely requiring “inerrancy in the original autographs.” Certainly “in one day” is not so emphatic as to imply “and a thousand more, the balance, on another.”1 Corinthians 10:9.—Note “Lord,” not “Christ,” is now the widely supported reading. Yet “ ‘Lord’ and ‘Christ’ equally refer to Christ’s presence in the Old Testament, as implied in 1 Corinthians 10:4; Jude 1:5; Hebrews 11:26” (Stanley). Moreover, something is due to the form of the sentence; it is not expressly said that Israel tempted Christ; we do “tempt Christ.” [For similar Gospel turns given to Old Testament phrases and facts, see, besides Hebrews 11:26; Hebrews 11:7; Romans 4:13 : cf. again this with Matthew 5:5 (Psalms 37:11), ib. 3] Tempted.—Numbers 21:4; Numbers 21:6. See homiletic material on 1 Corinthians 10:13. Here “put God’s patience to the test.” The word is strengthened here with a prefix which intensifies its meaning: “put Him to uttermost proof”; “unbelief, impatience, presumptuousness” being elements in their sin; suggesting a “longing for the sensual gratifications of their old heathen life, and a desire to shake off the restraints of Christianity” (Ellicott).1 Corinthians 10:10.—Numbers 16:41-50. The murmuring against Moses and Aaron being perhaps covertly intended as a suggestive parallel to the Corinthian murmuring against Paul’s Apostolic authority. Yet it of course aims higher than at any human authority. The destroyer.—Q.d. “the destroying angel,” whose physical instrument of chastisement was “a plague.” As in 2 Samuel 24:16; Isaiah 37:36. So Paul discloses a personal, Divine wrath behind the prevalent sickness and the deaths at Corinth (1 Corinthians 11:30).1 Corinthians 10:11. Happened … were written.—There was a purpose moulding the facts; the written record was also the expression of a purpose. If we may use the human analogue: just as the writer of “a novel with a purpose” first constructs his characters and his story, and then publishes his teaching through the vehicle of his narrative, by writing and printing it. The vehicle of instruction is here not a fiction, but a history (“these things happened”), in which the sovereign “authorship” of God and the absolutely free activity and “authorship” of man are found, as always, in “collaboration.” Ends of the ages.—The great dispensational periods in God’s whole Redemption history: Antediluvian, Patriarchal, Mosaic. In a sense these are successive, the Christian age being the last; after Christianity, Eternity. Yet the truer view sees what is essential in each running on side by side with the next later to arise, so that all “arrive” together at the beginning of the “age to come” (Matthew 12:32; cf. significantly, Mark 10:30). For ensamples,—“Typically,” as 1 Corinthians 10:6. So Romans 5:14 (strengthened by 1 Corinthians 15:45). The serviceableness of the Old Testament for teaching New Testament truth is not a happy accident, but the result of the intention of Him Who is the Author of History.1 Corinthians 10:13.—“Take warning. But also take courage!” See homiletic treatment.1 Corinthians 10:15.—“I take you at your own valuation; the more reason, if you are such wise men, that you should see how my warning is warranted.”1 Corinthians 10:16. Cup of blessing.—The name given to the third [or fourth,—authorities differ hopelessly] cup of wine solemnly drunk at a Passover Supper, over which the master of the feast said, “Blessed be Thou, O Lord our God, the King of the World, who hast created the fruit of the vine.” [This is the starting-point of the Saviour’s thought (John 15:1).] But the name was already associating itself with the Christian custom of pronouncing a blessing or thanksgiving in connection with “the cup” at the Lord’s Supper. “After the same manner” (1 Corinthians 11:25) implies that He gave thanks over His cup (1 Corinthians 10:21) as well as over His bread; and the first giving of thanks, that over the bread, is called “blessing” in Matthew 26:26. (On the general subject, see Separate Homily on 1 Corinthians 11:20.) Note that “communion” here, “partakers” (1 Corinthians 10:18), and “fellowship” (1 Corinthians 10:20) are cognate words, as shown in the 1 Corinthians 10:18; 1 Corinthians 10:20 are thus exegetical of the “communion” of this verse. (“Partakers with Christ” or “partakers of Christ,” in Hebrews 3:14, has, as matter of mere verbal exegesis, the same ambiguity as here between “Common participation with each other in,” and “Communion with, the blood of Christ (i.e. ultimately with Himself). The exact meaning will be for each man determined by his reading of the whole teaching of the New Testament upon the subject. We … we.—No definite, or decisive, pronouncement as to the persons who did, or who rightly should, “administer.” Paul’s “we” is the French “on,” q.d. “Which is broken in our Churches in our custom and manner of having amongst us ‘the Lord’s Supper.’ ” “We Christians, as a new religious community.”1 Corinthians 10:18. After the flesh.—Showing that he has been all along writing in the presence of the thought of a continuous “spiritual” “Israel.” The custom of making a sacred meal of the greater part of the flesh of the peace offerings is in Leviticus 8:31; Deuteronomy 12:18; Deuteronomy 16:11; 1 Samuel 9:23-24, etc. This gave Paul an argument appealing to the Jewish-Christian section of the Church. With the altar.—Not, as the parallels would suggest, with God, as though that were too solemn to say in such a connection.1 Corinthians 10:19.—“Do I contradict what I said in 1 Corinthians 8:4, or in Romans 14:14?” [1 Timothy 4:4 his still unchanged conviction.] “For Christians I said indeed that these things have no real significance; to the heathen around you they have a very real significance; and the powers of the world of evil take good care that they shall have to themselves a very real significance also.”1 Corinthians 10:20. Devils.—“Damons;” quoted from Deuteronomy 32:17. In the New Testament there is only one “devil”; the “demons” are many (Gospels passim). Stanley would soften down the meaning here to “divinities,” and “more especially to those heroes and inferior divinities to whom alone (according to the belief of this later age), and not to the supreme rulers of the universe, sacrifices as such were due.” But this enfeebles the strong antithesis which underlies Paul’s argument and remonstrance, 1 Corinthians 10:21; it is also against the New Testament usage of the word, which is everywhere (except Acts 17:18, where the speakers are heathens) evil spirits, spiritual beings, who form part of the Satanic order and realm (Ephesians 6:12. for example, is definite, and of decisive authority). “It is assumed everywhere in the New Testament that the abstract power and rule of sin have taken concrete form in superhuman beings, acting under one personal head, and bringing evil influences to bear on the human face.… Therefore every act of sin is obedience (Romans 6:16) to these superhuman enemies, and tends to carry out their purposes of death. For idolatry is the ritual of sin. It is therefore the ceremonial of the rule of evil spirits over men. Consequently, though the heathen neither intend nor know it, every act of idolatry, and whatever tends to support it, is a sacrifice laid on the altar of demons” (Beet). Very significant how far Paul is from any apologetic recognition of the (perhaps) original purpose of an idol,—to assist the worshipper to fix attention in worship, and its tribute to the necessity of human nature to worship something. There are fragments, instincts, of truth in all idolatry; but practically it is evil, only evil, sensual, demoniac.1 Corinthians 10:22.—A very good illustration of the meaning of “tempting God.”1 Corinthians 10:23.—See Separate Homily on 1 Corinthians 6:12.1 Corinthians 10:24.—Note the significant “also” in the second member of the similar saying in Philippians 2:4.1 Corinthians 10:25. For conscience’ sake.—This does not mean “Let sleeping dogs lie! Shut your eyes and go on. Do not raise the question!” but “There is, before God, no reason to raise any question; there is really no question to raise, for,” etc. So in 1 Corinthians 10:27. But, accidentally, a question of conscience becomes involved in the matter under the circumstances of 1 Corinthians 10:28; yet even then only for the brother’s conscience’ sake, directly. Indirectly, any want of consideration for him which ends in spiritual harm to him, will mean “judgment,” and condemnation, of the first man’s “liberty.”1 Corinthians 10:27.—Will of course be, not a public heathen festival banquet—there he must not go at all; but one in a private house, and that also a mere friendly banquet.1 Corinthians 10:28.—“Don’t burk difficulties of conscience;” as 1 Corinthians 10:25 means, “Don’t make difficulties.”1 Corinthians 10:30.—“I don’t blame him for his not unnatural condemnation of me; nor is God’s condemnation of such a use of my liberty unjust; I only blame myself. Why should I persist in doing what brings even this indirect condemnation? It would have been better to abstain, although I could, having regard only to myself, eat with thankfulness” [=“by grace”]. Perhaps with a reminiscence of the “blessing” of the cup and the bread in the most sacred meal of all.N.B. 1 Corinthians 11:1 really concludes this chapter. “Imitators of me,” 1 Corinthians 4:16; Ephesians 5:1; 1 Thessalonians 1:6; 1 Thessalonians 2:14; Hebrews 6:12; 1 Peter 3:13; (and for the thought) Hebrews 12:1-2. .—Whole ChapterI. An ancient piece of history; lighting up II. A modern question of conduct. I. 1. Corinth may borrow light and teaching from the Wilderness of Sinai. The ordinary, every-day type of man in a busy, wicked centre of trade and commerce may go back for teaching to a singular, isolated people, in special, unprecedented, unparalleled conditions of national, social, religious, personal life. The Gentile Christian in Corinth may, must, listen to the teachings of the story of Ancient Israel. Israel, like Another, is “given for a witness to the peoples” (Isaiah 55:4); a standing embodiment, in its history and its Scriptures, of some great Truths of God. The facts “happened”—were made to happen, such of them as depended on the sole will of God—to be a Revelation; they were also “written” down to be a Revelation (1 Corinthians 10:11). The “ends of the ages” were come upon these men in Corinth. The last “age” of the Redemption history was begun. No preceding age had really passed away. Beginning successively, they had run on concurrently, and now were mingling their course with this newest-arisen contributory to the stream of history. They were all still needed. No one of them had really ever become obsolete. Each had contributed much to its next successor; but it had also within it principles, examples, methods, of God’s government, always needed somewhere, by some nation or individual, and essentially applicable universally. And for these “wise,” fin de siθcle Corinthians (one might almost call them), at their own valuation of themselves, there was teaching, admonitory teaching. Nothing that is of God’s essential truth ever passes away. It may clothe itself, He who makes history may clothe it, in new forms, of longer or shorter persistence; but when the form perishes, the spirit and the essential principles remain. Very notably all true of the last of the bygone “ages,”—that of “Mosaism” (1 Corinthians 10:2) and its history and institutions. So closely did this mimic or suggest the coming final age; so wonderfully parallel were the historic Israel of the wilderness, and the new Israel of faith, just then beginning to be gathered out of many cities and peoples and tongues and religions; with such an entirety of transfer of all that was of abiding significance was the old “age” passing over, passing on, under the new forms of the last “age” of all; that the division line was, to the men who, like Paul himself, had lived in both, scarcely more than the formal break between two chapters of the written record of a history that never pauses in its course, and does not show any abrupt cleavage between old and new. Not only was human nature at Sinai, or Kadesh, or in the weary waste of the Arabah, the same human nature as at Corinth; not only were the great, broad outlines and principles of God’s dealing with the sins and the needs of a chosen people those on which His unchangeableness still must needs run, in dealing with a Church chosen out of the Corinthian world; but, more, it really was one continuous history of one continuous Church. There really never had been, nor could be, but one “seed of Abraham,” one people on whom were incumbent the responsibilities, in whom were vested the privileges, of the covenant with Jehovah’s “friend.” Every Gentile may read the Jewish Scriptures as his Scriptures; the Jews were not authors or exclusive proprietors, but “librarians” for the world’s sake; the Gentile Christian may claim the “fathers” as his too (1 Corinthians 10:1). The historic form was just then changing under men’s eyes, and in men’s personal knowledge; but one Corporation, one Church, embraced Sinai and Corinth, and will include every local Church and every century until literally “The End” of the earthly ages comes (1 Corinthians 15:24). The men of old were but “patterns of” the new men come or to come. And because they were patterns of them they were “examples for” them (1 Corinthians 10:6). Without essential resemblances history could teach nothing. If, so to speak, the body corporate had no personal identity under all changes of growth and development, it might as well have no memory; the Past would mean nothing to the Present or the Future. The teaching value of all History depends upon the unity of Man. The teaching value of sacred ancient history depends upon the oneness of man, and sin, in God’s purpose and work of Redemption. 2. So, then, we see really one Church, Jewish and Christian, in historical sub-division. (1) They had our privileges (1 Corinthians 10:1-4); (2) we have their perils (1 Corinthians 10:5-10); but (3) they did reach, or might have reached, Canaan, as our Exodus, too, may be completed; we may have their “way of escape” (1 Corinthians 10:11-13). (1) We have not copied theirs; theirs preluded ours. The Church may now read the significance of its very sacraments in—not read it back into—the Cloud and the Sea and the Manna. The child in Christian ideas may now read the riddle of the smitten Rock and the outflowing water. The word of the enigma is “Christ.” “That rock was Christ.” Indeed, to borrow the fantastic figure or fable of the Rabbis, a grace flowed forth from Him which accompanied their journey—the Spirit (cf. John 7:37-39), given forth from Christ, though not in the abundance, nor in the special “adoption grace” (Romans 8:15-17), which are the glory of the Church of Christ, given forth from Christ “before Christ.” [Noteworthy how the two strikings of rocks to bring forth water, occurred, the one in the first year of the wanderings, the other at Kadesh, after the long thirty-eight years’ parenthesis, the “suspension” of the covenant history; as though, when the new generation is to begin from Kadesh its march to Canaan, it is to have its Rock and Water, just as the old had at their outsetting.] The camp was full of God; the history was full of miracle, which is only the world of God and of “spiritual” things, breaking through the accustomed veil behind which He ordinarily chooses that it shall lie concealed, and that He shall do His work. The world of things “spiritual” extended itself, and included within its circle the “Rock,” the “drink,” the “meat” (1 Corinthians 10:3-4). They were all for the time lifted up and became “spiritual,” tokens and material instruments of the manifested presence and blessing of God. [Indeed, may we go further and say that these were to Israel as true “sacraments” as are those of the Christian Church? Did they receive the same grace as we, though in connection with another covenant token? John 6 would almost carry the weight of an inference that, as to a Christian, believing partaker the bread is, between him and his Lord Christ, the pledge and seal, and is also the symbol, of all the grace of “the New Covenant” (1 Corinthians 11:25, also Hebrews 8:8-13), so to a believing, obedient Israelite the Manna, for example, might be a sign and seal of “old covenant” grace, which is but “new covenant” grace in its beginnings and in scantier measure. [Galatians 3:8; Galatians 3:14; it was “the Gospel” of justification by faith which was preached to Abraham; it is “the blessing of Abraham” which “comes upon the Gentiles through Jesus Christ.”] The men of the ancient order had their “baptism,” when the cloud and the sea, with its waters, put the same obvious, visible demarcation between the old life of bondage and the new life of liberty as baptism puts in our case; [it is “burial” (Romans 6:4; Colossians 2:12), the express, formal, visible token of a real “death” to the old life. A man who is carried to his burial is obviously by everybody accounted dead; he presumably is dead]; and when, moreover, just as we were by our baptism bound to Christ, the Representative of our God, to accept Him as our Lawgiver and Mediator, and to render all obedience to all God’s words spoken by His mouth, they were in parallel manner bound to God’s earlier Representative and Lawgiver and Mediator, to accept him and obey,—“baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” As we sit at the Table of our Lord Christ, so they had spread daily for them God’s “table in the wilderness” (Psalms 78:19), and ate and drank with [and of (John 6:53-58)] Christ. Even so do we sit down at a peace-offering banquet (1 Corinthians 10:18) where the Host Whose guests we are is also the Sacrifice once put upon “the altar,” and Who is now also the Provision upon the table. We and they share in common privileges and in a common grace. But (2) we share their perils, their one great danger, and the subordinate dangers that contribute to it. “Let him that thinketh, … take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12). They fell,—“many of them,” most of them. All with their (Mosaic) “baptism”; all with their (wilderness) Table and its (“spiritual”) viands; all safely out of Egypt and safely commencing their Exodus under Moses’ hand and care: but not all retaining the “good pleasure” of Jehovah so as to enter Canaan. And you, too, of Corinth, who have begun your Christian course, all of you; who have partaken of the Baptism and the Table, all of you; who have all shared abundantly in the full-flowing tide of the Spirit’s grace, springing from Him who is our pierced, smitten Rock, [who “came by water and blood” (1 John 5:6); see how John turns aside from the simplicity of narrative to clench his statement of fact with, so to say, an affidavit (John 19:34)]; have a care that you also be not “overthrown in the wilderness.” No most abundant ordinances and “sacraments” will save you; no most assured and definite commencement of your Christian course, no most real and blessed past participation in the Grace of this new “age” of the world, will avail to give you absolute security of completing your course. “All” ends in “some” (1 Corinthians 9:22), with all man’s effort; “all” may be diminished by the loss of “many” (1 Corinthians 10:5), with all God’s grace and the Church’s fellowship. Watch! Take heed! Guard your heart; the mischief will begin there. Its “lust” (1 Corinthians 10:6) within and “evil things” without—your danger lies there, as did the danger of “our” common “fathers.” Your heathen friends and neighbours spread you another Table; nay, the “demons” themselves do it, with a “demon” cup. Idolatry slew our fathers; in the banquet to which you are bidden as guests there is idolatry which may slay you,—“idolatry” with its riotous, drunken, lascivious “play” (1 Corinthians 10:7) for the sequel to its feast. Your city is infamous for the “fornication” which cut off three-and-twenty thousand, who quitted Egypt, but never saw Canaan. [Call it by its plain name; let its undisguised shame and sin stand clear in your thought, a thing in all ages accursed of God and His holy Law. Lend no ear to your philosophers who tell you that it is a thing outside the man, and “indifferent”; to the young man’s natural appetite, which pleads that either God should not have made him so, or that it is “necessary” and “natural” to indulge it; to the poetry which calls it “love,” and weaves around it bewitching verse, till the sin gleams and glows a very virtue, a jewel “set” and enshrined in some of the masterpieces of human genius. God’s handling of fornication is with the plague and the sword!] Think how they daringly, wickedly, put to the test the love and patience of “the Angel of the Lord” in their midst, tempting Him, as if to see how far they might go before vengeance should fall. Do not ye so put Christ to the test by complicity with surrounding heathen sin; there is a “wrath of the Lamb” which may be awakened; God can still find “serpents” to avenge His holiness, outraged by His very people; He will never lack instruments, servants, to execute His judgments. [Perhaps not too far away to illustrate by the wretched man in Southey’s Thalaba, from whose shoulders grew two serpents, which unceasingly gnawed at his face. A sinner is often punished by the “serpents” born of the sin of his own heart or life; and most commonly and terribly in case of “fornication,” when the ruined body and the polluted mind become the man’s worst scourge.] Take heed lest, if your heart “lust” after the “evil things” you left behind when you came out from heathenism, your lips begin to “murmur” rebelliously against the “narrow” and “restricted” life your religion imposes. The journey hard? Yes. No delicacies of Egypt? No. But there is still a “Destroyer,” of sharp sword (2 Samuel 24:16, etc.) and mighty power. He can execute wrath upon the Egypt you have left. He can wield His sword against the very Church which has quitted Egypt. “Flee from idolatry.” Yet (3) some did find their journey’s end in Canaan; with some the Exodus was complete; it might have been for all. You need not fall; there is “access by faith into grace whereby you stand” (Romans 5:2). It was not God’s fault if they found that the “way of escape” from Egypt led them nowhere but, after all, to death. He “is faithful” to you and to them; the breakdown will be on your side, not on His. He knows your strength, your weakness. It is hard for you to stand in Corinth; neighbours tempting, wife or husband an unbeliever, perhaps obstinate and persecuting (1 Corinthians 7:12-13); impossible to move about in your city or to take part in public life, without being confronted with the signs and breathing the atmosphere of idolatry—attractive, sensual, filthy. But your God knows how hard it is, and He will in a thousand ways shelter you from an overwhelming pressure. Take care! Take heart! But again, take care, for II. This devil-parody of the peace-offering feast in the Temple of Jehovah, and of the supper of the Lord which “we” spread, with its “Bread which we break,” and its Cup “which we Christians bless,” in the midst of the Church assembly, was more true to the original than many a Corinthian pleader for “liberty” and “breadth” remembered or appreciated. Whatever the heathen worshipper intended or understood, however the Christian partaker in the feast might fine down and minimise the meaning of his action, it was really a devil communion! Nothing less. Will not the Corinthians hear, think, “judge” (1 Corinthians 10:15)? To sit at “the Lord’s Table” is to enter into a very blessed “participation” with it, and indeed with the Lord, Whose table it is. (Even as the Israelite, who sits down at the peace-offering banquet, enters into a happy participation with the Altar, with the Religion of which it is the very central Symbol, and indeed with the Jehovah whose Altar it is. He is Jehovah’s man who eats there; he is an Israelite.) He is Christ’s man who eats there; he is a Christian. He who eats at the table, or who drinks the cup, of Aphrodite—nay, of the demon-master of the Feast—whose man then is he? Can he be Christ’s, and sit to eat there? Can he be a guest at Christ’s table, and go thence to become guest at a demon’s table? What congruity is there in his resorting to this table and to that? If the partakers of the old, wilderness “sacraments” brought on themselves the holy wrath of Jehovah by their murmuring and longing for the old life of Egypt, and by their shameless, flagrant, heathen impurity under the very shadow of Sinai itself, will Christians escape with impunity if their heart also lusts, and the lips murmur, and the body lends itself to vilest sin? For what else is indicated by this desire to make idol feasts compatible with a Christian profession? What but a heart like theirs? What less is meant by partaking of “the table of devils”? The new Christian Church Order lights up the meaning of the Church Order of the wilderness, and of its institutions. So the new Christian fellowship of the Table, once understood, lights up the fearful significance of the fellowship of the idol table. Who then will tempt the might (1 Corinthians 10:22) of that God Whose “jealous” holiness would not of old, and cannot now, tolerate that one of His people should be married to evil? Stand clear! Take heed! “But you are making too much of this, Paul! There is no ‘demon’ behind the idol, or its festival. There is nothing behind the idol—nothing at all; yourself said so. Then why make scruple about what is intrinsically nothing?” Well, but the conscience of another may not only make scruple for himself, but, indirectly, for the querist. And even if no “judgment” (1 Corinthians 10:29) come upon his conscience for his own act, let him see to it that his liberty is not condemned of God for the wound it gives, the snare it spreads, to the hurt of a brother’s soul. The questioner’s conscience has its rights; and the conscience of his less stable or less instructed fellow-Christian, and even that of his heathen neighbour in whose house he sits as a guest, have their rights also (1 Corinthians 10:28-29). Their weakness and needless scrupulousness have a right to tenderest consideration from a Christian man. If he violate their right by his inconsiderate liberty, he may “give thanks” loudly enough over his “meat offered to idols” and “bought in the shambles”; he may insistently urge that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof.” But if he eat, and so make the doubting Christian, or the inquiring heathen, or (still more) the scoffing heathen, “speak evil” of him, he is “judged” and condemned. “The earth is the Lord’s;” and so is the man of too tender conscience; very precious to the Lord and Owner of all things! The Lord seeks “that man’s wealth” (1 Corinthians 10:24); the strong, “wise” (1 Corinthians 10:15) Christian will do so too. As Paul does (1 Corinthians 10:33). Lift up everything, as the Lord’s Table with its simple, holy bread and wine does even eating and drinking, to that high level of which happily all our natural life is capable; lift it all up till it become a continual praise: “To the glory of God.” 1 Corinthians 10:9. (May be made the occasion of a sermon or sermons upon Temptation.) I. Neutral sense of word.— 1. Text, whether we read “Christ” or “Lord,” reminds us that the “temptations” of the Devil are not the only ones we meet with in Scripture. Experience teaches by many sharp lessons that man also can tempt man. This verse reminds us that man can “tempt” God. More than interesting—often very helpful—to get back to the one common meaning from which all these uses of the word have grown; the one which satisfies them all; the only necessary, and exact, meaning of the word in Scripture (unless perhaps in James 1:13-14). 2. We customarily distinguish between “trials” and “temptations.” Easy for a reader of even an English Bible to see that our forefathers did not so sharply divide the words. They could not help distinguishing between the things! But the word was as often neutral, or good, as evil, in its suggested idea. 3. This is not only a question of the use of English words. Very remarkable and clear case of the intrinsic neutrality of the very idea of putting to the test in Malachi 3. In 1 Corinthians 10:15 “they that tempt God” and yet “are delivered” are manifestly daringly evil men. But in 1 Corinthians 10:10 “prove Me now herewith” employs the same word-when, so to speak, inviting men by their consecration of their goods to see whether God will not meet their fair dealing with Him with liberal dealing to them. In both cases men tempt, prove, put God to the test, but with a purpose that gives the quite neutral word a widely differing colouring in the two cases. “Trying God” may be an act of God-honouring faith or of God-daring impiety. The word, the thing, the “testing,” was big with twin possibilities. It bore within its womb a temptation born of an evil heart whether of man or devil, and a temptation born of God’s good purpose or of man’s God-honouring faith. 4. It is of great practical use in our exegesis of Scripture to keep this, the only proper meaning of the word, quite clear from all the accidental associations of evil purpose and result. These are really accidents. In our experience, the temptation is so commonly designed to arouse, or lead to, evil, and so commonly finds its most potent instrument in the evil within the heart, that we make the purpose of evil in him who tempts, and the presence of evil in him who is tempted, essential to “temptation.” But, in fact, even when the purpose of the testing is evil, the presence of evil to be appealed to and awakened does not constitute the temptation. It makes it strong, not real. The intention to put to the test makes the reality of the temptation. 5. [Obviously so, or men could not “tempt God.” Thus, too, is removed some of the difficulty connected with the “temptation” of Christ;—some, not all. We say, naturally, “This was no temptation to me,” meaning that the tempter, human or diabolic, found no response within, nothing within the heart’s citadel to make resistance difficult; [as Nehemiah found added danger and difficulty in the fact that there were men within Jerusalem, by marriage or otherwise allied to the Samaritan and Ammonite enemies outside]. In such a case we almost use His words, as to that particular instance (John 14:30). But, speaking accurately, it was a temptation, a real putting of us to the test by somebody or some group of circumstances. It is then only popular, and inexact, thought which makes us say of Christ, “How could He be tempted? How could anything be a temptation to Him?” The Adversary was doing on a larger scale, and with a greater intensity of evil, what the “lawyer” did with scarcely any evil intent (Luke 10:25); or His successive questioners, on the “Day of Questions” (Matthew 22); all alike were putting Him to the proof to know what He would say and do. The Tempter, par excellence, has a wide knowledge of human nature, and a wider experience, derived from years of practice and observation. But he has no certainty beforehand that he will succeed with even a man. From wide experience he knows the heart, but not the individual; he knows man, but not the man—not me. Christ in the wilderness was a problem to him. Only once before had he seen on earth a sinless man, and he had tried and found him plastic to his evil will and purpose. Now again, after so many centuries, he saw a sinless man. [Perhaps he knew Him “a second Adam”!] Would this One also prove plastic to his will? He tried; he tempted Him. The reality of the temptation of Christ is posited there. It is altogether another question how far the fact that He was secure, whilst the utmost we can by grace attain to is to be kept safe, affects His community and sympathy with us. And another and profoundly mysterious question, what part the forty days’ testing, with its culminating threefold attack, played in the personal life of the Saviour Himself; whether He were simply and wholly representative of our Humanity as it was in God’s original conception and intention. It is to be remembered that the Personality, tempted through one part of His twofold nature, was the Son, “the second Person of the Trinity.”] II. The evil sense.— 1. Men so tempt men. No more emphatic testimony to the innate evil of man’s heart than that man should, often quite gratuitously, try to lead others astray; should put stumbling-blocks in the paths of spiritual childhood and weakness. [Like putting, morally, a “chair” on the rail, for the mere pleasure of seeing the ruin wrought to the train.] Why will men stand in the way of the drunkard, etc., who wants to climb out of the slough and shame of his old life—stand proffering the old allurements? Why will they beset the path of the prodigal who wants to “arise and go to his Father”? [Utilia.— (1) You tempted, and must come within near range of the temptation? Hurry by the faster, as a planet or a comet does when nearest to the attracting Sun. (2) You tempted? Stand fast! You may save your tempter as well as yourself. Perhaps he is fighting with his conscience, whilst he is trying to get you to silence yours. (3) The sin of the man who tempts you does not take away the sin of your yielding. Jacob is guilty as well as Esau. (4) “They who ought to have helped me gave me no help and sympathy.” No matter. You may not be so guilty; but you are guilty. Farrar remarks on: “Cast thyself down!” (5) Never talk away a man’s “too nice “scruples; they may be his only security against a terrible fall (1 Corinthians 8, 9; Romans 14).] How low that man has sunk who lends himself, for no personal advantage, but simply for the pleasure of seeing evil ruin good, to be the decoy to lead his fellows into the Devil’s trap! [One of the saddest glimpses into the fallen condition of even the world beneath man, that the animals can be trained to do this for their fellows.] Men must needs say to men, sometimes, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” as Christ did to Peter. It would seem that in those weeks the thought of His passion and all its accompaniments of agony was present with Christ in unusual vividness. Perhaps Calvary had never so vividly stood in His view until that time. May we say that He had wrestled with His natural and innocent shrinking from the suffering [as afterwards in Gethsemane], and conquered with an utter submission to the will of His Father? And now Peter, His friend, proposes to Him to choose some easier path than that of the cross. “Do not say that, Peter! That is what Satan would like, and has been saying [as, in effect, in Matthew 4:9, proposing a short and easy “cut” to the throne and the kingdom]; Satan speaks through thy proposal, Peter! Away with the thought! Away with thee, Peter! “Unintentionally they tempt men, and do the work of the Devil, who tempt them to seek an easier path to heaven than that viβ Calvary. 2. Men so tempt God.—See Synopsis appended. (1) By acting as if daring Him to punish (1 Corinthians 10:22), e.g. Korah and his company of censer-bearers; as if putting Him to the proof to see how long His patience will endure, how far they dare go in open, defiant sin. “Let us see whether He will punish, as He says.” Or (2) As really, if not so defiantly, by “trading upon” His longsuffering mercy, His readiness to pardon, even at the eleventh hour; continuing in sin, taking little or no care to avoid sin, making little or no effort to cultivate holiness, and yet hoping to retain His favour and their status as His children, as if trying how much His holiness will bear of sin’s offensiveness. (3) By expecting salvation on some other terms than God’s or without regarding the published terms of the Gospel at all. “God so loved the world,” etc., where “so” is not “so much” but “thus”; the one manner and the channel of the availableness of the love of God for the world; not the measure of it, which lies rather in the fact that it was this “Son” who was “given”; men should seek, expect, get, the love through that one Channel, on that one Condition. The man who will trust to something or some one else, as, e.g., to himself and what he had been and done, or, quite as often, has not been and has not done, and yet who will hope to be saved, is tempting God. (4) The man who, on no call of duty or of service to souls, thrusts himself into company, or into a business position, or a place of amusement, manifestly unfavourable to his religious life, and yet hopes to escape,—“We shall suffer no harm; God keeps His children anywhere,”—is as really tempting God as Christ would have been if He had flung Himself from the Temple pinnacle hoping to alight unhurt. (5) Ananias and Sapphira are a typical case of the many wherein men almost seem as if experimenting whether God can find them out and punish (Psalms 73:11). III. The good sense.—God tempts men; “suffers them to be tempted” (ver, 13), “leads them into temptation” (as implied in the Lord’s Prayer, Matthew 6:13). 1. Our moral instinct assures us that God’s testing stands apart from the rest in this: He never designs or desires that, under His tests, men should give way or fall, and be either overborne by trial or borne down by sin. “God cannot be tempted of evil,” we all say with James (1 Corinthians 1:13-14). Let men’s evil heart, or the devil’s, do their worst, they cannot disturb His peace or sully His awful holiness. Indeed, that holiness of His very being casts, as it were, around Him an awful seclusion of sanctity, within whose sacred precinct He dwells unassailable, unapproachable, by the shafts of temptation. With how much stronger reason do we say, “Neither tempteth He any man.” If evil cannot enter within the awful barrier of His holiness, how much less can we conceive of it as originating within its circle, or that from within that Holy of Holies of burning, blinding sanctity there should issue a volition, a message, a Providence, whose purpose should be to lead a man to sin! Whatever it may mean that God should “lead into temptation,” it can never mean that. He never did, nor can, design to awaken, or strengthen, or bring forth into expression or execution, the evil of man’s heart. He can only design to bring forth, strengthen, discipline, good. The engineer does not desire to break down, when he tests severely, the newly built bridge. He does not even desire to find flaws or weakness, except that they may be remedied. On the other hand, when the enemy tests a city by assault, or by planning to secure the help of treachery within, he hopes the place may prove pregnable. He hopes he may find weakness or treason, which may give him entrance, possession, mastery. As the engineer tries his bridge, so God tempts men—and only so. As the enemy tests the city, so the Devil or evil men tempt men—and always so. 2. God leads into temptation—tempts men—when He puts them into circumstances of (as we distinguish the word) Trial; the Adversary endeavours to turn them to his own evil account of Temptation. E.g. God asks a modern Abraham to give up his Isaac. It is to be a blessing to him; to perfect his consecration; to complete the education of a finished trust, besides making him to others a more glorious example of grace. The diligent Adversary is on the watch, to turn it into an occasion of bitter, or rebellious, thoughts, souring or sanctifying the tempted man. Or God’s test may be some great measure of temporal good—a very sharp test of character. It may reveal to a man how little he can bear of advancement, how liable he is to pride, how easily he might grow independent of God. It may leave him humbler, and drive him to prayer, and make him hold all only as the gift of God. It may reveal the man to himself. He may come out of the testing, and go in and out before men an example of enlarged, enriched, ennobled nature, and of humbly borne honour and consecrated wealth. On the other hand, the Devil’s endeavour will be to bring out all the evil that lies so near the surface. The pride, the ostentation, the independence of God, may become predominant; the man may be enriched, but narrowed into a mere worldling, “who has his portion in this life.” 3. If this liability is always so near, and men are so often ruined, not raised, soured, not sanctified, by the perverted issue of His own providential arrangements, why does God “run the risk”? Why does He “lead into temptation”? or, at the least, “suffer men to be tempted,” by devils or men? Full answer has within it whole Problem of Evil. We may suggest: (1) A human analogy. A country lad thrust into the life of large city; pleasant, but evil, things all around; men, friendly but evil, ready with their offer of guidance to “see life”; temptations of the streets, the vacant evenings, the absence of restraining observation. And his Christian father knew all the peril, all the boy’s weaknesses, when he sent him up to the City, and away from home. With more trepidation sends out his daughter too; “cannot afford to keep them at home; would not be good for my boy if I could—he will never become a man unless tested; he must learn to stand alone, by being left alone, even at the risk of many a stumble or even a ruinous fall; will introduce him to friends, will write him frequently; will help him to stand.” When he leads him, thrusts him into the trial of a City life, he leads him into temptation in the only sense in which God does it. [Or we may say: God’s ships are not built only to lie safe and snug within the shelter of the breakwater. There are storms outside; they may bo wrecked; but the risk must be taken, or they will do no business and carry no cargo of blessing.] Also (2) we ee that not even the Son was exempt (Matthew 4:1); He was “led up into the wilderness—led of the Spirit—to be tempted.” [Another word in Matthew 6:13. Mark (1 Corinthians 1:12) is very express: “Driveth, thrusteth Him out” into the wilderness, where, of course, His Father knew that the Evil One would find His Son and tempt Him. We dare not say (see above) that the Son of God needed it personally. Officially He did; His work did; we did. Part of His work for us, part of His sharing with us in all things that He must meet, and wrestle with, and overthrow, the same Tempter with whom we must meet and wrestle. [Parallel so far to the death which He must representatively die, though no personal necessity lay upon Him (2 Corinthians 5:21).] We see just how much His Father did. The place, the hunger, the destiny, which gave the Adversary his opportunity, and became the occasions of his attack, were part of His permitted course. Indeed, they were in the course of the providential arrangements of His Father, made for another, an altogether wise and holy, purpose. So we shall say: “My Father led me into circumstances which put me on my trial. As it proved, and not without His foreseeing it, my evil heart, my diligent Adversary, the closely surrounding world, turned all into temptation. My Father so suffered me to be tempted, led me into temptation, tempted me.” 1 Corinthians 10:13. “Thus far, no farther!”—(Of temptation.) I. View of God here suggested.— 1. Surely an unwarranted turn is given to the thought when this is read: “Take heed, for though you have hitherto had only such trial as man can bear, there is worse to come!” The true connection of thought in Paul’s words conveys a twofold message: “Take heed; take courage! “It would be strange enheartenment to say: “Look out! You will soon have trials such as no man can bear,” But the heart of “the God of all comfort” (παράκλησις, 2 Corinthians 1:3) loves to hearten His people. “A devotional writer, replying to the question, ‘How are we to overcome temptations?’ says, ‘Cheerfulness is the first thing, cheerfulness is the second, and cheerfulness is the third.’ It is very true. Faint heart never won anything, least of all a spiritual battle.… Lightness and brightness of heart, an unfailing elasticity of spirit, must characterise the good soldier of Jesus Christ, if he is to break his way to the heavenly country through the serried ranks of his spiritual foes” (Goulburn, Pers. Rel., III. vi.). It is not part of a healthy religion to anticipate trial, whether worse or lighter than has hitherto been known. [Yet if worse come, “a fiery trial,” Peter would say, “Think it not strange,” etc. (1 Peter 4:12). Q.d. “When it comes your way, and knocks at your door with its urgent hand, do not treat it as a stranger, or an enemy, or refuse it admission into your life, or even grudgingly submit to its intrusion. It is a friend, however strange and rude it may appear; it brings you a blessing; welcome it as from God; do not refuse it.”] As to the possibilities of the future, rather rest in— (1) God’s relation to the trial, and (2) God’s relation to you. (1) “Will not suffer.” Then, if it do not directly originate with Him, it does not come upon you apart from Him. All things, even the course of trials, serve His might. The flood may creep up to, or come rolling in upon, your standing place; but He sitteth above even such waterfloods, and can stay their proud waves when He will—certainly before they swallow up you and your place of foothold upon His faithfulness and love. The free and evil wills of devils and men have their limit, and are subordinated to His will. Except within the limits of His sovereign rule in your life, they can neither themselves create for you, nor modify what He has created, of arrangements of events, or associations with persons, such as put character and the strength of principle to the test in you. The roaring lion himself cannot go beyond his chain; and the end of the chain is in the hand of your “faithful” God. Whatever be our estimate of the literary form of the revelation in Job 1:2—simply literal, or allegoric, symbolic—no question of form involves falsehood in the view there disclosed of God and His relation to evil. It—not to say “he”—must solicit His permit to assail a Job; it can only do it so far as may serve the glory of Jehovah and the moral education of His servant. We are on surer ground in regard to the strain of teaching—some would regard themselves on surer ground as to the actual shape of the facts—when we hear Jesus communicate to Peter—a later Job in this—a colloquy which, behind the veil, and within the real, but to us unseen, world, where He and His Father and the Evil One mysteriously move and meet, had recently taken place in regard to the man Peter. “I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not” (Luke 22:31-32). “I cannot tell, now that I look back,” says a man of God, “how I got through. If I had known beforehand, I should have said it would have been impossible for me to come out of it unharmed, conqueror, more than conqueror.” There had been the colloquy behind the veil. There had been the controlling hand of Him who “would not suffer,” etc. Do not look out for worse. Take the days in successive detail, as the trial unfolds itself, and meet each new point in the confidence that His hand will “suffer” or “not suffer” as He knows right. Also (2) “He is faithful.” If you can see, or can say, that His character is in any case involved, then your faith, or your appeal for help, has a hold upon Him such as hardly anything else will give you. He regards His people warmly; He regards His own honour “jealously.” He is pledged to them. What less is implied in His name “Shepherd”? (Psalms 23). For the sake of His name “Shepherd” He will see that “no temptation,” etc. No matter if you rather, with Paul, conceive of yourself a precious “deposit” lodged with Christ for safe keeping “in that day” (1 Timothy 1:12). It is the faithfulness of God revealed, embodied, in Him. In this, as in all else, “he that hath seen Him hath seen the Father.” He is the faithful Father “over again.” So then— II. Temptation is, 1. Wisely adapted, suited to men (and to the man); 2. Graciously proportioned; 3. Mercifully limited [J. L., who also suggests:] Many suppose that their temptations are: 1. Singular, but they are common; 2. Intolerable, but they are proportioned to ability; 3. Invincible, but there is a way of escape. Illustrate, 1. By the trucks upon the railways. Look at them; see figures painted upon their side or the framing, “5–3–0,” or the like. Their “load limit.” So much, no more, must be put upon that build of truck; that heavier build of truck marked yonder “10–2–0” can carry twice as much. What the temptation suited to angelic nature or strength may be we do not know. He knows what is suited to human nature and its strength of grace. The human build of truck has its load limit. It will never be overpassed. He will not suffer it. “Against regulations,” under His mangement. Illustrate, 2. By the prison surgeon standing by, as even the hardest criminal receives his quota of lashes. He watches the effect of every stroke. If the full tale of punishment has not yet been administered, but the prisoner can bear no more, he says, “Stop!” The sentence is incomplete, but not another lash may be laid on. Incongruous in many a point, the illustration may serve to make Him real Who sits watching the effect of every stroke which He Himself causes, or else permits, to descend. Not one heavier, not one more, than you can wisely, profitably, graciously be made to endure. 3. (1) It was a true parable when on the top of hill above Nazareth the Pattern Son was hemmed in on all sides by a crowd of angry, murderously angry, Nazarenes; and yet a way out opened through the crowd; a Power was upon them which held every Nazarene hand in its restraining grasp; “passing through the midst of them, He went His way” (Luke 4:30). As you will through the most urgently pressing besetment of encircling “trials.” (2) How often in such intricate channels as the Kyles of Bute does it seem from the deck as though there were at last a perfect cul de sac, and as if to go forward must be to run upon the enclosing shore or cliff. But at the last moment there is the “way of escape,” and a new, often a more beautiful, bit of clear course opens up by an unexpected turn; like the unexpected “turns” in trying circumstances which have suddenly opened up perhaps years of clear and happy “run.” He has made the channel, and has the map of it under His eye. And His hand, if we will, may be on the helm. (3) How men rightly glorified Captain Kennedy, who brought his steamer safely out of the so fatal hurricane in the harbour of Apia, Samoa. The enclosing barrier reef had its one narrow opening—difficult, perilous, but a practicable “way of escape.” Our Captain has “consummate seamanship,” and will never fail to hit the exact outlet from the barrier reef of closely encircling trials. (4) To His knowledge, power, heart, there are no insoluble problems of trial or temptation. Wherever He puts you, or suffers you to go on His errand, He can keep you until you reach “the way of escape.” Possibly the article in Greek may almost be equivalent to “its own way of escape,” i.e. the particular deliverance belonging to, and best for, that particular trial, God thus “giving His attention” to each case that arises. 1 Corinthians 10:14. Flee from Idolatry. I. The general principles underlying Paul’s advice in this particular instance.— 1. (1) “You cannot touch even these idol feasts without more or less of complicity with, and countenance given to, the whole system of idolatry.” (2) “You cannot give any degree of countenance and support to idolatry, without in that degree disavowing your Lord.” Sin “hangs together.” No sin is an isolated act. It manifests a tendency of heart; or it carries a principle of action; or belongs to a system of evil, a coherent, organic whole. It might seem a small thing to join in a public banquet, where the viands on the table were largely “meats offered to idols”; especially remembering that such participation was regarded as a matter of good citizenship, “religion” being very much more an affair of a man’s civic life than of the individual life. Moreover, “was it not now abundantly clear to every enlightened, thinking Christian in Corinth that an ‘idol was nothing in the world,’ that these viands were not intrinsically affected in the least by the fact that part of (say) the carcass or of the basket of fruit had been put upon the altar of a so-called ‘god’? Could not every man of sense see that in regard to any healthy food there need be raised no question of conscience about eating it? Such entire abstinence as our Jewish friends counselled—was it not narrow, and needlessly repellent to possibly well-disposed people amongst our Gentile neighbours?” Well, but why this hankering after these old ways, this heathen company, these perhaps dangerous festivities, which not seldom ended in a drunken orgie, or in indulgence of gross sensuality? Was the “Christian” heart half idolatrous yet? Was the ploughman looking back from his plough? (Luke 9:62). Was “Lot’s wife” in heart going back to the Corinthian “Sodom,” as she thus looked back? Were the Christian Israelites “murmuring” that “the fleshpots of Egypt” might not be enjoyed in the camp of God in the wilderness? (1 Corinthians 10:6-10). [Why, in the modern Corinths, all this eagerness to show how compatible with a “broad,” “fair-minded,” “attractive” Christian life are places and pleasures which, in the current opinion of the “stricter sort,” and in the current opinion of “the world,” are accounted “worldly”? Is the heart losing its satisfaction in the joys of the life in Christ; beginning to murmur against its restrictions—they used only to be the instinctively imposed and necessary limitations upon Christian action; beginning to look towards, to move towards, the world again?] But, be that as it might, it perhaps seemed, and might be pleaded, that the connection of the feast with idolatry was of the very slightest, that to touch idolatry there was to touch it at its purest, brightest, or, at worst, at its least defiled and defiling point. No! To touch it anywhere was to sanction it everywhere! It might be but the borderland and farthest outskirts of the area of the evil thing, but it was idolatry’s ground. The most strictly limited participation in anything belonging to the system, “explained” to the man’s own conscience in the most “satisfactory” fashion, would really be, and would be regarded by the idolater as, a patronage and sanction given to the whole. [Not to say that, if the Christian “did but touch the border of the garment” of the Accursed System, an evil “virtue would go forth” and pervade with its power the new life of the soul.] So, in modern Corinths, the “broader” mind pleads for the theatre, sometimes for “the theatre as it might be if only Christian people would not hold aloof from it”; sometimes by carefully choosing the place and the play, and with great circumspection going and coming away “unharmed.” But “harm” is a subtle thing, not always immediately to be perceived. And that apart, the Theatre “hangs together”; it is a coherent thing, touching on the one hand—at least dramatic literature does—the sublimest reaches of poetry and of creative art, but spreading and broadening downwards from that highest point to depths; at best of inane and vapid folly of language and art, at worst of suggestive or overt sensualism and crime. The most guarded, most strictly limited, participation is, by necessity of experience and fact, taken to cover the whole Thing. The Christian man picks up a very filthy cloth, with dainty thumb and finger taking hold very “gingerly” at the cleanest place he can find, and then lays it down, exclaiming, “There! This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/phc/ NOTES[1 Corinthians 11:1 belongs to chap. 10, where see. Evans (in Speaker), Stanley, and others divide this chapter at 1 Corinthians 11:16, not 1 Corinthians 11:17, making 1 Corinthians 11:16 introduce the new topic]1 Corinthians 11:2. I praise you … all things.—Not qualified or limited by 1 Corinthians 11:17, which refers to a new point, which had arisen in practice, outside the “all things already delivered,” whether orally, when Paul was at Corinth, or by the (possible) lost letter. Courteous, and no doubt true of the Church as a whole, though there were factious and rebellious exceptions. Certainly they deferred to his authority, when they submitted for his decision the questions the answers to which occupy so much of this letter. See also how this loyal feeling asserted itself in consequence of this letter (2 Corinthians 7:11 sqq.). Ordinances.—“Traditions” (R.V. and all Commentaries). “The delivered instructions, … directions in matters of discipline as well as of doctrine” (Evans). Ellicott suggests such (esoteric) topics as 1 Corinthians 6:2; 2 Thessalonians 2:5. Beet adds a new idea: “Probably the more or less definite instructions given by Christ to the apostles for the Church. Samples in 1 Corinthians 11:23; 1 Corinthians 15:3.” Important to note (as Stanley): “Always delivered, not ‘traditionally’ through many links, but direct from the teacher to the taught.” Hence entirely without analogy to the technical traditions of, e.g., the Romish ecclesiastical theology: “Not merely such acts and words as were supposed to have descended from Christ and His apostles, although orally transmitted instead of recorded in writing; but also the whole circle of dogmas and practices which had been instituted by Church councils and recognised by the Church” (Luthardt, Saving Truths, lect. viii.); which became an authority concurrent with Scripture. All verbal or written Apostolic directions which are needed in order to a statement of God’s will, complete for the purposes of Christian practice, have been put on permanent record in Scripture.1 Corinthians 11:3.—As to husband and wife and the illustrative force of their relationship, cf. throughout Ephesians 5:22-33. There the stress lies upon their intimateness, their unity of relationship, and the obligation of mutual helpfulness and sympathy. In 1 Corinthians 11:33 her subordination to him is introduced, and is here the prominent point dealt with. Head.—Above the Body (Colossians 1:18), though, in a true sense, belonging to it; in close, living, life-giving union; directing it, and so every particular “man” in it. Man is woman’s “immediate head” (Beet), for Christ is her head too; in the Body there is “no male nor female.” Also distinguish between her equality and parallelism with man in her relation to Christ in regard to her personal spiritual life (1 Corinthians 11:11), and her social subordination to man (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:27, 1 Corinthians 3:23). “The meaning of ‘head’ must not be unduly limited or unduly extended. The general idea is that of supremacy or pre-eminence, but the particular character of that supremacy or pre-eminence must in each case be determined by the context and by the nature of the things specified. Thus, in the first member, [it] is in regard of nature and of headship of the whole human family; in the second, in regard of divinely appointed order and authority (Genesis 2:22-23; Genesis 3:16; see below, 1 Corinthians 11:8-9); in the third, in regard of priority and office,—the pre-eminence of the Father, as Bishop Pearson says, ‘undeniably consisting in this, that He is God not of any other but Himself, and that there is no other person who is God but is God of Him’ ” (Ellicott).1 Corinthians 11:4.—The Romans and Jews prayed with covered heads, the Greeks with uncovered. Hence no suggestion that the men at Corinth did draw over their heads any sort of covering, e.g. the loose lap or fold of the outer “wrap,” like a Moorish haik. The Greek Christian would do by mere habit what profound Christian truth declared to be right for Jew or Gentile men. To cover his head was to assume openly the woman’s condition of subordination, and to disavow his manly right to stand with unveiled face before Christ. He thus dishonours his head (i.e. his manly self, culminating there), and dishonours also that other Head in Whom he has, and to Whose work he owes, his own honour as a man.1 Corinthians 11:5. Prayeth or prophesieth.—Acts 2:18; Acts 21:9. In apparent contrast see 1 Corinthians 14:33. Sanctified good sense would draw a distinction between (say) a full, formal meeting of the whole Church for worship, where propriety dictated that she should ordinarily be silent, and smaller, half-social gatherings of Christian people in “prayer meetings”; or between her liberty at the family altar or in a gathering of women, and her seemly restriction in mixed or public gatherings. [Observe the antithesis, “the men … the women” in 1 Timothy 2:8-9. In any case, whenever her praying is in any degree in public, let her not be “unveiled,” unsexing herself and making herself “masculine,” bearing herself like a short-haired man; she might as well go the whole length and be “cropped” [shorn] like a man. “Modesty is the conscience of the body.” A Corinthian woman’s veil would be the peplum, worn over the shoulders in the house, drawn over the face in public. [At Corinth a “shorn” woman would be a harlot.]1 Corinthians 11:7.—Note, not merely “made in the image”; he “is the image and glory of God.” Note also, “woman is” [not “the image,” but only] “the glory of man.” She also—but the thought is outside of Paul’s view here—is “man made in the image of God.” “The male sex, as holding the highest power on earth and exercising undisputed sway over all else, is a visible pattern of God and a shining forth of His splendour” (Beet). Being what he is, man glorifies God Who made him thus; being what she is, woman glorifies man, to whom God has given her for a help-meet. The dependence found in both cases, of origin and relation, exalts and brings dignity to God and man respectively.1 Corinthians 11:10.—Very difficult text; a crux interpretum. (1) Pretty general agreement that “power” means her “veil,” the sign of man’s authority over woman. [Perhaps also: “It is a piece of natural fitness that nature herself should have put on the woman, in her long hair, a natural sign of subordination”; though this fits with still greater difficulty into the next clause.] (2) Because of the angels.—Choose between (a) “Good angels,” present in the Christian assemblies, who will be grieved by anything disorderly or unseemly. In favour of this are: the far-fetched, obscure, precariously based, character of the argument involved in (b) below; the general use of Scripture, where “angels” means “good angels,” unless the contrary is made clear in some way; the wide concurrence of the Greek Fathers in this interpretation; the constant assertion in the New Testament of the vivid interest which these take in all that belongs to man and his redemption. Also, the worshipping heavenly company, of which good angels form a large part, and the companies of earthly worshippers, are really one great body of worshippers at the same throne of the same God, though locally divided or distributed—part here, part yonder; the human worshippers must do nothing unworthy of the angelic part of the great adoring company. (b) “Evil angels;” as many, from Tertullian to Farrar, who suppose Paul to refer to [and believe in!] the Rabbinic interpretation of Gen 6:2. In favour of this are many Rabbinic sayings, and some fantastic Mahometan stories; against it, the consideration that a veil could hide nothing from spiritual beings, even though evil ones, and would neither defend the woman from their gaze nor shield them from temptation to which they might again at least desire to yield. To suppose that the veil is to defend the good angels [or the “angels of the Churches (Revelation 2, 3)] from temptation (I) is to suppose them “weaker, in the matter of sensual desire, than average Englishmen now” (Beet). [The matter is of very little homiletic use in any detail.]1 Corinthians 11:12.—God’s glory is His creature, man; man’s glory is his companion, woman; woman’s glory is her covering, her hair and its symbolised modesty of subordination.1 Corinthians 11:16. Seemeth.—Not in the usual sense of the frequent translation of the Greek word, “thinketh that he is”; but, “is so pertinacious in disputing upon this point that, to put it kindly, he appears to others to contend, for the mere love of being in opposition. It would be true to observed facts of human nature to translate and expound “thinks that he is, and is rather proud of being.” We.—As distinguished from “the Churches of God” will mean “we apostles.” Custom.—Viz. “of women praying with unveiled heads.” .—1 Corinthians 11:2-16 The Women’s Veils. I. “Solemn trifling,” cries somebody, “to think of putting these nugæ Paulinœ on permanent record as a piece of God’s revelation!” But in God’s works, and in God’s words, we are no competent judges of what are nugæ. This a sample case of how to deal with and decide the many small points of Church order and worship; e.g. such as, in mission-fields, or in communities for the first time becoming organised and civilised on Christian lines, often get an accidental significance and importance. As the same “laws” give shape to a globe and a rain-drop, so the same great principles apply to and regulate the gravest or the most trivial matters of Christian practice. There is no limit, upward, or downward, to the concern God takes in whatever bears upon His redeeming work for the race of mankind. Everything connected with His Church may be brought to some of the tests suggested here. II. 1. Customary observance and Church rule. There is a power in the very idea of a Great, Whole Community feeling its oneness, and showing it, by some observance which is its universal badge and token. E.g. the eating of bread and the drinking of wine at a supper in connection with the death of Christ and the Christian covenant, and in faith and hope of His second coming, is everywhere—amidst all the varieties of ritual and interpretation—a differentiating custom, as between Christian and non-Christian; a uniting custom, as between Christian and Christian of all types, and creeds, and ages, and lands. The Church sees its oneness at the Table. This indeed is no custom of optional observance. But, to take another, not thus binding: For centuries, almost as far back as the very beginning of the Church, there has never been a day on which, somewhere, Christian voices have not uplifted Psalms 95 to God in public worship. The sections of the Christian Church are far enough removed from each other; in doctrine, in practice, very often in spirit also, they have been as widely sundered as they could well be, to belong to the same Body at all. Yet in the use of this psalm one common life thrills through from Church to Church. The diversities and divisions are real and deep, but they do not destroy the unity, deepest when all are at worship. Thus, then, when Churches which as separate communions are but of yesterday, sing this psalm, which has been interwoven for ages with the prayers and praises of the Churches of, at all events, all Western lands, hoary some of them with the associations of ages, the gulf of time is bridged over by the “custom”; the Church of the present avows its oneness with the Church of the past, and each Church claims its place in the great company of the Christian worshippers of the One God and Father. [The unity of worship even goes further. The Jew in his Friday evening synagogue service begins his Sabbath worship with this same psalm.] This is poetry, sentiment; but any thing which manifests, and makes real, the sense of unity is not lightly to be regarded. That woman, that Church, would be ill-advised who went in the face of the “custom” of all the Churches of Christ. If the uncovered head for the man, and the veiled head for the woman, be the universal Christian custom, that is worth something as a test by which to decide such a question as had been raised at Corinth. [So Burial—not necessarily Interment—v. Cremation.] Christian custom should prevail, as against personal “fad” or the freak of undisciplined individuality. If there be no good reason against, “fall into line” with the universal Church. And this the more when there is reason as well as custom in the practice. 2. Universal instinct of propriety as against any unnatural, perverted, temporary fashion, or the “crank” of some “contentious man,” fond of, glorying in, being “on the other side,” and in a minority—himself against the world. “Propriety,” indeed, may in regard to some points be read in the most opposite senses. To the Jew it means that a man cover his head with his hat, or turban, or tallith, when he prays. And that Jew would be censurable who in the synagogue, in mere freak or self-willed preference of his own course [= “heresy,” 1 Corinthians 11:19], should go against the received proprieties of the place and of his co-religionists by praying with bared head. [“In your prayers, in Churches and places of Religion, use reverent postures, great attention, grave ceremony, the lowest postures of humility; remembering that we speak to God, in our reverence to whom we cannot possibly exceed; but that the expression of this reverence be according to the law or custom, and the example of the most prudent and pious persons; that is, let it be the best of its kind to the best of essences” (Jeremy Taylor, “Holy Living,” ii., § 5).] But there are “proprieties” which are universal. The modesty which is the body’s conscience may, like the sense of sin which belongs to the soul’s conscience, be so violated and sinned against that it seems gone; but it is there, ineradicably deep in human nature, and can be awakened and appealed to in all. Nature has a voice, and can be heard speaking in her very physical differencing of the sexes. Long hair for the woman, shorter for the man; this is not fashion, it is of no one age or nation. “Fall then into line with” Nature in your rule for Church order. “Your Jew and your Roman covers his head when he worships. He does not understand, as you Christians do, the headship of man in and with Christ. But even he does not tolerate that his women should worship with uncovered head.” Paul’s principle appeals to the universal womanly instincts and fine perceptions. In extraordinary circumstances a woman, like Philip’s daughters, may “prophesy”; the gift brings with it its own call for exercise, and overrules many prudential or conventional considerations. In quasi-domestic life she may “pray” (1 Corinthians 11:5) openly and as the leader of the devotions of others. But the proprieties as well as the custom of the Churches will make this the exception (1 Corinthians 14:33), only to be departed from under the clearest necessity. Woman’s place and work and open participation in the conduct of worship are all to be decided and adjusted in conformity with this second test. A local impropriety at Corinth made a “shorn” head, or uncovered, “a shame” to a woman. Even this local conventionalism must not needlessly be offended against by a Christian woman anxious to assert her equality with the men as before Christ. Even the Gentiles must be “pleased,” if possible (1 Corinthians 10:32). And in many another small detail of Church order, an instinct which works for fitness and propriety is a criterion not to be left unused. The “angels,” too, have their sense of fitness which should have consideration. But this belongs rather to the next criterion. 3. Revealed truth is, however, the supreme standard of appeal. Where there are no express directions there may be exemplar facts. There may be “leading cases,” each of them carrying a principle. Yet example, even Apostolic example and practice, if certainly established, is not necessarily Church law, unless the apostles have made it so. [An argument often urged in the controversy re Episcopal v. Presbyterian system of government.] The Apostolic example may sometimes be more honoured in forsaking the literal and exact and mechanical copying of it, whilst seizing the essential principle and adapting its form and embodiment to the changed environment and necessities of a new time or a new world. The true law may lie deeper than the letter of their practice. But any practice of theirs put on permanent record in the Scripture is, with this proviso, legislation and Divine direction for the Churches (1 Corinthians 11:16, “we have no such custom”). The histories of the Bible are didactic; they may be legislatory also; they are parts of the revelation, one of the methods of the revelation, of the mind and will of God. Nature, with its long and short hair for the two sexes—how comes it thus? Who made “Nature”? Who made such a detail of “her” arrangements so significant? How has it happened that “a mere resultant of the processes which have evolved sex” is ethical, and finds something innate in man and woman responsive to its dictate? “All things of God” (1 Corinthians 11:12). Go back to Eden and the Creation story. See the finished work of the creative “week” (1 Corinthians 11:7-11):— “Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,Godlike erect, with native honour clad,In naked majesty, seemed lords of all,And worthy seemed; for in their looks divineThe image of their glorious Maker shone,Truth, wisdom, sanctitude, severe and pure,Whence true authority in men; though bothNot equal, as their sex not equal seemed;For contemplation he and valour formed;For softness she and sweet attractive grace;He for God only, she for God in him:His fair large front and eye sublime declaredAbsolute rule; and hyacinthine locksRound from his parted forelock manly hungClustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad;She, as a veil, down to the slender waistHer unadornèd golden tresses woreDishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved,As the vine curls her tendrils, which impliedSubjection, but required with gentle sway,And by her yielded, by him best received,Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,And sweet, reluctant, amiable delay.”—Paradise Lost, iv. 288–311. Not in this particular case only, but in all, let men get back to God’s facts; let them dig down beneath the accretions of speculation, or fashion, or error, until in God’s own utterance of His will, above all in Revelation, they get to rock. In everything, not, “What thinkest thou?” but, “What seest, hearest, readest, thou of the works of God?” That only is final; the supreme arbiter of all, whether in actual use or only proposed, in connection with the order of the Church or the life of His people. [Revelation and propriety combine in the appeal made by Paul to the presence of angelic spectators, who are also, as is suggested in Critical Notes, co-worshippers in the great company of adoring ones to which believers “are come” already (Hebrews 12:22), and with which in a glorious reality they are already associated in the one joint homage of Heaven and Earth. But so obscure is the whole matter, so small a corner of the veil is drawn back, so momentary and partial is the glimpse we get of these angelic critics of the proprieties of Christian observance and worship, that very little practical use can be made of the motive Paul appeals to. We dare take in the obscurity no step, except the one we here take with our inspired guide, in the unfamiliar world within the veil, where we have, indeed, planted our foot, but we hardly know what it is we see. Yet more thought and honour might perhaps be paid to the “big brothers” told off, “sent forth,” to take charge of us (Hebrews 1:14), without our running into all the fanciful, Rabbinic, and apocryphal poetising about each man’s “guardian angel,” and the like.] 1 Corinthians 11:11. Man and Woman.—How all the arguments, 1 Corinthians 11:2-15, assume the historic truth of the story of Genesis 1, 2. Paul, it is admitted, does so; to him the relation of the sexes, the order of the family life, originated in the history, and rest upon it. Possible to admit the truth of all the teaching here about the relative positions of man and woman, and to regard the history as myth. But in that case the truth stands without known basis, or without any unchallengeable basis. A mere “happy” use of an old myth will hardly afford an argument such as—not Paul only, but—the inspiring Spirit might employ. The creation facts, and the physical facts of everyday knowledge, say that, subordinate as she is, the man needs the woman; and that, though he has headship, the man is made for the woman, and not alone for himself or his God. I. 1. Man and woman both are needed, to exhibit manhood in its perfection of idea; neither without the other. Fitted respectively for restless activity and quiet retirement; to fight in the battles of life, to heal the wounds of the combatants; the stronger mind, the better-disposed heart; men arriving at truth by slow reasoning, women by quick intuitions; men consequently gaining more by the way, but oftener missing their way altogether (Luthardt); hence men oftener sceptical, women “naturally” more religious; [“an irreligious woman is a man spoilt, and doubly corrupting to those men over whom she acquires influence” (Luthardt);] man’s the initiative, generative, originating mind, woman’s the receptive and reproductive mind. Broadly true, and correspondent to, and founded in, physical differences; but with many exceptions in detail. 2. The distinction and the unification mount higher.—God is both Father and Mother in His love. No woman ever misses anything in Him because He is “Father.” He is ideal Parenthood. So, too, the painters are guided by a right instinct when they give to the face of their ideals of Christ a somewhat feminine (not effeminate) manhood. He is Man and Woman; in Him neither is without the other. No girl ever feels that Christ does not understand her because He was “only a boy”; no woman ever feels that He is not for her because He is a man. His “sex” never occurs to the mind or heart. He is man and woman, strength and tenderness; the wisdom of both types of mind and heart are in Him; perfect Manhood. 3. The perfectly rounded Christian character combines and exhibits the best characteristics of both. If women are “more religious” than men, it is because it is easier for them to enter by “Little-children Gate” into the Kingdom. Dependence, docility, belief in what comes on authority,—all that makes the little child typical of the character which alone can enter, all these are nearer akin to the woman’s character and habit than to the man’s. The man enters the kingdom “not without the woman,” developed, or submitted to, in him. The perfect manhood of grace needs, however, to add to faith “virtue” (perhaps = “courage”). As between man and God there is no room in man for self-reliance, but, as between man and man, and in doing the work of God in the world, there is room and need for “the man.” III. Christianity, the Church, the work of God, each needs, and has availed itself of, both “man” and “woman.”—It would never have succeeded, it will never succeed, so far as human conditions of success are concerned, unless by the employment of both. The presence and interaction of the sexes is a valuable element in the educational effect of the Church upon its members. Sanctified family life, with the reciprocal, incessant, little-adverted-to, training of husband and wife, brothers and sisters, is the seminal instance and example of the training given by, and gained from, the brotherhood and sisterhood in the Church of Christ. Each sex has its gifts and capabilities complementary to, lacking in, those of the other. Woman can reach where man is excluded; man can dare where woman may not go. Wisest Church organisers utilise both to the utmost of possibility. Romans 16 is a picture of an early Church, and is full of women who, like the men, are “in the Lord.” Nor are they simply receivers of blessing; they “labour,” and even “labour much in the Lord”; they can with their husbands lay down their own necks in running risks and daring death to save an apostle’s life. Indeed, Priscilla may precede Aquila; possibly just as in a Church to-day there are godly women who, without unwomanly obtrusiveness, have so much more of initiative than their equally godly and devoted, but quieter, husbands, that every one says, or thinks, “Mrs. and Mr. ——.” “In the Lord,” in the sphere and realm where He is supreme, and where everything bears the stamp of His lordship and ownership, “Woman” and “Man” are both required. Neither is without the other. In the new creation in the soul, in that other new creation, the “kingdom of God” on earth, the original, natural order of the Creator’s idea is being perfectly restored. TOPIC: THE LORD’S SUPPER AND THE LOVE-FEASTS 1 Corinthians 11:17.—Backward reference: the directions just given, and the general praise of 1 Corinthians 11:2, are not to be taken to carry with them “praise” in regard to this further matter. Indeed, 1 Corinthians 11:16 precludes it, for in this they are out of line with the holier manner and “custom” of other Churches. Better … worse.—“Not for edification and spiritual improvement, but the reverse.”1 Corinthians 11:18. First of all.—Not formally completed by any “second” topic; perhaps 1 Corinthians 11:34, “the rest,” covers all Paul had in his mind when he here says “first of all.” In the Church.—Of course not any building so called; only in “due and formal Church assembly.” Divisions are again “schisms” as in 1 Corinthians 1:10 [though not necessarily here the Church parties; perhaps only divisions of feeling arising from diversity of wealth and social position], 1 Corinthians 12:25. Partly.—Courteous, but serious; “charity hopeth all things.”1 Corinthians 11:19. Must.—; Not stronger than in (say) Matthew 18:7. “Fallen human nature being what it is, it is certain and inevitable that,” etc. So, whether we shall say, “with the result that” or “in order that,” goes down to the roots of things, as to the co-working of the free wills of God and of man. No doubt the Hebrew mind saw all history so full of God that it connected His will very closely indeed with the course of events, inclining always to “in order that”; to ordaining rather than merely overruling. A close parallel is in Matthew 10:34-35. “I am come … to send a sword,” “to set … at variance,” etc.1 Corinthians 11:19. Heresies.—Not yet in the technical sense; only divisions arising out of the choice of self-willed hearts, showing itself in open unbrotherliness, dissension, division. Approved.—As usual (e.g. Romans 16:10) those whom the testing shows to be the pure metal, genuine, true, loyal, to Paul, to the Church, to Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:18; 2 Corinthians 13:7; James 1:12.)1 Corinthians 11:20.—Cf. 1 Corinthians 14:23; Acts 1:15; Acts 2:44; Acts 3:1; quite general, perhaps including not only “place,” but time and purpose. Choose between: (1) “Your way of doing things may be ‘eating a supper,’ but it is no ‘Lord’s supper’ ”; and (2) “Such love-feast suppers as yours, conducted as they are, cannot suitably lead up to the ‘Lord’s Supper.’ Decision turns upon the historical question whether the Lord’s Supper itself was made a meal capable of (more than) satisfying hunger and including (even excessive and intoxicating, 1 Corinthians 11:21) use of wine; or whether it was associated with (preceded by) such a substantial meal. Further—1 Corinthians 11:21.—Note, “other” is an insertion, depending in part for its warrant upon the decision as to the historical question. Choose between (1) “Takes beforehand, with a greedy eagerness which will not even wait for the whole company to be gathered and the proper Church ordinance to begin, but ‘falls to’ forthwith, so soon as the place is entered, upon ‘its own supper,’ brought to the feast”; and (2) “Takes first with selfish preference its own (rich man’s) supper; whilst the poor man, with his poor and scanty supper, must wait the rich men’s convenience and pleasure before partaking of anything they had professed to bring towards a communion meal.”1 Corinthians 11:22.—Either way, the communion idea is sinned against and lost. “Hungry” and “drunken” sit side by side at the Lord’s table! Private meals should be eaten in private houses; natural hunger and thirst should be satisfied at home. [The historical questions involved are most variously decided upon, sometimes under (unconscious) theological bias. The facts are few; their interpretation is often still sub lite. (E.g. some would make the edict of Trajan [112, or earlier] occasioned by the well-known letter of Pliny the Younger,—that the “simple and harmless” meal of the Bithynian Christians, taken in the evening of the Lord’s Day, should cease,—the occasion of the disuse of the Love-feast, and of a morning use of the [distinctive] Lord’s Supper. But it is not agreed that the meal which he forbade was really taken in the evening, at a second meeting, in addition to the morning one which he so fully describes.) For homiletical purposes one important point is clear: the ordinance is to every participant’s thought and apprehension a Supper set out upon a Table. Whatever other meanings might lie latent—or even then be understood—in the eating of bread and wine together at Christ’s supper table, it was certainly a Meal, not without analogies to the feats in heathen temples, or to the Jewish peace-offering banquets, or (more appositely) to the actual “last supper” of Christ. The analogy of this last may lend some support to the frequent exposition of 1 Corinthians 11:17-20, that an ordinary meal (in part also reminiscent of the early community in Jerusalem, Acts 2, 4, 6): preceded the more definite “Supper,” as in Christ’s own instance. Without insisting too strongly upon “we break” (1 Corinthians 10:16) or “every one taketh” (1 Corinthians 11:21), it is also clear that this, like many more things in the Church, has not yet attained to much definiteness of form and manner of observance; there is little or no “rubric” as yet; differentiation of officials, and between Love-feast and Supper, is only in an inchoate stage.]1 Corinthians 11:23. Received.—Two interpretations: (1) “Hearsay” theory; (2) “Inspiration” theory. (1) supposes from, e.g., Peter during the fortnight of Gal 1:18, and asks where the necessity was of any independent narrative, straight from the risen Christ to Paul; (2) Evans (in opposition to Meyer) insists upon the meaning of the Greek for “of,” though this again need not necessarily imply oral communication from Christ to Paul. At all events, (2) is preferable, and gives an independent, original account (which may have influenced the closely similar one in Luke 22:19 sqq.) of the institution of the Supper. I also delivered.—The two links in the chain, “received,” “delivered,” solemnly certified and vouched for as being duly in order. Note, “I delivered … was being delivered.” Bread.—A cake of bread, a loaf; one of those lying on the table, so far as appears.1 Corinthians 11:24.—Note the shortened, correct reading (seen in R.V.). Therefore “broken,” though true and suggested by the facts, does not exhaust the significance for His people’s life and salvation of the fact that He had a real human body. Still, this “broken” is the pre-eminent serviceableness “for you” of His having become an incarnate Saviour. This do.—Viz. “Take, give thanks, break, [take, eat,] as I have done, in remembrance of Me.” Himself, in all the developing discoveries of their reverent, Spirit-guided inquiry, is to be the object of thought and faith.1 Corinthians 11:25. In like manner.—Viz. Taking, giving thanks, and giving to them. Observe this was “after supper”; the bread apparently being “during supper.” The “Last Supper,” then, would not set a very close precedent for any (assumed) sequence of definitely distinguished Agapζ meal and Lord’s Supper. Is.—Spoken of “the cup”; the Cup IS the Covenant; exegetical of “is” in 1 Corinthians 11:24. This do ye.—As in 1 Corinthians 11:24. Peculiar to this narrative, in connection with the cup. As oft as.—Contemplates the continuance of the ordinance. [Are we to prefer, as verbally more exact, this particular record of Christ’s words over the bread and over the cup?]1 Corinthians 11:26.—Communion (1 Corinthians 10:14-21); Covenant (1 Corinthians 11:25); now also Commemoration. (For this and other points, see Separate Homily on 1 Corinthians 11:20.) Until He come “to be Executor as well as Testator” (Evans).1 Corinthians 11:27.—With no “worthy” appreciation of its meaning, or, this appreciated, with no care to behave in a manner “worthy” of what he believes, and of what the Supper is, Guilty of.—A fourfold use of the Greek word in New Testament; see (1) Hebrews 2:15. “subject to bondage”; (2) Mark 3:29, “guilty of eternal sin”; (3) Matthew 26:11, “guilty of death”; (4) here, approximating to (2). Held bound to the responsibility for the act, and to pay the penalty of it; in this case, of dishonour done to Christ, almost in the manner of the apostates in Hebrews 10:29—“hath counted the blood of the covenant … a (merely) common thing.” If the Corinthians evacuated the ordinance of its high and holy meaning, they made the bread and wine only the historical reminders of a malefactor who once was (perhaps justly) crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem. What was this but to assent to His crucifixion—in fact, to “crucify Him afresh”; as He deserved, if He be not a Saviour Whose Supper has the full significance which Paul has expounded.1 Corinthians 11:28. So.—I.e. having examined [“proved,” cognate with “approved” (1 Corinthians 11:19)] his heart, and his intention in partaking of the Supper; then, with all the personal unworthiness he no doubt discovers, but with a real desire to use the Supper as the Lord intended, “let him eat.”1 Corinthians 11:29. Damnation.—“Judgment,” “condemnation”; but these also include, not only the verdict upon the sinner, but the penalty. At Corinth this last was sickness, and in many cases death (1 Corinthians 11:30). (Cf. Acts 5:5; Acts 13:11.)1 Corinthians 11:31.—shows the verbal connection with 1 Corinthians 11:29. When will we choose to have ourselves appraised, and our true position and character estimated? Now, or at “the Day”? And by whom—ourselves, or the Judge? Punishment now is chastisement, which may chasten the “worldliness” out of our heart and thought, so that we shall not come into the world’s irreversible condemnation. [“He (Noah) condemned the world,” Hebrews 11:7.1 Corinthians 11:33.—Coming back to, as it might seem, the trivial piece of unseemly disorder out of which all this solemn profanity arose, with its sad sequel of punishment; disorder which also was symptomatic of their moral blindness to the meaning of the Supper. .—1 Corinthians 11:17-34[The specific subject of the section is dealt with under 1 Corinthians 11:20. A general grouping of the many topics may be made around three nuclei of arrangement. Thus:—] I. Evil mingling with good. II. Good arising out of evil. III. A good thing—only, and of many-sided good. I. Their assembling for public worship, and even their “coming together” for “the Supper of the Lord,” issues in evil, not in help to man or glory to God,—“not for the better, but for the worse.” The fires of party “divisions,” always smouldering in the hearts of fellow-Corinthians, and fellow-Christians, are stirred into a fierce blaze so soon as they find themselves together within the same place of assembly, and are made to burn intensely by the behaviour of some of the rich towards the poor, as they sit down for the holy feast. Thus the place and the worship and its central ordinance—that which above all should be the sign and the bond of “communion”—are profaned, and the crucified Lord, Whose broken body and Whose poured-out blood they profess thankfully to remember as the foundation of all their common hope, is dishonoured. Can there be no “truce of God” from their “divisions” there, where of all other places should be peace? Is the distinction between rich and poor to be offensively obtruded, and their poverty flung in the faces of the poorer saints [? even “houseless” ones (1 Corinthians 11:22)] at that table where one [“wedding garment” of] undistinguishing redeeming love invests every guest alike, and covers and hides all such social rank and distinction? If there be one occasion in which should stand out conspicuous that glory of the Church of Christ as the home of all comers, of all races, ranks, ages, of both sexes, all sinners, all adopted children of God, alike,—it should be at the Table of their common Elder Brother. To accentuate there the inevitable social distinctions of the secular life outside—there, of all places—is the offence against the brotherhood the grossest; there, of all places, is the “worldliness” of such hearts shown up most staringly as sin against the Lord and Host of the Feast. How utterly “unworthy” is such “eating and drinking”! Do they, no better than that, “discern” and discriminate and judge between the covenant supper, where the Lord Himself is the true Passover Lamb, and the common meal in their own houses? Or, indeed, are they as heathenish still as those who eat at the table “of idols,” “of devils”? If their partisanship thus sins against the very idea of the unity; if their offensive flouting of the hungry poor of Christ’s flock by their greedy, selfish haste to demolish the heap of provisions they have brought to the common table, thus sins against the brotherhood; if such utter unpreparedness of heart and thought thus sins against the very Lord Himself, around whom they “come together,”—is it any wonder that His “judgments” are abroad amongst them? Any wonder that their very eating and drinking thus only brings “condemnation” upon them? Any wonder that sickness is abroad, and that even the “sleep” of death has fallen upon some most conspicuous offenders? They did not connect the disorder and the deaths? They did not trace any connection between the prevalent sickness and the “undiscerning,” “unworthy” communicating? Very likely not. “The world” never does. It stops at natural causes; had perhaps its (crude) sanitary theory of the epidemic sickness at Corinth; could perfectly account for every death in the membership; knew exactly what had carried off each particular man or woman. If they shared in the ignorance of the undiscerning “world” which does not see God in such things, and in the practical heathenism which made the gathering nothing but “a guild supper,” such as abounded around them, was it any wonder that they were “condemned with the world”? (1 Corinthians 11:32). “They come together,” indeed, “for the worse.” A Church in Corinth not three years old, a Church of Christ not fifty years old, and its most solemn assemblings have here come to this! Evil springing up amidst the good! “The world is out of joint!” II. Good springing out of evil,— 1. Just as these two consummately important and valuable Epistles have found their occasion, if not their cause, in these miserable factions and these shocking disorders in the Corinthian Church. “All things have indeed thus worked together for good,” for the Church of all lands and of all ages. The apologist of to-day comes to these two Epistles for his weapons of defence, for his facts of cogent significance and value (e.g. chap. 15). The theologian comes to them for full and explicit and far-leading revelations of truth upon some of the deepest themes of the Christian faith. The humble believer finds every line in some pages full of “meat to eat” that the world, and even some of the apologists and theologues, “know not of.” How great is the worth to the Church of this earliest-written account of the Lord’s last supper, of His own solemn expository words of institution, and those derived from the Lord Himself. And yet Paul rises to this universally precious, monumental, declaration and testimony, from the temporary and local and personal. Dictated to his amanuensis as he sat working at his trade in some humble lodging in Ephesus, there falls from his pen a palmary document of the Christian faith: “received of the Lord, delivered unto” the truly Catholic Church! “Surely the wrath of man shall praise Him!” (Psalms 76:10). “The world is out of joint” indeed; God’s fair order is sadly disturbed and marred. But every man can see, and can say, “He meant it not so; He Who did so much that was manifestly intended to work for good, never left His work so nearly finished and yet so mischievously incomplete, so admirably designed and yet so imperfect in its actual working.” And the wondering, grateful heart of His Church sees in a thousand instances God’s self-vindication for those who have hearts to feel its force and open eyes to see its facts; how He makes evil the seed-plot from whose very bosom good springs up; how not only parallel with evil, but occasioned by it, and helped forward by it, there arises the good. It is God working toward the restored order, the “restitution of all things” (Acts 3:21), towards which the most potently effectual contribution are the Redemption and the Church in whose midst is the significant Supper so profaned at Corinth. In 1 Corinthians 11:19 is a particular example of the working of this ceaseless drift and movement of the Divine government of the world towards; “restitution” of the disturbed original order. It reads strongly: “There must be heresies … in order that.” How and where do the Human and the Divine meet and work together? Who can tell? There is a Holy of Holies of secrecy within which the most adventurous human inquiry or analysis or speculation have never yet been able to set foot. [Kindred with the question: “How and where do the Material and the Spiritual meet in Creation; e.g. in the chemistry, and the mechanics, and the mathematics, which are inwrought into the very structure of the natural world?”] In the Incarnation, for example? In Inspiration, for example? In the Answer of Prayer? And, as here, in the Providential rule of the will of God over, and in, and through, creaturely wills, created by Himself as free as His own? It is one and the same problem, worked with many sets of data, and insoluble for the same reason in each particular case. Approach the meeting, the midway, reconciling point from one side, and all is Man, his free activity, his passions, his plans, his limitations, his sins; so much Man that there seems no room—naturally, intellectually, morally—for God. Approach from the other, and all is God; so entirely God that it is difficult to find room for man’s freedom of thought and action, and for his responsibility or guilt. Yet it is noteworthy how seldom the heart raises or feels the difficulty. To the, not all unintelligent, bulk of God’s people, the every-day working hypothesis of life includes both: “Much is of man; all is of God.” The speculative difficulty is felt now and again, but the combination of man and God which defies intellectual analysis is a working principle which as a matter of fact does serve for the practical need of life. [How many readers, for example, or how many Jerusalem Christians in (say) A.D. 67 or 68, ever stopped to find any speculative difficulty in their Lord’s command, “Pray ye that your flight be not in the winter”? And yet how many lines of military, and political, and domestic plan and arrangement must converge; how many “accidents” of the weather, of the year, of the month, of the week; of the longer or briefer resistance of an army or a city, advancing or retarding the march of a general, and opening or closing the gates of a city; must concur—with chances simply infinite, mathematically calculated, against all the needed elements of a secure flight, in mild weather, to an open Pella of refuge, being found in combination—in order that the prayer might be answered.] “In order that” is for the understanding a problem of bottomless darkness, here and in all similar cases. But we do see a little way down. If we cannot always dissect out and exhibit in their distinctness Purpose and Result, we are oftentimes moved to deep and thankful wonder as we see Good resulting from Evil. For example: 2. Open evil keeps good on the alert.—If only the Adversary were absolutely wise, he would oftener see that the game to play if he would win, is that of the subtle veiling of evil. The man, or the Church, that can, and does, “withstand” and struggle nobly and victoriously “in the evil day” (Ephesians 6:13), often needs the emphatic caution, “And having done all, to stand.” When Evil has drawn off its beaten forces from the field, and the hard-pressed victor for faith, or principle, or public morality is breathing hard but freely, now that there seems a moment’s leisure, then is the need that watchfulness shall not be relaxed the greatest. It is not the evil which stands revealed as a “heresy,” from which a Church has most to fear, but that which puts on the guise of the most perfect congruity with the highest aspirations and work of a Church, or which robes itself in some innocent or friendly phraseology. Troy is still captured by the harmless horse of wood, which forsooth “is really a thing devoted to the patron god of Troy!” The world and its mischief are often hidden away in the harmless, innocent piece of “politic concession” to the needs of the age, or to the necessities of the young people “whom we must keep with us, you know”; in the offered assistance to the activities of the Church, which though not exactly claiming to be “Christian,” really “is working, you see, towards the same end as yourselves.” “Let us help you,” said the enemies of Jerusalem in the days of Zerubbabel, “to build your temple; we seek your God as ye do” (Ezra 4:2). Zerubbabel and Jeshua would have no such “help”! The alliance, not the “heresy,” is to be feared. The “heresy” means that the uniforms of the opposing ranks are become more distinctive. When Confederate and Federal troops could hardly tell by speech or uniform whether friend or foe was stealing upon them and emerging from the mist, then was the peril of surprise and snatch-defeats. So again: 3. Defections and desertions have benefited the Church.—Such defections stiffen faithfulness; not by provoking any mere dogged “other-side-ishness,” but by leading to heart-searching as to personal loyalty or unfaithfulness, to truth and Christ, by inducing new consecration on the part of the “approved” ones, by occasioning new inquiry into the meaning and worth of what is being assailed and defended. The diminished numbers close up their ranks and feel themselves the fitter for the fight. [See how, at the supper table, Christ Himself “opened up” to the “approved” eleven after Judas had withdrawn, as if even He breathed more freely where now all were faithful. “Now is the Son of Man glorified,” etc. (John 13:31). The underlying idea of “approved” is well expounded e converso in 1 John 2:19 : “[The many antichrists] went out from us that they might be made manifest that they were not of us.” The deep essential cleavage which all along had divided the Church stood revealed. It was seen that they who were not for Christ were against Him. They stood out ἀδόκιμοι, “reprobate,” sifted out from the “approved,” the δόκιμοι. In this instance the separation is made manifest by the secession of the antichrist party. In 2 Timothy 2:19; 2 Timothy 2:21 the secession is to be the action of the faithful party. Two “heretics”—where the word is beginning to take on its later ecclesiastical colour and associations—are specified, Hymenζus and Philetus. They had gone greatly wrong in doctrine (1 Corinthians 11:18), and perhaps also in morals (1 Corinthians 11:16); they were heretics who at least tended to become “ungodly,” immoral, heretics. They had gone out from the Church, or had been cast out; or, if not so much of separation had yet taken place, their “error” (1 Corinthians 11:18) ranged them as not really belonging to the Great House. They had never really belonged to it, or had ceased to do so. It was only a human reckoning, which was originally imperfect, or which had become so by their falling away in doctrine and heart, that had accounted them so. Either man’s hasty work had built in stones which never were “living stones,” or they had ceased to “live,” and so fell out from their place in the living temple, the “spiritual House,” to which they had ceased in any true sense to belong (1 Peter 2:4-5). So far as they had any connection with the Great House, it was that of “vessels unto dishonor”—[not made to be broken in pieces; what house has any such?],—the “vessels” which are needed to carry away from the house its sweepings and gathered impurities. [The heavenly Jerusalem, like the earthly; the Church, like the literal city; have their Gehenna outside the walls (Matthew 13:41). In the history of Churches, and of The Church, it is simple matter of observation that from time to time evil, error, disorder, and wilful, self-pleasing teaching seem to have gathered and gravitated toward some “vessel unto dishonour.” In some secessions—“heretical” or other—it has seemed as if the leaders have carried away with them the elements of turbulence and scandal. They have done good, indirectly. The vessel which carries away what cannot longer, for health or happiness, be suffered in the house, serves a useful turn. The Church has been left united, cleared in doctrine and life, purer and at peace, its “approved” ones “appearing” such to all. 4. It is an extension of the same principle to say that heresies (in the technical sense, not in Paul’s sense here) have served the good end that what is “approved” truth has stood out in clearer light and appreciation. The early Church found itself occupying its heritage of Truth, much as some pioneer settlers in a new land may plant themselves in the midst of a vast, vague territory whose limits are not easy to define; nor for a little while does any necessity to define them seem to press upon them. But as neighbours come and plant themselves in the same region, “Mine and Thine” must needs be ascertained and marked off. Sometimes claim is set up or occupation attempted where the first comer believes that he has already exclusive right. With much discussion, perhaps with more than a little of heat and temper, the matter is threshed out, and at last a boundary-mark is planted where the verdict determines that rightful Occupancy and wrongful Claim are parted. In the end the process has been repeated on all sides, until the original seat of our settlers is girdled with a series of boundary-posts, which have become a complete definition of their holding. So, beginning with a body of truth rather held experimentally than formulated for the intellect, the Christian Church had from time to time to investigate the claim, the pretension, of this teaching or that to be part of the Truth; and so, very often with heat and struggle, it became clear that thus far was Truth, beyond was Error; on this side and on that, in this direction and in that, the boundary-marks got planted, until a definition of doctrine more or less complete was arrived at. [E.g. truly God, perfectly man, without confusion two natures, without division one person, are four such boundary-posts, marking the limits within which the truth that takes in all the facts and declarations of Scripture has been ascertained to lie, and beyond which lie “heresies” in the ecclesiastical sense; sometimes imperfect or crude attempts after truth, which have overstated one aspect of the whole, or have omitted some of the data for determining the whole.] Heterodoxy has cleared Orthodoxy. The “heresies” have necessitated the Creeds. “That they which are approved”—the truths which have endured the scrutiny and the test and the fire of discussion and controversy—“may be made manifest among you.” An accommodation of Paul’s word, “heresy,” of course; but a legitimate application of the principle of the sentence. III. Good, and only good.— 1. How restful the atmosphere of these verses (23–25). We are escaped where God “hides His people in a pavilion from the strife of tongues” (Psalms 31:20); escaped from the noisy factions of Corinth into the calm of the upper room in Jerusalem, where every word of the Master of the Feast seems to come from within the penumbra of that Shadow which is creeping over His path, and into whose inmost darkness He will enter on the following day. Sitting at table in full health, He talks to His fellows at the table of His blood, the price, the pledge, of a “new,” better “covenant.” Still with them, He speaks of the days when it shall be “remembrance,” not “enjoyment,” of His presence, of Himself; as if with the accent of a dying parent or friend, giving last injunctions, and making, with a calmness hardly shared by any who stand around the bed, the little final arrangements for the days when all is over and he is gone. Still living, still the Teacher and Friend in their midst, yet His own hands give out and distribute “His body” the body of a true Passover Lamb,—a Sacrifice of redemption and deliverance, the Provision of a Supper whose strength shall be for the pilgrimage of God’s new, ransomed Israel. To these men, who had once heard Him declare Himself the true, the original, the archetypal “Bread from Heaven” (John 6); and who had seen, and shared in, the hushed perplexity with which men that morning listened in the synagogue of Capernaum, and at last said, “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?”—to these He says, “Take, eat.” 2. “As oft as ye shall drink it”; His words look forward through the long vista of years before His Church, as, each time they sit down at His table, they look backward down the years. “He is with them always,—all the days.” The Supper board is never spread but He takes His place as the Head of the table. [As He who sat quietly eating, the invited guest in the inn at Emmaus, suddenly, significantly, took their bread into His hands, and did the host’s part, blessing and breaking, and vanishing! (Luke 24:30-31). See Appended Note.] 3. And they are not to allow the simple feast to be dissevered from Himself, and their grateful, believing “remembrance” of His whole work. “As oft as ye do this, do it in remembrance.” No other meaning is to be attached to, to be accreted round, the simple arrangement; Himself, their “communion” in Him, “the covenant in His blood,”—these are to be “remembered,” not repeated, nor extended, nor forgotten. They may institute, may disuse, [like Moravians and Methodists] may restore, love-feast suppers in the Churches, as matters of prudential, profitable arrangement and order; simple fellowship meals. But only He can institute in “remembrance”—in this fullest sense—a supper; and so long, so often, as they profess to continue His supper, they must always take care that this significance is attached to it. It must not be so stripped of meaning that it becomes only the simple love-feast, or the sub-Pentecostal common table of the Christian brotherhood. 4. Only He could institute it, and only He can abolish it. There will be a last celebration of the Lord’s Supper, somewhere, somewhen. How happy that company “eating and drinking” when the Son of Man comes,—by His lightning-sudden appearing breaking in with startling abruptness upon all the medley of human employment (Matthew 24:38),—if they are “eating and drinking” at His table; a celebration of “the Lord’s Supper” interrupted by the coming of the Lord! And even then the fit word will hardly be “abolish.” The analogy of the creation history, and of the redemption history, in the past will again be followed, and the only abolition will be that of the temporary, accidental clothing of the Idea. The “Lord’s Supper” is but one form of, one testimony to, the Communion between God and man in Christ, towards which “the ages” (1 Corinthians 10:11) have all been convergently working. All the persistently repeated supper-imagery of the Gospel parables concerning the future bliss of the saved will be fulfilled when, and where, “the Lord’s Supper” has given place to His “drinking of the new wine with us in the kingdom of God” (Matthew 26:29, etc.). The words will have had their suggestive, anticipatory fulfilments all along; these may suffice “until He come” (1 Corinthians 11:26). 5. When He comes, the Lord of the feast will declare the feast ended; the Heavenly Supper begins. The witness of the Supper to the faith of His Church, that the Unseen Lord is only unseen, not dead, and that He will one day again step out from behind the veil and appear with a visible intervention in human affairs, will be crowned with its triumphant vindication. It will need the vindication. Christ shall step forth just when Antichrist is lording it over men with fullest-blown blasphemy; when the love of many shall have waxed cold; when faith shall be hard to find in the earth, a few poor embers of its old fire almost smothered beneath the heap of ashes of men’s dead beliefs (2 Thessalonians 2:8; Matthew 24:12; Luke 18:8). “Till He come.” Happy the dwindling band who still spread the table, and eat the supper, “preparing it in the midst of their enemies” (Psalms 23:5), with dogged faith looking out for Him who is “their hope” (1 Timothy 1:1); “waiting for the Lord, as they that watch for the morning,”—not only as eagerly, but in as assured certainty that the morning whose breaking delays longest nevertheless will dawn (Psalms 130:6). 6. “In the midst of, and in spite of, evil.” And how the repeated celebration of the little supper will have sustained faith. [The old argument of Leslie in his Short and Easy Method with the Deists is essentially sound wherever there are: (1) A fact of the past, near or remote, e.g. the Exodus of Israel; (2) An ordinance, repeatedly celebrated, in professed commemoration of the fact, e.g. the Passover; (3) the connection between the fact and the ordinance, asserted and embodied in a record, written or other, whose repetition is part of the commemorative rite; and (4) this repetition resting upon a command to that effect which professes to go back to the time of the original institution, e.g. Exodus 12:26. He shows how impossible it is to conceive of a nation accepting the fact on the joint evidence of (2) and (3), unless on the supposition of its truth, seeing that (4) guards against the subsequent attachment of a pretended significant connection with (1)—whether this also be pretended or be real—to an existing ordinance of a different or unknown origin. Could a newly-devised Passover feast have been, at any but the contemporary date, offered to, or accepted by, a nation as an original and ancient memorial of the events connected with an Exodus itself perhaps a myth? Or, supposing that the only new thing was the asserted memorial significance, then with what success could those who propagated this, hope to attempt to attach it to a really ancient feast, when part of their assertion was also that the feast always had been celebrated with this commemorative meaning; and that, from the first, at least the instructions for celebrating it had included a prescribed question and answer expressly connecting the events and the festival? Presuming, that is, that this direction had always been obeyed, and that there had been no considerable periods during which the observance had not been kept up, Leslie’s argument was strong, and has close correspondence with the argument often built up upon the fact and manner of the observance of the Supper in the Christian Church.] This undisputed letter of St. Paul is the first of a long series of testimonies, patristic and other, that from the first the Church of Christ has celebrated a supper with this significance. Moreover, in the four great families of Liturgies, the Oriental, the Alexandrian, the Roman, the Gallican and Spanish, can be found evidence mounting up to the fourth century, and almost to the third, that the bread has always been broken and the wine poured out in connection with a memorial use of the original words of institution. Very strong historical evidence this that, even though in this last particular we cannot make the ascending chain of evidence demonstrably link itself to the use of the institutory formula by Christ Himself, yet the lines so manifestly converge, that they must have a meeting-place in a fact, which—reversing the direction of thought—is also their common point of origin. [For a brief, popular, accurate sketch of this argument and its foundation facts, see Present Day Tracts, No. 36, by Sir William Muir.] 7. Indeed, the solemn tone of the opening words of the account in 1 Corinthians 11:23, it is suggested, betrays an already fixed “monumental” form of the teaching as to the origin and meaning of the supper. It is suffused with a tender solemnity, as it recalls in briefest suggestiveness the origin of the simple acts. Every stroke tells: “The Lord Jesus”; “In the same night that He was betrayed.” Jesus is in the foreground of the picture; but Judas is also there in the gloom of the background. “Took up a loaf,” and afterwards “a cup.” We can see His uplifted eyes; His as yet unpierced hands; we can hear His voice, “giving thanks,” even then, and the “betrayal” so nigh! “In the same night,” when selfishness touched the lowest depth it ever reached, and treachery sold the Lord of heaven for a slave’s paltry price, in that night and no other, did unselfish, atoning, redeeming Love solemnly devote itself to death for the lost objects of its benevolence. On that night, when death was so nigh, and the toils of the hunters were every moment being drawn closer round the Object of human and devilish hatred, was His heart “at leisure from itself,” not only to speak words of comfort and instruction to a sorrowing company in an upper room in Jerusalem, but also to take care for a Church in all ages and places and peoples, and to institute His tenderest, simplest memorial to the understanding and the heart, of Himself. Good uplifting itself in undimmed, immaculate, undefilable beauty in the midst of Evil. Light shining in the very midnight of black, defiling darkness. We who read will at least “give thanks … in remembrance of” Him and of His Supper table and its grace and love. 1 Corinthians 11:20. “The Lord’s supper.” I. Supper.— 1. The proper, Scriptural name of the ordinance. Jewish Christians familiar with the idea. Judaism had its supper. The birthday supper of their nation and “Church.” The Supper, the Sabbath, the Holy Place, the Circumcision-rite [with exactly the same continuity of “development” which obtains between successive stages of God’s creative work—neither less nor more close], have been brought forward into Christianity, but modified—preserving the basal principle, their raison d’κtre—and stamped with the seal of Christ, “the Lord.” In these “days of the Son of Man” everything has become “the Lord’s,” implicitly or expressly. We have “the Lord’s Day”; “Church” is [etymologically (see Skeat, Dict.) and in fact] “the Lord’s House”; Baptism is (at least closely connected with) the “Circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2:11); in our chapter occur “the Lord’s Table, Cup, and Supper.” He had taken one of the many cups drunk at the Passover supper; and of it, with a simple loaf from the table, had made His own new Supper, belonging to a new order of things in which “the Lord Christ” is all, and in all. 2. Not a sacrifice.— (1) A very large, historically important section of the Church affirms it is. “Body and blood, soul and divinity, of the Lord Jesus Christ, bread and wine no longer remaining.” (Conc. Trid., Can., § 13, 1.) A transformation the more marvellous because not cognisable or verifiable by any of the senses. Men who alone can effect it are of a special order—“priests”; the service they conduct is a “sacrifice” of this “body,” etc.,—a real sacrifice, making expiation for the sins of the living, and (if they please) of the dead; in connection with it and with auricular confession of sins, they claim the power to remit (and, by consequence, to withhold) the “temporal” penalty of sin. (2) Basis of all this is, “This is My body.” But cf. “This cup”—not even the wine in it—“is the New Testament in My blood” (Luke 22:20). Rigid literalism of interpretation carried consistently through ends in absurdity of interpretation. (3) The Epistle to the Hebrews negatives all this. In it Christianity knows only one altar (1 Corinthians 13:10), one sacrifice for sins (1 Corinthians 10:12), one Priest to offer it (1 Corinthians 10:21). Many priests, repeated sacrifices, belonged only to the imperfection of the type. But even the type was right in this: one only place for offering this atoning sacrifice. Synagogues (in later days) were everywhere; but in Damascus, or Tarsus, or Rome, or (the later) Babylon, for an altar and a priest and an atoning sacrifice, a devout Jew must look toward, or visit, Jerusalem. On that one spot only might such a sacrifice be found. So in every place the Christian worshipper must turn to the Heavenly Sanctuary only, trusting that there the One High Priest, long ago “entered within the veil,” is presenting His one perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for sins. No priest, then, at an altar, but a fellow-guest,—representing, perhaps, the great Host Himself,—at a supper table:—the minister. II. Three words gather up the teaching of the New Testament as to the ordinance: 1. Commemoration; 2. Communion; 3. Covenant.— 1. Commemoration. (1) Luke 22:19 : “This do, in remembrance” (spoken when distributing the bread); revealed to Paul, “Do this, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance” (as He gave the cup). Paul adds the inspired comment: “As often as ye eat … ye do show the Lord’s death until He come.” The act looks backward to Calvary [as well as forward to the Second Coming. In the face of denials of the resurrection—and of His resurrection—or the scoffer who asks, “Where is the promise of His coming?” the Church at the Table proclaims, “We look for Him to appear the second time,” etc. (Hebrews 9:28); and we purpose to proclaim our hope and confident expectation “until He come”]. The Church at the Supper says: “We believe in Jesus Christ, … Who suffered under Pontius Pilate, … crucified, dead, and buried, … rose again, … ascended, … sitteth.” The Creed, with its facts of History, is implied in the celebration of the Supper. (2) The very fact of the observance of such a Supper does something to prove our faith reasonable. [And, given the past facts, the hope for the future is reasonable too.] Impossible, travelling backward, to find an age when the Church did not meet to break bread together, and that as a token of faith in the Cross and its Atonement; all but impossible to account for their doing it—above all with this meaning—unless on the supposition that the events commemorated are really historical. These are reasons of no slight force on which may rest the faith of the heart of the Church of Christ. (3) “The heart”; for this no mere commemoration of a fact of history. Conceivable that an annual public reading of the narratives, perhaps with some suitable ceremonial accompaniment, might have sufficed for that. The Lord made the commemoration one for the heart, as well as for the understanding, when He made the celebration itself symbolise the truths to be kept in view and enshrined in the history. The broken bread, the poured-out wine, lift the heart’s eyes to the body broken with scourge, thorn, nail, spear; to the blood poured forth to secure remission of sins. “The Lord’s death” is not merely the crucifying of one Jesus of Nazareth at a particular date, outside the walls of Jerusalem, but “God setting forth Christ Jesus a propitiation,” etc. (Romans 3:25-26); “setting Him forth” in full view of three worlds—angelic, infernal, human; in full view of the heart of the guest at the Supper. So from age to age the Church hands on the deposit of testimony—to the history and to the meaning of it—which each generation receives from its preceding one; [each generation receives the torch of Hope from its predecessor, and in turn hands it on to the waiting next one; only to be quenched when He comes]. 2. Communion.— (1) Paul’s comment in 1 Corinthians 10:16. Significant in the East, and not without meaning in the colder, prosaic West, to eat food together; it very early meant to establish a compact of peace, friendship, mutual defence. The persecuted Church of early ages felt vividly how sitting side by side at a common meal was an avowal of their unity in the face of heathen neighbours and kindred, and a pledging of themselves to love and fidelity each to other. The little Christian host, warring in an enemy’s country, at the Supper table join hands, and go forth again to fight [“strengthened as with bread of life”], to stand shoulder to shoulder, back to back, foursquare to the assault of the world and sin. “The club-feast of the Christian society” (Ecce Homo); this, though more. A periodical reunion of all believers in Christ, which may remind them of their separateness from the world, and of their close-drawn brotherhood and association for common aims, work, help, and in a common hope. [Here the close resemblance to the Love-feast, which was the “club-feast” and no more. Hence their conjoint, confluent celebration in early times; especially remembering how the first Lord’s Supper was the emphasising of a particular point in the course of a prolonged meal.] (2) This satisfies, lawfully, the craving for some continuous linking with the Early Church, and for some visible linking with the world-wide Church of to-day, or of any one century. The gulf of nearly nineteen centuries is bridged over by an unbroken succession of little companies, who—kneeling, sitting, with gorgeous ritual, or with none at all—have broken bread and drunk wine together in memory of their common Lord and Founder. At the Supper table the humblest Christian joins hands with apostles and martyrs; with the living, fighting, working Church, in all Churches and lands to-day; with the living, resting, glorified Church of those “who have departed this life in His faith and fear.” The front ranks of God’s great sacramental host—one in every time and place—have long ago, or recently, passed into the skies; rear ranks are not yet come into view; midway at the Supper the Christian of to-day vindicates and confesses his place in the host. [No rank, or social distinction, known at the Table. Master, servant, children, all there.] “Ye being many,” etc. (1 Corinthians 10:17). (3) “Partakers of that one body.” This to be noted. Not only association, brotherhood, fellowship, but all these resting upon, rooted in, a “communion,” a common sharing in the One Lord. He called the personal appropriation of Himself, so as to make Him the strength and sustenance of our spiritual life, “eating His flesh,” “drinking His blood” (John 6), “living by eating Him.” The same Holy Ghost—the Life of the Body, Who dwelt in a Corinthian Christian, dwells in a Christian in a foreign land to-day, dwells in the English Christian who sits at the “Communion” Supper. 3. Covenant.— (1) The Covenant significance, announced in Christ’s words of institution, and in Paul’s report upon the matter, makes the Supper a Sacrament. [In old Church Latin, a symbol of some hidden truth.] Conceivably, as matter of expedient ceremonial and teaching, a man might have instituted a custom of a united supper as a memorial and communion ordinance. But only Christ could say Luke 22:20, or Matthew 26:28. (2) The writer of the Hebrews (1 Corinthians 9:19-20) carries back exegesis and thought to Exodus 24:6-8. Under shadow of Sinai, newly given law read in hearing of Israel; that done, the book, with its precepts inwritten, the altar, the people, were sprinkled with the blood of their [own provision of] peace offerings. Moses cried, “The blood of the covenant.” etc. “The blood of the Old Testament”; “the blood of the New Testament.” The people provided the offerings; Moses, on behalf of God, ordained, accepted, used, the shed blood. God and Israel entered into covenant. They were pledged to obedience; God was pledged to faithfulness in blessing. As it means the Creed; so the Supper involves on man’s side the Commandments; and, on God’s side their preface, “I am the Lord thy God,” interpreted as in Luke 20:38. (3) So, though we provide the materials for the meal, it is “the Lord’s Supper.” We procure,—He directs that we shall, and accepts and uses,—the bread and the wine; and He, as really as we are, is covenanted. Hence 1 Corinthians 11:28 : “So let him eat”; i.e. having examined himself; having renounced the sin he finds; purposing to avoid it by the covenanted help of Christ. (4) No special appropriateness then for this Supper to a dying hour or a sick-chamber. Certainly no passport thence to a surer heaven; the bread is no heathenish obolus on the tongue, to fee some other-world ferryman or doorkeeper. Also, no special privilege of “good people” as such. All living in covenant communion with God in Christ, or seeking to do so; all sincere penitents “trying” to cast themselves with all reliance upon Christ; may come, guests welcome to the Supper, and may there learn to know, or to know better, the Lord Whose guests they are. 1 Corinthians 11:31. Self-judgment. I. “If we would.”—Why do we not? 1. We are too indolent.—It is troublesome to go thoroughly into an incessant analysis of motives and inclinations and desires. These are often not single and undivided, but exceedingly complex. “A motive” is the resultant of the interaction of a whole set of motives. It is easier, it disturbs our comfortable adjustment of ourselves to our social environment less, it involves no inconvenient, “ungentlemanly” necessity of condemning what our “good sort” of neighbours are and do, to accept some ready-made, external, customary standard of character and behaviour, and to be content, in our own case at all events, with a tolerably close approximation to even this—so close that we pass muster with, it may be, not a little credit amongst our fellows. Yet such a standard must needs be concerned only with the outside of the man; the judgments of which it is the instrument must needs be somewhat “rough estimates.” It convicts only the few specially prominent points which it touches. All the detail of the outer life, and all the inner life, it ignores. So long as we are content to live outside our true self, and to be only on terms of acquaintance and not intimacy with ourself, the average or minimum character which passes muster in our “set,” whether Christian or “worldly,” may satisfy us. But we do not know the man whom that other Judge knows. 2. We are too proud.—Such experiment as men do sometimes make, under the constraint of that “moral honesty” which is really part of the Holy Spirit’s preliminary work in the human soul, so constantly ends in very uncomfortable, disquieting, unsatisfactory discoveries, that they will go no further. Now and then some unusually marked incident of moral failure forces upon them what is to them an amazing revelation; for a moment there yawns within them, and they must look down into, a moral abyss of darkness and defiling sin, such as they never suspected or believed was possible. Their new discovery may issue in a penitent, self-loathing prostration of the man at the feet of Him who can “create a clean heart” within; or it may be followed by a refusal to look any longer, or to learn any more; by a resolute endeavour to forget what has been seen and to avert the mind’s glance altogether from the direction in which such unwelcome discoveries may again by possibility lie. The natural heart rebels against the accusation, and still more against the conviction, of sin. Pride will not let men “judge themselves.” 3. Moral inability.—Not any original inability. “If we would” assumes that, normally, men may. There is, as a matter of fact, no total blindness, no total ignorance of God’s moral standard, no utter want of spiritual power; the grace of a Redeemer has secured some measure of these for every man—enough to “begin upon.” And this restored, gracious power of perception and judgment may grow by exercise; it will be increased on every act of obedience to its decisions; but it may also be disregarded and disobeyed until it is lost. The inner standards of right and wrong may be depraved, and the power to apply them be lost altogether. Blind man could not have given himself again an eye to see, or light to see by; but these given, he can create darkness for himself and renew his blindness. Too many cannot “judge themselves,” because the standard is lost and the faculty for applying it gone. But, short of that, there are, in varying degrees, the obscuration, the deadening, the blunting of the moral sensibility or sensitiveness, till, even with the objective standard in the Word of God still clearly legible, and comparison with it inevitable and constant, many men are, in popular phrase, “no judges of themselves.” They are in David’s case, who for more than nine months after the murder of Uriah the Hittite seems to have lived in happy enjoyment of his shameful possession of the murdered man’s wife, and to have occupied himself with the ordinary round of royal duty and pleasure, without any sense of remorse or of sin at all; conscience silent [or forcibly silenced: cf. Psalms 32:3-5, which usually are connected with this episode in David’s career]; fear of God’s wrath hardly, if at all, felt. Such sensuality as that of Corinth, if even only allowed to enter and contaminate the imagination, thus dulls the moral sensibility and weakens the moral “judgment,” with fearfully cumulative effect. “If we would” means living with such a guard upon ourselves, that nothing is tolerated, encouraged, cultivated, which will interfere with the instant readiness of conscience to judge, with a growing fineness of perception, our actions, and our whole position before God. II. What if we will not?—Then we come before another Judge, Whose decision goes a stage further than our own would do. Ours is the judgment of the jury—the verdict; His is the judgment both of the jury and of the judge—verdict and sentence and penalty. At Corinth it came as physical evil—sickness, and even death in many cases. But His penalties on this side the grave are not irrevocable nor merely penal; they may be corrective, reformatory, if with them a man will seek to have and to use the grace of God; the chastenings of a Father, not the punishments of a King, “condemning the world.” Three stages are marked out: (1) Come into condemnation at your own court of first instance within, and then it may be you will not need to come into God’s condemnation. (2) Come under the temporal, reformatory chastisements of a Divine Father. If these are tried and fail, if neither He nor your heart is suffered to rebuke, convict, reform, then (3) You come into condemnation, to a judgment which knows no issue but the doom of “the world.” (Cf. the obscure passage, 1 Corinthians 5:5.) 1 Corinthians 11:30. The connection between moral and physical evil is:— I. Clearly revealed. II. Daily exemplified. III. In accordance with true philosophy. IV. Should be an incentive to holiness.—[J. L.] 1 Corinthians 11:30-32. Temporal judgments are:— I. Usually occasioned by sin; yet the absence of them is no proof of innocence (Luke 13:1-5). II. Mercifully designed to save us from final condemnation. III. May possibly be averted by faithful dealing with ourselves.—[J. L.] NOTENote the suggestion of some upon 1 Corinthians 10:31, that the Lord’s Supper is [only] the highest instance of the sanctification of even the lowliest, most material, most nearly animal, part of our common life. Note also how at Emmaus the ordinary supper which is in progress is in a moment glorified into, at any rate, a suggestion of the “Last Supper.” Note how, similarly, in 1 Corinthians 11:25, the express statement of time makes the blessing, etc., of the bread to have taken place during supper, and the differentiating of the meal from the sacrament to have only become patent in connection with the sanctification of the cup to its new use. Well illustrated by the incident told of Fletcher of Madeley by James Rogers, the husband of the well-known Hester Ann Rogers: “I had long desired to converse with … Mr. Fletcher, and now an opportunity offered itself. Stopping at Bristol for a few days to rest myself and horse, I heard of his being at Mr. Ireland’s, about three miles off, in a poor state of health, and, with two of my brethren, took a ride to see him. When we came there, he was returning from a ride.… Dismounting from his horse, he came towards us with arms spread open and eyes lifted up to heaven, His apostolic appearance, with the whole of his deportment, amazingly affected us.” [Then, after a brief conversation, all in keeping with his habitual spirituality of mind], “We were about to take our leave, when Mr. Ireland sent his footman into the yard with a bottle of red wine and some slices of bread upon a waiter; we all uncovered our heads, whilst Mr. Fletcher craved a blessing upon the same; which he had no sooner done, than he handed first the bread to each, and then, lifting up his eyes to heaven, pronounced these words: ‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.’ Afterwards, handing the wine, he repeated in like manner, ‘The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ etc. But such a sacrament I never had before. A sense of the Divine presence rested upon us all; and we were melted into floods of tears. His worthy friend, Mr. Ireland, grieved to see him exhaust his little strength by so much speaking, took him by the arm, and almost forced him into the house; while he kept looking wishfully, and speaking to us, as long as we could see him. We then mounted our horses and rode away.”—Early Methodist Preachers, iv. 301–303. NOTES1 Corinthians 12:1.—Gifts is a translators’ supplement; right in fact, as 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 show; slightly too precise in word. Almost certainly neuter, and so very general, “spiritual things.” Another of the topics laid before Paul for his discussion and guiding instructions.1 Corinthians 12:2. Dumb.—In contrast with the “tongues,” which were, in the mind of the Corinthians, the most striking and choice charism of the Spirit; denying also to the idol, and attributing implicitly to the “demon” (1 Corinthians 10:19-20) the “oracles” of heathenism [possibly the diabolic correlatives of the “tongues” and of “inspiration”], Habakkuk 2:19; “dumb” also standing for the whole impotence and nothingness of the heathen idolatries, Isaiah 44:9-17; Isaiah 46:5-7; and particularly Psalms 115:4-7; in brief. Led.—A personal leading; as in 1 Corinthians 10:19-20; Ephesians 2:2 sq., etc. And, in a lower degree, by priestly or governmental authority, or by national and ancestral custom. Contrast the “leading” of the Spirit, Romans 8:14; Galatians 5:18, and the intelligent, personal choice of Christ required and supposed in Christianity.1 Corinthians 12:3.—“So then you may distinguish the voice of the Spirit from the voice of the evil spirit—the mere idol has no voice—by this test.” Observe “anathema.” In the synagogue this would be heard, “Jesus” being the simple personal name of the “Man of Nazareth” naturally employed by Jews. The Gentile denials of their Lord at the bidding or leading of demons took another form, that of participating in the heathen feasts (1 Corinthians 10:14-22). This test under another aspect appears in 1 John 4:2-3. But beyond this was a special “gift” of “discerning of spirits” (1 Corinthians 12:10). Lord.—“Verbum solenne in LXX. for Hebrew Jehovah” (Evans). So, in effect, but in reverse order, 1 John 5:1. Also Matthew 16:17 (Peter’s confession).1 Corinthians 12:4.—Subject to this one unvarying characteristic and test of the Spirit’s presence and work in a man, there is “variety and distribution” of “gifts,” “manifestations” which reveal the presence of “the same Spirit” of God. 1. Observe (as R.V.) “diversities” in each case; same word. 2. Observe the Trinitarian form of the passage; the “practical and experimental,” as always, moulded over, and clothing, a skeleton of Trinitarian theology.1 Corinthians 12:5. Administrations.—Human “ministrations,” “forms of service” (not official only), under the same Captain of the Army, the same Head of the House, the same King over the Redemption-realm.1 Corinthians 12:6.—“Workings” for “operations.” “The effects, results, outward manifestations of the same inworking power.… The practical exhibitions of that power” (Ellicott).1 Corinthians 12:7.—Not his personal profit, only or chiefly.1 Corinthians 12:8-10.—Note 1. More accurately, the changing prepositions “through,” “according to,” “in”. The Spirit “is the channel through which they come, the standard with which they agree, the element in which they are possessed and used” (Beet). Also “three series,—intellectual gifts (1 Corinthians 12:8), gifts conspicuously miraculous (1 Corinthians 12:9-10 a), gifts connected with ‘tongues’ (1 Corinthians 12:10 b)” (Beet). Note 2. Wisdom, more general, practical, discursive and argumentative; Knowledge, more restricted, theoretic or scientific, something more intuitive, e.g. as in Paul and John respectively (Stanley). Note 3. The “word” characterised by and specially the vehicle of, “wisdom” or “knowledge.” Note 4. Faith.—For miracle-working, as 1 Corinthians 13:2. Good case in Acts 3:16 : “His Name, through faith in His Name, hath made this man strong.” Note 5. Prophecy.—See Appended Note. So also for “tongues.”1 Corinthians 12:11.—Observe the activity and will here attributed to the Holy Ghost, and the “sovereignty” with which He apportions His “gifts.”THE BODY PARABLE 1 Corinthians 12:12. Christ.—The Great Unit in all God’s thought and purpose in the history of Redemption. So Galatians 3:16. Not the personal Christ, but the “Christ mystical.”1 Corinthians 12:13.—Observe again the prepositions “in,” “into,” [“of;” query, recalling, 1 Corinthians 10:4? Also Evans would translate, “were drenched with,” denying any reference, in this third clause, to baptism]. “Into” might, grammatically, only mean “unto” or “for,” i.e. of the aim or purpose of baptism; whether more is found in the word depends upon a man’s whole reading and interpretation of New Testament teaching upon the topic. Cf. Galatians 3:27-28.1 Corinthians 12:14-17.—Beet points out that the members—not merely the lowest, but those next to the highest—compare themselves, as men do, with others resembling, though superior to themselves. “I am not of the body” is said in the spirit of wounded vanity which fancies it has a grievance, and exaggerates it: “By the look of things I am not reckoned in the body,” and then flings itself out of fellowship: “Well then, I won’t be!” One (kind of) member, 1 Corinthians 12:14, and so 1 Corinthians 12:19-20.1 Corinthians 12:18.—Cf. with 1 Corinthians 12:11; here the sovereign will is that of “God.” [Different words for will; this the fundamental, original determination underlying all the order of the world.]1 Corinthians 12:22.—Many “necessary” members are incapable of self-defence (Beet). “Those more delicate portions of our bodily structure, external or internal, which, compared with the more obviously active and energetic members of the body, might seem to be somewhat feeble” (Ellicott). But Paul is designedly indefinite in his reference.1 Corinthians 12:23.—“Alluding to the almost universal instinct of fitness or of decency which has dictated, on the one hand, the use of ornaments, on the other hand, the necessity of clothing” (Stanley).1 Corinthians 12:25.—Expository again of the simple, original meaning of “schism” (1 Corinthians 1:10; 1 Corinthians 11:18). There is a conveyance of working inward upon the Body and its welfare, as well as upward upon the Head and His honour and will.1 Corinthians 12:27.—Not merely “a body,” but “the body of Christ”; organic to Him as a man’s body is organic to him. (See Separate Homily.) In particular.—Rare expression, only here and in 1 Corinthians 13:9-10; 1 Corinthians 13:12. Choose between (1) “Members of this imperfect earthly half of the one earthly-heavenly Church” (Evans); and, as most, (2) “Each one of you made a member with his several part and function.” I.e. “Collectively the body; individually, the limbs” (Stanley).1 Corinthians 12:28.—“First,” “secondarily,” etc., order not merely of enumeration, but of dignity; great “drop” at “then.” Two exceptional “orders” respectively begin and close the list: “apostles,” “tongues.” “Teachers,” who spoke without the exceptional and direct impulse of the “prophet” [moreover, the prophet declares new truth; the teacher expounds and applies truth already given], and without the ecstasy of the “tongue”-gifted men. “Helps,” vague, but perhaps doing such service as visiting the sick, etc.; “governments,” perhaps practical tact and faculty for administration of affairs and the management and direction of men, whilst not excelling as “teachers” or “miracle-workers.”1 Corinthians 12:29-30.—Notice the insertion of “workers of.” Interpret.—Q.d. the “tongues” in which the others “spoke.” “Tongues” last, not to indicate Paul’s estimate of the gift as distinctly opposite to that of the Corinthians, but as being, as it were, an exceptional gift appended to the ordinary list.1 Corinthians 12:31. Best.—“Greater” (; new reading); i.e. the more noble and useful amongst the foregoing list (1 Corinthians 14:1). But there is something better than the best, and this too, as the gifts were not, even in richly endowed Corinth, for all. More excellent.—Found also in Romans 7:13; 2 Corinthians 1:8; 2 Corinthians 4:17 (strengthened); Galatians 1:13; cf. 1 Corinthians 4:7, 1 Corinthians 12:7. .—Whole ChapterThe topics here may be grouped around four words:— A. The Diversity of gifts and offices. B. The Unity of the body. C. The Dependence of member upon member. D. The Serviceableness of each member to the whole body. A. Diversity.— 1. The abundance of the gifts bestowed upon the Corinthian Church was matter of thankful wonder even to Paul (1 Corinthians 1:5). But the variety is as wonderful. It may be that in this chapter we have a generalised description of The Church and its endowments, rather than an exact sketch of this Church in particular. Yet with all abatements, the impression does remain that beyond most of the early Churches Corinth was a miniature of the greater Body in the completeness with which it exhibited in its midst every type of gift and character. Gifts distributed over many other Churches are all at least “sampled” in Corinth. “The body is not one kind of member, but many” (1 Corinthians 12:14). 2. There is no mechanical reproduction of any one type of member; they are not made and endowed to do one thing only, and all the same one thing. That is not God’s method; that is not the habit of Life. Wherever He works, wherever It is, there is variety. “As like as two peas in a pod;” but two peas lying side by side in their narrow green bed are not mechanical copies of each other. They are individual, even though the differences may be minute. There are no duplicate faces; no absolutely correspondent sides of the same face; no exactly symmetrical halves and lobes of bodies or of organs; no pair of leaves exactly balance each other as a “pair.” Ruskin, in his Modern Painters, has engraved a diagrammatic drawing of the scheme of ramification of a forest tree. It has a beauty; there is a beauty about the careful and exact work of a machine, and about the logically consequential correspondence of part with part, and the development of part from part. But no tree ever grew with such mechanically exact bifurcation of branches, or with such rigorous completeness and balance of parts. It is, as he calls it, a tree “drawn by a Clerk of the Works.” It is not the artist’s tree, nor the Creator’s tree, nor the living tree. However it may be, there is always diversity touching even the nearest correspondence. In the diversity of organ, and office, and function, in a body, and of member, and office, and function, in “The Body of Christ,” we have only a particular instance of the working out of one of God’s ruling “ideas” in nature. It is “a law” which holds good “in the natural and the spiritual world,” both. In the Body, men and women are “members in particular” (1 Corinthians 12:27); each having his own work, each made on his own pattern. “Gifts;” the “ministrations” of this man or that; the “workings” of the same underlying power of God in this or that Christian;—“diversity” is stamped on them all (1 Corinthians 12:4-6). Nor does the application of the principle end as between class and class. Within the same class, all “apostles,” or all “prophets,” or all “helps,” or “governments,” or “tongues,” vary. No two apostles ever do the same work. [No two evangelists have given us the same gospel; each is individualised very strongly.] No two “teachers” ever caught and presented identically the same aspect of the whole round of truth. 3. There is order in the diversity, “first,” “second,” “thirdly,” “after that,” “then.” The apostle’s office was unique; the prophet’s office was passing away while men heard Paul speak of it; the tongues are silent; the miracle is done. But in the shorter list that remains the ranking is significant. “Teaching” heads the diminished enumeration; and yet what more necessary gift does the God Who “sets every man in the Church as it hath pleased Him,” and Whose Spirit in like manner “divides to every man severally as He will,” ever bestow upon a Church, than the men who have “helps, governments”? So long as human hearts are perverse, and their judgments fallible, and that too in different directions; the more the growth of the work of the Church forces “division of labour” upon those who are responsible for its welfare and its success; so long and the more will the man be in demand who can organise work, who can hit the right time for doing or beginning it, who is both master of broad schemes and is not overwhelmed with the small details of execution, who can rightly judge of character, and lay his hand exactly on the suitable human instrument, who can lead or govern men with all their variety, their touchiness, their vanity, their smallness of temper. “Helps,” “governments,”—these may rank after the supreme necessity of “teaching,” but in order they do not march far behind! And, most of all, the primacy of order is accorded to the “best gifts,” the most useful to the Church, the most honouring to the Master. 4. Nothing is more necessary to recognise than that the diversity is a limitation. It is of no use to be disappointed, or vexed, that the human instrument cannot always do every kind of work. It is of no use to blame, or to rate as if of lower value or fidelity, the man who is “very willing to do anything he is asked to do,” but who now and again is a disappointing, troublesome failure in some things he undertakes. Perhaps he was set to work he was not made for; he was not “set in the Body” to do that. Better to be thankful for his willing mind, and for his not infrequent usefulness or success. There are few, or no, really “all-round” men. There are no “all-round” members in a body. Also, the man himself will be saved from a morbid sensitiveness of self-reproach, by remembering that the differentiation of organ and function and power which is more and more the characteristic of more highly organised life, is a limitation in many directions, a real disqualification for many forms of service. His zeal for good may be as great, his consecration of himself to Christ as full and perfect and entire, his spirituality as deep and intense, as that of some more obviously and attractively successful member, with whom be is tempted to compare his own smaller, less obvious “results” and work. “Not one (kind of) member.” His concern is only with the whole-hearted devotion of himself, just for what he is, and for what he is not, just for what he can, and cannot, do, to the glory of Christ and the good of the Body. The Lord of the Church knows exactly where to put and use him; just where his special, if narrow, or humble qualification will be of most service, and where his limitations will be least detrimental, or not detrimental at all, to the growth of the Body and the work of Christ through It in the world. Consecration, intensity of spirituality, are in themselves an equipment for usefulness; but they will not make a foot do the work of a hand, or an ear, or an eye. 5. To remember that specialisation is limitation as well as qualification, will also save a man from, the feeling which finds expression in 1 Corinthians 12:15-17. It begins, be it noted, in a comparison of oneself with a “member” higher or more honourable; whether really so, or according to customary estimation. Possibly the comparison may at first have been the self-depreciating, needlessly condemning one just suggested in 4. But it is very apt to pass over into a fretful discontent that one is limited, and cannot do what the “hand” or “eye” can do, or win the credit they gain. The “foot” that begins by wishing it could do what the “hand” does, soon ends by murmuring that it cannot. And it is not a long step, it is one easily taken, when this disheartened disappointment lends itself to the leading of wounded vanity, to a pique which will do nothing, not even its own characteristic and intended office. “I am not the hand; I cannot do this or that which the hand does. Am I of any use in the Body? Am I really in it?” very readily is transformed into, “I am not the hand; I am no longer—I will not be—of the body.” B. Unity.—“E pluribus unum.” All such judgments as have been suggested, even those which are honestly, humbly meant, are so many forms of self-centering. The safeguard against them, and their remedy, is to go deeper than the diversity, and see the profound, glorious unity. I. What is it that is one?— 1. “The Body”; and, more wonderfully, “Christ.” The wife takes the husband’s name; Adam and Eve are “Adam”; the branches are, and can do, so utterly “nothing apart from Him,” Who is the very basis and source of their life, that He appropriates to Himself the name which ordinarily covers stock and branches: “I am the Vine.” Conversely, here the Head is so pre-eminent in importance amongst the components of a body—though it is no “head” apart from “the members”; cut off from it, they are so entirely without power, or will, or life; the head, moreover, so nearly completely expresses the man, that, for example, the picture of the head is taken as the picture of the man [“That is Mr. So-and so,” men say, when looking only at a bust]; that, in this Body, “Christ” covers Christ and His people,” [In Galatians 5:16 His name stands alone in the covenant promise: “to thy seed—which is Christ.” But it is manifestly no boon to Him personally which is thus conveyed and assured to “Christ.” To Him indeed, but to Him only for the sake of the wider “seed,” who, with Him, and in their union with Him, are “heirs” also “according to (the tenor of) the promise,” ib. 1 Corinthians 5:2-9).] 2. That Body, that “Christ,” “The Church” when so defined and vindicated, is always “one.” It is only the imperfect human expression of, and approximation to, this “one body,” which is outwardly divided, and even rent into antagonistic confession, and “communions”—(save the mark!) II. How is it one?— 1. “One,” “Holy,” “Catholic,” “Apostolic,” are four “notes” of the Church, found in the earlier Christian creeds. The confessional and ecclesiastical definitions of the first have been very various, ranging between widely removed extremes of theory and teaching. At the one is the theory which sees no unity where there is not connection with an historically continuous organisation, of which an essential factor is a succession of orders inherent in one special line of ministry, ordained in one special manner, and presumed to stand in direct and authorising connection with the apostles themselves. At the other stands the theory which, beyond the unity of the particular congregation, sees no oneness but that of voluntary aggregation. Midway is a compromise attempted by those who—Anglican with diocesan episcopacy or Lutheran without it—only hope for or believe in the unity of national Churches. [Governmental, Gregarious, Geographical.] 2. But, as a matter of exposition, a point of outward, manifest, historical oneness so universal as baptism with (more or less of) water in the name of the Trinity, is very subordinate even in 1 Corinthians 12:13, where the “baptism” on which the stress is laid is that “in the one Spirit.” The unifying Headship of Christ itself is not in our passage so prominent as the unifying presence, and “work,” and “manifestation,” and endowments of the Spirit of God. Ubi Spiritus ibi Ecclesia. We customarily distinguish between “gifts” and “graces”; here they are alike “spiritual (things)” (so, literally, 1 Corinthians 12:1). All, and each several one, of them bespeak the presence of the indwelling Holy Ghost. Whether “through,” or “according to,” or “in” be Paul’s carefully chosen and varied word, i.e. whether He be the channel, or the regulating and testing norm, or the very life element in which they are enjoyed; every charism, ordinary and permanent, or extraordinary, and passing with the Apostolic age, brilliant, or useful merely—every one leads upward and backward to a common Original,—One Holy Ghost. These are all evidences of His presence Who is the life—not which, but—by which the Body lives. If each member lives, it is because it shares in Him the life of the whole. He “divides” not only His gifts, but Himself, “to every man.” “If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His” (Romans 8:9). This Vine feels, in every tiniest twig and to the farmost tip of every finest tendril; this Body feels, in every most humble member, and most remote from the head, and to the very extremity of the last thread of each many-branching nerve; one common Life,—the Spirit of that special life which is in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:2). The Unity is a unity of the life-element in the body, a life-element which not only holds together all the components of the living organism, but which by its presence holds in check the forces of disintegration and decay, the forces which make for “Death.” 3. The “gifts” speak of a unity of Source and Giver. The “cloven tongues” of Pentecost, rightly appreciated, exhibited this, at the very outset of the new order, the dispensation of the Spirit. The painters of uncritical centuries, often deriving their traditional conception from ill-instructed ecclesiastics, have generally given us a seated company of men and women, on the head of each of whom rests a split, pointed flame like that of a lamp. Every tongue is pretty much a copy of every other,—in utter antithesis to the diversity in unity of 1 Corinthians 12:8-11. Each head has its own tongue. Almost if it had been a Holy Ghost to each, working in each an almost precisely similar gift and manifestation! Whereas the truer reading exactly expresses the fact; which the real appearance also exhibited. Over the head of the one company hung the one flame-like appearance [a Shekinah-cloud?] darting “disparted tongues as of fire,” out and down, one to each several head. [With guarded use the (very) material illustration may serve: The unity of the source of the supply of gas and water through the thousand homes of a modern municipality. The light which cheers in a sickroom in some artisan’s cottage at the poorer end, is no separate and independent—candle-like, lamp-like—illumination; it is being every moment fed from the same source, and out of the same common body of illuminating material, as are the lights which are at that moment blazing in the drawing-rooms of the wealthiest of the “West End” homes. Every house in the place “drinks into” one and the same common central water-store. The water is not “mine” or “yours”; it is “ours.”] 4. The highest evidence of the unity of the Spirit is the common confession of the “Lordship” of “Jesus.” Even in Corinth, amongst “spiritual” men, though they be only of a “carnal” grade, there is agreement here. Here there is indeed “no schism in the body.” Every partisan of Paul or Apollos or Cephas joins heart and confession here: “Jesus Christ is Lord.” That shall one day be the confession of the whole sentient universe, in its every order of life and intelligence (Philippians 2:11; cf. Isaiah 45:23; Deuteronomy 5:8). Some shall pay it even then with an enforced submission and homage. Now many hearts will neither render the submission nor accord the homage. In the days of His humbled estate and veiled glory, the evil spirits now and again would cry out, as He drew near to them or to their human “temples,” “We know Thee who Thou art, the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24; cf. “Jesus I recognise,” Acts 19:15). But the full force of the statement may well amount to something less than a proclamation of His Godhead. Rate its value high as we may, it was an admission rather than a confession. It was wrung out from fear, and from the unholy recoil of evil at the very touch and presence of goodness; and it may be that it had often not a little malice in it, as an attempt to force on a premature avowal of Himself on the part of Jesus. He at least refused such testimony to Himself. (Cf. Peter’s “Depart from me, for,” etc., Luke 5:8.) A confession bursts irrepressibly forth from the reverent, trusting, adoring heart of a believer taught by the Spirit. The admission of the Galilζan demons had in the heart of it a curse. The lips said, “Thou art the Holy One of God”; the heart said, “Anathema be this Jesus!” The words here used suggest a strange scene in the little meeting-place of the Church at Corinth. “The prophets are prophesying” together (cf. 1 Samuel 19:20 sqq.); “a spirit” comes upon or enters into another worshipper, and he too shows all the outward accompaniments of the illapse of the prophetic Spirit. The “discerners of spirits,” with their intuitive perception [the Holy Ghost in one gift recognises Himself in every other], are perhaps absent. The new “prophet” is not at once to be “discerned” by the character of his utterances; they seem harmless, if not very profitable. But some hearts are not satisfied, and they inquire, “Wilt thou say, ‘Jesus is Lord’?” And the mask is dropped: “Lord? No! Anathema!” Or, the Christian hymn is being uplifted; the men endowed with “tongues” are glorifying in ecstatic praise God and His Christ; when suddenly a discord in the music! A scream of hate and rage cuts athwart the praise: “Jesus is Anathema!” That is no prophet whose gift is of the Spirit! It needs no special charism to “discern the spirit” in such a man. Less aggravated forms of this Jesus-hate were found then, and might be found now, in the Jewish synagogue. Here is a poor young girl who is denounced, or suspected, as a Nazarene. She is brought before the rulers of the synagogue. The test is short and simple: “Call this Jesus the Nazarene ‘Absalom’; call Him ‘The Hanged-one’ [Gallows-bird!]; call Him ‘the Bastard Branch’; curse Him; say that He is anathema!” Happy if, by some miracle of holy courage, the young heart does not quail, or if, while the lips blench with the strain of excitement, they will shape none of the accursed words. See her stand there, and at last break her silence in response to threatening, or warning, or appeal, with the cry of passionate devotion: “Jesus is Jehovah!” [How they would have got their answer, clear and sudden, from Paul of Tarsus, if conceivably they had put him to their test. “Call him ‘Anathema’!” Not anger, but conviction and love, make his voice ring out: “If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him—not Jesus—be anathema!” Speaking of the stories of Jesus in the Talmud, Dr. Geikie says: “Against (Him) no slander is too gross to be retailed by the Rabbis” (Life of Christ, ii. 624).] And yet more subtilly does the presence of the same aversion which may deepen into antipathy to Christ, betray itself in ordinary, decent men and women of to-day. No man who knows himself but remembers the averting of heart from Christ which made His name unwelcome, and aroused a real resentment, when His claims on heart and life were pressed with more earnestness than usual. What spirit is that? It is the fashion to exalt the character of the Man, the Teacher, the Universal Brother and Pattern, Jesus. But to accept and own practically His “Lordship”—that is another matter. To own that as a creed, indeed, did once become almost an epidemic fashion in stormy days in Constantinople, till one could hardly ask a carpenter or a shoemaker the simplest question about his trade and work without drawing forth by way of reply some fierce “Athanasian” sentence about the Trinity and the Godhead of the Son. But give the natural heart time and room to “grow” its tendencies to full blossom and fruit, remove the restraints of education and of conventional propriety or fear; men may then come to the rabid, destructive hate of Christianity and things Christian which not only disfigures the pages of some who ought to be calmly scientific writers, but which, in some times of Continental upheaval, has dared bitter words, and done black deeds, against everything of God and His Christ. How the natural heart will tolerate any religion which is content to be a mere set of opinions with no practical bearing upon life. English “good society” will play at Mahometanism, or at Buddhism—“esoteric” or other—or at Romanism or at “being High Church.” But as to taking up Christianity as a “craze”! Why, the thing insists on being lived out! Insufferable! Nor is it enough to say that this a revolt against any one particular presentation of Christianity and against its priesthood. It has in it the germ of that hatred of good as good, that hatred of God Incarnate which went at least near to ripening into the unpardonable “blasphemy against the Holy Ghost” [Matthew 12:30-31; so closely connected with His sharply divisive word: “He that is not with Me is against Me!”] So, by a converse but analogous process, there is a Spirit—the Holy One—behind every real confession of the Lordship of Christ. “Flesh and blood” do not reveal this doctrine, nor reveal Him, to men. There is a knowledge of Christ which is part of the new world into which that man has passed who is himself made “a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:16-17). The burst of revelation which came to Peter—or rather the sudden flash of insight which showed in Peter—near Cζsarea Philippi (Matthew 16:16-17); the sudden, overwhelming access of knowledge which silenced all the tests and requirements that Thomas was going to propose and insist upon, and left him with only one thing to do, only one thing to say—to fall prostrate and cry, “My Lord and my God!” [which is the manifest, (and if the word be permissible) the artistic, climax to the Gospel of John;—the confession of John the Baptist and of Nathanael, in chap. 1, lead up, through a succession of confessions, to this of Thomas, the last, most definite, most full, in its recognition of Christ as Lord];—these are distinctly grace,—“spiritual things” (1 Corinthians 12:1). The “faith” of 1 Corinthians 12:9 is indeed pretty certainly shown by its companion “gifts” to be miracle-working faith (cf. under Critical Notes). Yet it is only one phase, one operative presentation, of a larger “faith,” of which in every sense it is true that it is “by the same Spirit.” In 1 Corinthians 12:9 it is a Hand thrust into the unseen, “spiritual” world and grasping there the God from Whom it draws power for mighty works. But it is also, and more widely, true that it is an Eye to whose gaze all that world stands unveiled, “naked and open” as we are to the gaze of God. It begins already “to know even as we are known” (1 Corinthians 13:11). And the opened Eye is one of the gifts of the Spirit through Whose quickening men already “pass from Death unto Life.” Life has come into Death; the dead eye now lives and can see. Hence John’s close association of being “born of God” with “believing that Jesus is the Christ.” Or, as he gives it in varying statements: “Who is he that overcometh the world but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?” Or, again: “Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God” (1 John 5:1; 1 John 5:5; 1 John 4:15). No merely doctrinal “confession” or “faith” satisfies such statements. The stoutest and most orthodox champion of the Godhead of Jesus, whether against old Socinian, or later Unitarian, or modern Naturalistic, may, nevertheless, be no man “born of God.” Orthodoxy and Regeneration in such vital association make “orthodoxy” something far higher, deeper, than a matter of creed. The only man who knows a Divine Christ is the man who is “in Christ.” Other men may master the sections in the “Handbooks of Theology,” the “Institutes,” or the like, headed “Divinity of Christ”; they may become past-masters in the controversial literature of the topic; they may know completely the accustomed collection and formulation of the scattered and often inferential data, which, when marshalled in due order, are the basis of the doctrine; they may be expert of fence in dealing with the difficulties and the criticisms of the objector; weighing Scripture statements for, and the passages which in Scripture itself seem to be against; they may come up to the assured intellectual position that Revelation makes “Jesus Lord.” But even then they do not know Him; the belief which intellect has built up, intellect may destroy; the argumentative balance may by new considerations be made to turn against the doctrine; the Lordshνp of Jesus is only rooted in the surface stratum of their manhood; a storm of sceptical attack may uproot it. The spiritual man does not undervalue the arguments; they are most likely the ladder by which he climbed to the level of a true faith. They made him ready to believe. But he has now a direct intuition of Jesus as Lord, which he shares with ten thousand others, most of whom know nothing, nor can know, of the arguments. The same Spirit Whose indwelling in Him makes him live, makes the regenerate man know Christ and His Lordship. [Cf. another case of apparent connection of “salvation” with the acceptance of an historical proposition: “God raised Him from the dead;” and of a theological dogma: “I confess Jesus as Lord” (Romans 10:9). Of course “with the heart” makes all the difference. As here] the truth accepted into the creed also passes into, and is assimilated and reproduced in, the experience. The inward, spiritual life echoes and reproduces the outward, historical, Christian verity. Christ’s development of God’s word “in the Bush” (Matthew 22:32) brought out the profoundly fundamental truth that for God to say “I am Abraham’s God,” involved a natural capability of such a relation which is unshared by the brute creation, and which argued a soul not “dead and done with”; and further implied an actual, spiritual covenant relationship between God and the man. So for a man to say in any real sense, “Jesus is Jehovah,” he must have come a long way to have reached that point, and the truth must now carry him a long way further. To him “to live” must be, in fact, “Christ.” It will mean such a trust, such an habitual dependence, such a new principle of covenanted, faithful obedience, as the heart only renders to God when it has become “a new heart.” And it comes as a new revelation, (to speak inexactly) a fresh disclosure, to each man who comes to the saving knowledge of the truth. The man who knows Jesus his “Lord” knows also that he never said it or believed it to any practical intent until he learned it as a sinner “by the teaching of the Spirit of God.” The Spirit’s work is to testify of Christ. He is the great Preacher of Christ. He has but the one theme—Christ. And He has wrought in the Church of Christ, in all the ages and races and communions, a wonderful unity in the testimony, “Jesus is Lord”! The voice of the much-divided Church is one here! 5. Theology, more theology, always theology, underneath all the facts and teachings about the spiritual life! The theology may be presented by itself, as the skeleton may be dissected out from the body, and exhibited alone. But it is a hard, ugly thing; as the theology which is the “bony” frame giving shape and strength to 1 Corinthians 12:4-6, may be made to seem. Underneath the most noble form, underneath the most beautiful face, are a skeleton and a grinning skull. So we may not have the verses and their teaching, we may not have the experimental unity, without the Trinity. [Good example this of Pauline passages which assume the “Dogma,” and are Trinitarian in underlying, essential structure. Usually the Trinity is barely seen in the New Testament except in connection with Redemption.] “The Spirit,” “the Lord,” “God.” Here again there is order in the equality; there is diversity in the unity. It is not overpressing the suggestion of analogy between the Unity of the Godhead and the Unity of the Body: “That they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:22). “All the capacities come from one Spirit; the different kinds of service are for the same Master; and the different results are produced by the same First Cause” (Beet). From one Source; under one Ruler; all, ultimately, through one God. It is the unity of streams which all derive precisely similar waters from the one fountain; of troops of different arms and training, fitted for different service, under the orders and fulfilling the plan of the same Captain; or of many classes of servants under the same great Master of the house; of living ones whose life and all its activities come from the vivifying, inworking hand of the one Living God. At how many points are the many units summed up; at how many points of rapport do the diversified hosts of the Christian army find themselves in contact, one host. The unity goes down to the springs of the very principle of Life, for the Body and for the individual member; it mounts up to the One Lord Christ, towards Whom every heart, every face, every life, converges, with adoration paid to Him “as to God” [said Pliny’s letter]; it broadens out until it takes into its holy compass and round all who in grace and gifts manifest the presence of the same Holy Ghost, all who serve for the love of the same Lord, all in whom stirs the same life of God. Blind they who “cannot see the wood for the trees,” who cannot see The Church for looking at the Churches! Can they not verify the “manifestations” of the same Spirit? or ascertain that the “ministrations” are for and under the same Christ? Can they question whether the energy, in this and that Church or man so absolutely identical in all its effects, is of the same God? C. Dependence.—Interdependence—“No need of thee!” (1 Corinthians 12:21). That is not the voice of any component of the Body; it is not the intelligent voice of any member of a body. It sins against the very idea of an organism. And the Church is not an aggregation merely, like some chance heap of stones. It is not even an orderly structure merely, like a temple. The aggregation and order are those of an organic structure, those of a living organism. Put the statue of a man and a living man side by side, the very man (say) whose features and form and stature are copied, to the last degree of accurate correspondence. The one is made up of crystals, the other of living cells. How great the difference in the unity thus in each case set up. It may be mechanically an easier task to rend asunder cell from cell than crystal from crystal; more easy to damage the union and the unity of life than that of mere aggregation, though of the closest. [Against outward assault, the highly developed ecclesiastical, historic Church system is no doubt stronger in resisting power than the Church unity, whose one bond is an inner, vital one. The always dead, marble form persists unaltered for ever; the dead, cell-built form, which once was living, disintegrates with accelerating rapidity, from the moment the life departs.] But notice how the unity ends, as it began, with the mere contact of neighbour with neighbour. Each crystal of the statue-form is self-contained and perfect in itself: “I have no need of thee.” It receives nothing from, it gives nothing to, the next crystal on every side of it. It is nothing to the next, except that it happens to be next. As there are “Churches” whose unity has shrunk to little more than this, a unity of aggregation within the same four walls, for worship or for the enjoyment of some one preacher who happens to catch the ear of them all; or to a still more attenuated unity of bare registration upon the same Church roll. Paul’s frequent illustration of a temple is a little better. Upper stones are borne by those beneath them, and in their turn help to keep these in place, whilst also supporting others above themselves. Stone may lean against stone, and be upheld. But this “give and take” of support is mechanical, and it is all. It falls far short of that interchange of sympathy and help between the parts of a body, and between adjacent cells in the same organism, which makes the figure of “a body” so nearly perfect for the purpose of the Spirit’s teaching about the interdependence of the members of The Body. “God hath set the members in the body,” and in The Body, that member may help, and be helped by, member. An independence which should refuse to give anything to another, or should attempt to hold itself aloof in self-centered, self-contained, self-sufficing fulness of life, is utterly alien from His idea. Such “Christians” could never make a Church. [A selfish absorbency which will take all that the Church, or any member, can give, and yet forgets, or indolently neglects, to give to any in return, is equally alien to the idea.] Independency and selfish, parasitic dependency, stand equally condemned by the very principle of a body. Every single member has something to give me, which I need from him; every single member may demand from me all I have which can serve him. The debt of member to member is often very closely brought home to the heart, by some relation of circumstances which binds together a couple such as would have been supposed to be hopelessly incongruous opposites, in age, in social standing, or education, or mental calibre. Every Church can show its happy examples of the gladly acknowledged obligation of the rich master to his godly servant’s prayers and character; of the educated man’s manifold debt to the unlettered but saintly, Christian neighbour, with whom some “happy accident” in the providence of God has somewhat closely associated him. On the other hand, there are found not a few homely men and women, with good sense enough very thankfully to draw inspiration and help from the evident firmness of belief and from the cultured godliness of some educated Christian whom they know. It is pride, not gratitude, which is restless under this sense of indebtedness. The grateful, cheerful acknowledgment, “I have need of thee,” is politically, socially, as well as in the Church, the saving law of all happy corporate, organised life. The association and the reciprocal helpfulness are indeed much wider than the simple couplet “I … thee.” Member does often help member, in charming examples of direct and close personal association. There is often a tenderness and a beauty, which are in themselves a strength and a help, about this more easily and vividly realised help of individual to individual, which, when the relation is rather that of one to a great Whole, is lost, or is hardly so powerful a motive or bond. When, man to man, “the members have the same care one for another”; when the Christian is drawn to, and helps, some particular fellow-Christian; it is gloriously, and very practically, true that he is helping the whole Church. Few hearts can embrace “The Church”; but we can “love the brother whom we have seen.” Yet each may remember that the Whole does depend in some degree upon the One. No member but really puts something of value into the grand common stock, whilst in turn it is helped from the common store. Thus Dependence passes over into— D. Serviceableness.—Indeed, it has been difficult under C. not to anticipate D. 1. A man’s gift is not his own, alone or chiefly. He is graced and gifted most of all for the sake of the common good and the common growth. The ideal of the Body’s increase is not the independent and isolated growth of member and member, however perfect, each by itself working out its own development. Conceivably a hand might grow whilst its fellow-hand, or the foot, might linger at infantile strength or weakness. But such irregularly distributed growth might really disturb, not only the harmony, but the very unity of the body. No; the ideal is, “Till we all come—pari passu—to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ”; i.e. each member sharing in, keeping pace with, the development of the whole, till Head and Members stand forth one Body, one “perfect Man,” every part harmoniously and completely developed to manhood’s scale of size and strength (Ephesians 4:13). Toward this tends all the variety and distribution of the “spiritual (things)” of 1 Corinthians 12:1. It is designed for this. What one member is or has, or can do or be, or, under the training and discipline of the Spirit of God, can develop and can become,—all that is for the sake of all the rest. We may be sure it was pure instinct, however guided and organised, which originated the brief-lived community of goods in the sub-Pentecostal days in Jerusalem. The right heart of the “member” does not need schooling into this sharing of all the “good things” with which he himself is endowed. The very possession of any ability or faculty which can be laid under contribution for the welfare of a fellow-Christian or the Church, is in itself a claim for its use. The fitness for office is a call to undertake office. A hand ought to be doing a hand’s work. “To profit withal” must not be misunderstood (1 Corinthians 12:7). As matter of exegesis the “profit” thought of by St. Paul is the profit of the whole, not of the man himself. This latter is true, and is closely linked with the former. (God always does make duty to others and to Himself to go hand in hand with blessing to the man himself.) For his own sake, certainly, should a man strive to be at his best, his best, the fullest development of which he is capable,—eye, hand, foot, whatever be his place and capacity in the body. The men in the Parable of the Talents profit, with equal fidelity and with proportionate success, by the talents entrusted to them. But they are simply salient instances sufficient to illustrate the Lord’s principle. As a matter of fact, there will be many varying arrangements and gradations of faithfulness and increase. Five talents will sometimes only bring two, or even one, to the Master. Or, as in the complementary Parable of the Pounds, one talent may win two or even five. Each “member” should be growing to his best. He should be at his best for his own life’s sake. But what Paul here says, is that he should be at his best for Christ and for the body. Talent, faculty, unimproved or only half cultivated, is a sin against that law of serviceableness which lies at the very root of the idea of “His Body, the Church.” “Stir up the gift of God that is in thee,” is not an advice for Timothy only (2 Timothy 1:6). A gift is a fire which needs feeding and “poking”; God kindles it, but the man must guard and stir up the holy fire; not merely or most that his own life may be warmed and cheered by the blaze, but that “the Body” may be blessed by the gift that is in him. The possession is obligation. A Christian man may not deliberate or choose whether he will or will not give himself to serve his Lord and the Church. In what way he can, in that way he ought. He was made what he is, that he may be serviceable. He will receive his reward. The health of each several member is but a particular instance of the healthy life-condition of the whole body. If the whole man be in poor health, the hand is feeble, the foot begins to fail. As the man recovers, so under all ordinary conditions the foot or hand or eye renews its vigour. The most frequent form of the interdependence, as was shown above, is that which is mediate, through the body’s well-being as a whole; to which the part contributes, and out of which it receives its supply of blessing. So then, he that is at his best for the sake of the Body has his reward; he is at his best for himself. If, therefore, a man would get the utmost of advantage from the Divine institute, a Church, let him do his utmost of service, and be at his best of spiritual health, for the Church. But, once more, it is not merely interest; it is obligation. The body lives and grows by the active serviceableness of every member, whatever some aberrant member may do. The body never says to a member, “I have no need of thee.” “What am I? Hand, or eye, or foot, or ear, or what? What can I do for the Body? ‘Nothing?’ No; I am ‘set in the body’ with my own small capacity for something; I am not ‘of no use.’ Let the body, let the Head Himself, command me, and claim me, even me.” “Even me;” this leads up to 1 Corinthians 12:22-25. Ruskin has written his “Unto this last.” These verses are, in the political economy of the Church’s own life and social order, the Spirit’s “Unto this last.” We have— 2. The law of the least honourable; their real honour and their real obligation.— (1) “Less honourable” is only by comparison true, and by accommodation. In the holy innocence of Eden all the body’s life was honourable and holy. In the holy fellowship of “the Body of Christ” there is no member who is not honourable. Holiness and helpfulness, to the full of the capacity and opportunity—these are real honour. Poverty, or ignorance, or humble capabilities are no dishonour; these may set some lower in the scale, but they are degrees of nobility, all of them. The honour upon the Head runs down to the skirts of His raiment. One needs not to force Paul’s analogy into minute and even unseemly detail, but his general drift is clear. The face may be left bare in its beauty or its rugged strength; it can take care for itself. But many another part needs defence and covering. There are men conspicuous in the Body, of conspicuous gifts; they show full in every eye. No fear but that they will be known and honoured. There, in them, the Body has its outlook upon the world; through them it communicates with the world. But for one, two, ten, such, there are the score, the hundred, the mass, of less-obtrusive gifts and position, never likely to attract much attention, or to win much applause, even from their fellows in the Body; and there are passive and quasi-internal, normally hidden, “organs” in the Body Itself. Delicate, sensitive, easily hurt, incapable of self-defence, they need the shield of the stronger membership. There are feet and hands which must oft do rougher, laborious offices in the many-sided work of the Church, or even the drudgery of the carrying of the rest to the field of their “more honourable” toil. They can do no thinking, or organising, or governing; they must do the obeying and the executing of the orders of the “comely” and “honourable” parts. Or, like ear and eye, they can utter nothing, can originate nothing, they are silent and receptive; they can “do nothing,” they are apt to say, nothing but receive light and sound for the guidance, the warning, the comfort of the rest. “Less honourable,” perhaps, but still “honourable.” They are of the body; they are in the body for its service. That is their honour. The body needs them. (2) They are necessary. Indeed, perhaps one might push the figure so far as to say “indispensably necessary.” Certainly, in the actual physical structure, there are some small organs whose use is obscure; but he would be a bold, rash physiologist who should pronounce them superfluous, any smallest of them. Whilst we have been slowly and laboriously learning the function of this organ and the use of that part, they have been quietly doing their work and fulfilling their function, vindicating themselves as “wanted” in the whole economy of life. As certainly in the Body of Christ there are no dispensable members. The Body might live and grow, of course, without any one of them. But it would, pro tanto, be with an impoverished life. No member “of least account” (1 Corinthians 6:4) in the Church can withdraw his help and contribution, without making the Church the poorer. Happy that Church and its officers who know how to prize the service and worth of those “least honourable”! They cannot fill the pulpit, but they can sustain the preacher with sympathy and prayer. They cannot do much towards replenishing the treasury, but their devotion, their steady, year-in-year-out attention to their own little bit of work is an inspiration, or perhaps a rebuke, to the large givers and the prominent office-holders. They can create “an atmosphere” in whose sweet and healthy peace pastors and leaders and “workers” can pursue their tasks with hope and vigour. How much does “The Church,” in the largest sense, owe to its poor, to its pensioners, to the sick who can only suffer and pray, to the veterans who linger—not “lag superfluous”—upon the busy stage, where they can no longer play their active part, but where their very “style” is a formative tradition for the younger generation? These “less honourable” cannot do the fighting; they make no contribution to Apologetics. But they have been an “Apology for the Christian Religion” not easily ignored, less easily gainsaid or silenced. Written in no book, but exhibited in humble, “humdrum” lives. Without them the apologist defends Christianity in vain! How often life seems to have retreated to these hidden and humble members of the body, its last stronghold and safe asylum through days of widespread sickness or of epidemic worldliness! How often the quick spiritual “ears” have detected approaching mischief, which the bold, clear “eyes” ignored or disbelieved! There are a great host of members in the body who give it its sympathies, its sensibility, its heart; as there are many more who give, or who conduct and execute its plans and work. It were a hard, perhaps cruel, mighty machine without those; it were a weak, ineffectual thing without these. All are necessary; but the “least honourable” who are and who do that which brings little notice, and less public thanks and honour, are not “least necessary.” Happy and wise the Church which takes care not only for the defence and sustenance of such, but which puts upon retiring worth, upon humble godliness, upon sanctified routine workers, “more abundant honour.” On the whole topic it may be noted that when Menenius Agrippa availed himself of the figure of the Belly and the Members, to bring the Plebeians who had seceded to Mons Sacer (B.C. 494) into a humour to treat with the Patricians of the little Roman State; and when Plato illustrates a thought akin to that of our 1 Corinthians 12:26 by the community of the whole body in the pain of the wound given to a finger; they are on the track of one of the great thoughts—the archetypal ideas—of God in His ordering of Creation. Nor have these two, or St. Paul, any claim to have “discovered” the significant serviceableness of the figure of a human body to teach the laws of all “social life.” There would be as many such “discoveries,” as in any age, or race, or school there were thinking men. It is a particular case of the great principle, that the ultimate reason why things are what they are, and as they are, and not other and otherwise, is revealed to us as,—“Christ.” “All things were created in Him.” All the great thoughts of God have been perfectly spoken from the first in that “Word of God.” But these so aptly parabolic physical facts of the natural world, are partial, prelusive, and, so to speak, stammering utterances of these same ideas. The great trunk lines of idea and purpose in Creation all converge upon, all lead up to, all meet in, Christ. They are but returning to their point of origin: “Of Him,” originally, they are “unto Him” finally. Creation is full of Man from its earliest, geological antiquity onwards, upwards; and full of the Man (Hebrews 2) in Whom the ideal and history and destiny of Mankind are alone perfectly exhibited. The body’s highest function and purpose is to “speak concerning Christ and His Church” (Ephesians 5:32). 1 Corinthians 12:3. Jesus the Lord. I. This singular declaration as to the essential evidence upon which Christianity rests belongs to the earliest records of our faith.—It was delivered at a time when the religion of Jesus was making its first attempts to convert men. Humanly speaking, it could not have been pronounced a success or a failure. Its Author had disappeared from earth about thirty-three years; and notwithstanding its swift propagation, and the unusual fervency and faithfulness of its disciples, the annals of sects would have cautioned a mere historian not too confidently to pronounce upon the ascending fortunes and future reign even of a religion so vastly superior to all other schools of theology and morals. Suppose Christianity, during the first two or three centuries, had failed.… I can then imagine that its champions, perceiving that their system could never be sustained by ordinary historic canons, would affect to despise such literal standards, and appeal to the convenient authorities of the supernatural. This, indeed, has been the course of several false religions; they have begun in myths, when life was simple and reason imperfect and credulous; but as the age became educated they evaded historic scrutiny by disclaiming history, and rested their claims for acceptance upon inspiration and revelation. The realm of the supernatural has been the inaccessible retreat of the priesthood. But the doctrines of our faith are not the accumulations of after thoughts, for the relief of priestly exigency. They were laid down once for all in the beginning of the Church, when that Church was an untried institute; and first and foremost among them was the Godhead of Jesus as a dogma based upon the evidence of inspiration. II. The man Jesus, the Son of Mary, who lived in Palestine for thirty-three years; who acted as a man in connection with men, as a brother in the family of a house, as a human being in the functions of need and in the exigencies of distress; who at last died from the violence of murderous men; … is the Lord.… [Paul] meant all that was included in the Jehovah of the Old Testament.… III. This tremendous truth … cannot be accepted without Divine help.—No man … can state it as the natural conviction of his judgment. The truth has a history, and yet history is not sufficient to demonstrate it. If it were clearly historic, it would never be disputed. When you tell me that Jesus Christ was born and lived in Palestine, and taught disciples, and died, I understand you; for you have narrated what appears to be a natural event. But when you tell me that Jesus is the Great God, … [and the Creator of all He saw and ate and used], … you transport me out from the sphere of intelligible statement and testimony into wonderland. I hear, but I understand not.… I do not mean that the Godhead of Christ is naturally inconceivable, or that the dogma itself shocks or violates my sense of what is possible, but simply that the doctrine is above me. I cannot reconcile it with the laws and impressions of nature as I know them. Say that Jesus was a man; … I will go to greater lengths of admiration than any other man ever commanded, for the greatest power earth has ever known or will know; but it must be human power. I can say he shall fill the domain alike of genius, science, empire; but I cannot say that Jesus is God unless you add some other power to my mind, or stimulate to unnatural intensity the powers I have. St. Paul affirms that no man can.… The history of controversy has repeated it in every age. It is echoed in every treatise of modern theological discussion. The intellectual spirit of the day is plainly in sympathy with it. No man in the merely natural circle of his attainments and convictions can say that Jesus is the Lord. Modern philosophers maintain this … as if it had been left to them to discover; whereas Paul asserted it from the first. They tell us that the Incarnation is to the last degree unintelligible; that they prefer holding fast to what they know, to floating about in depths of mystic speculation. This jealous adherence to fact and distrust of faith, which is sometimes put forth as the latest scientific judgment upon the claims of Christianity, dates as far back as St. Paul; and he has described this temper of mind with as much candour and accuracy as if he had been a philosopher himself: “The natural man,” etc. (1 Corinthians 2:14). IV. The evidence by which this grand truth is affirmed … is the internal persuasion of the Holy Ghost.—Here we speak in parables to them that are without. The first step towards this confession is the conviction of sin by the Holy Ghost. I do not mean … of evil, wickedness, wrong. A man may be assured of these without any supernatural influence whatever; but a conviction of sin, of transgression against God’s law, of liability to eternal death—no man can feel this unless the personal presence of God is brought home to him; and this cannot be except through the revelation of the Holy Ghost. The misery following such a conviction will make a man strive against it, and learn by bitter failures his perfect helplessness. He seeks rest, a place of firmness for his feet; but the ground gives way; he “sinks in deep mire.” Preach Jesus to a man, with his guilt arrayed in terrors and his fears alarmed, with his self-despair and his eager cries for help, he not only sees no difficulty in accepting the Godhead of Christ, but he grasps it as the only truth that can give him comfort. A teacher of God can instruct him; a servant of God can intercede for him; an angel of God may minister with him: but the Son of God must save him. An inferior Christ would be nearer to him in rank, but a man Christ or an angel Christ would not be so near in sympathy as the Jehovah Christ. The soul bereaved of human help [finds] this the promise which lightens up her widowhood: “Thy Maker is thy husband.” That which makes Jesus our final resting-place is His Godhead; it is His equality with the Father which gives His blood an omnipotent potency as an atonement, which makes His priesthood irresistible and eternal, His presence illimitable. V. How easy for those whom the Holy Ghost has convinced of sin, who under the tyranny of its power have imagined what a counter-power that must be which could redeem us from it, to admit that Jesus is God.… It is still all mystery to us; and yet it seems natural, as if it could not but have been. It wears a familiar face. like the mysterious world of nature around us, which, because we are part of it, looks very homely to us.… With our eyes open and our hearts touched by the revealing Spirit, we feel that we belong to the Gospel world; we are the active and intelligent recipients of its laws and blessings. Its stupendous wonders, although far distant from our comprehension, seem almost close to us in the clear atmosphere of a fellow-sympathy. They are ours, and we are theirs. The incarnation of God is the inscrutable event of the universe. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/phc/ NOTES1. These need be very few; the language of the chapter is of the simplest, the thought inexhaustibly full. 2. Note, Paul, not John, writes this chapter on Love. 3. The “I” is not so much personal, as the ideal of a Christian life personified. 4. Connect closely with, begin reading at, 1 Corinthians 12:31. Also, go on from 1 Corinthians 13:13 to 1 Corinthians 14:1. Thus, then, the whole scheme of thought is: “Desire earnestly the greater gifts. Yet I show you something still greater, better. Look at Love! Love It. Covet It. Follow after It. Yet, as I was just now saying, desire earnestly the greater gifts, but Prophecy more than they.” The Order of Preference will therefore be: (1) Prophecy rather than Tongues or the like Charisms; (2) Love rather than even Prophecy, and much more than Charisms. 5. “Love,” of course, throughout. “Charity” is the Vulgate, and quasi-ecclesiastical, word; used in systems of Morals with a nearly technical sense. Our “charity” is in 1 Corinthians 13:3; and, less exactly, in 1 Corinthians 13:5,—“not provoked,” “thinketh no evil.”1 Corinthians 13:1. Tongues.—Connect with the “tongues” of, e.g., chap. 14. Tinkling.—Clanging (R.V.); q.d. incoherent noise, as opposed to the ordered, significant “speech” of real music. Tongues, prophecy, knowledge, faith,—most nearly to be desired as permanent endowments of the Church, but—nothing without love.1 Corinthians 13:2. Perhaps Prophecy an occasional gift only; Knowledge a permanent one. Knowledge.—As in 1 Corinthians 1:5, etc. Faith.—Not saving faith—that always works by love (Galatians 5:6); but such faith as Samson’s or Gideon’s; such as in Mark 11:22-23. All.—As usual with St. Paul (e.g. 1 Timothy 1:16), “all kinds, and all degrees of every kind.” Remove mountains.—Familiar phrase to Paul, Rabbinically trained, as used of Rabbis eminent for acute or subtle judgment, enabling them to clear up difficult questions or solve the knotty points of Rabbinical disputations. But here, with the larger sense of Christ’s use of the words, Matthew 17:20; Matthew 21:21. Nothing.—I become before God, and in reality, what I was once in the judgment of the world (1 Corinthians 1:28).1 Corinthians 13:3. Give my body.—Very expression in Daniel 3:28, LXX. Cases in 2Ma 7:5; Jos., Wars, VII: 8, 7. There had not at this date been any Christian martyrdoms by fire. Note the variant reading.1 Corinthians 13:4. Suffereth long.—“Longanimity” rather than “Magnanimity.” Look at James 5:7 (same word as here, twice); Luke 18:7. Puffed up.—As you Corinthians are (1 Corinthians 4:6; 1 Corinthians 4:18-19; 1 Corinthians 5:2; 1 Corinthians 8:1).1 Corinthians 13:5. Seeketh not its own.—Philippians 2:21; also 1 Corinthians 10:23-24. Easily.—Omit this; as, in similar case, “without a cause” (Matthew 5:22). Looks as if the simple statement of Scripture were too strong meat for some early transcribers! Thinketh.—Reckons, and reckons with; keeps no account of evil actually done or said; never assumes, or supposes, or infers, or expects evil, as a factor in reckoning or judging of men and conduct. [Perhaps also actively, as in Homily below.]1 Corinthians 13:6.—Notice (R.V.) in unrighteousness, with the truth. More accurate. Love stands by the side of, and has fellowship with, truth. If it were (per imposs.) to rejoice in unrighteousness, it would stand apart from it, even in its joy.1 Corinthians 13:7. Beareth.—Better than “covereth”; well illustrated in Paul himself (1 Corinthians 9:12). Endureth.—Same root as in word for “patience”; in New Testament always more than “submits to,” even if silently; “pressing on, and bearing up” (T. T. Lynch). Faith, Hope, Patience, in this sentence.1 Corinthians 13:8.—No verbal contrast (such as in A.V.), “faileth … shall fail.” Words different. “Faileth … shall be done away,” So at end of verse, and in 1 Corinthians 13:10. Favourite word of Paul’s (almost exclusively). Worth while looking at Romans 3:3; Romans 3:31; Romans 4:14; Romans 6:6; Romans 7:2; Romans 7:6; 1 Corinthians 1:28; 1 Corinthians 2:6; 1 Corinthians 6:13; 1 Corinthians 6:13 : as above, 1 Corinthians 15:24; 1 Corinthians 15:26; 2 Corinthians 3:7; 2 Corinthians 3:11; 2 Corinthians 3:13-14; Galatians 3:17; Galatians 5:4; Galatians 5:11; Ephesians 2:15; 2 Thessalonians 2:8; 2 Timothy 1:10; to make meaningless, powerless, or at least inoperative and valueless, in regard to some special purpose; so that it need no longer be taken into any account. Faileth.—Cf. Romans 9:6. Also cf. how Peter and James contrast the “falling” of the flower and the grass, with the “abiding word” of God. Love has the permanence of the “kingdom which cannot be shaken” (Hebrews 12:28).1 Corinthians 13:9. In part.—Lit. “from a part.” Evans graphically says: “As we know the moon, deriving our knowledge of her from the one, only, side we ever see.” [May we add, seeing slightly round the edge of the known part, owing to the “libration”?]1 Corinthians 13:10.—Stanley notes: Not when we come to it, but when it comes to us.1 Corinthians 13:11.—“Perfect” with Paul, e.g. 1 Corinthians 2:6; 1 Corinthians 3:1, commonly suggests the manhood of the Christian life, as opposed to its childhood. Hence the transition to the similar contrast of “manhood” and “childhood” here.1 Corinthians 13:12.—“In a (metal) mirror,” more accurate. Yet we seem to see the images through the mirror. Also, “in an enigma,” for “darkly”; yet we must suppose that we have some clue, and can half solve it, or we should have no knowledge at all, not even “in part.” “Face to face” and “in an enigma” are borrowed from LXX of Num 12:8. Also “know fully”; such generally is the force of noun and verb with Paul. (See how, e.g., 2 Corinthians 6:9; Colossians 1:6; 1 Timothy 4:3; Ephesians 4:13; Colossians 2:2, gain in force.)1 Corinthians 13:13. Abideth.—Singular. Each passes as it were in review. What shall be the verdict? Faith? “It abideth.” Hope? “It abideth.” Love? “It abideth! Yes, and is greatest!” See this same triad in Colossians 1:4 sq.; 1 Thessalonians 1:3; 1 Thessalonians 5:8; Titus 2:2, etc. The “theological virtues,” as distinguished from the “philosophical” or “cardinal,” wisdom, justice, valour, prudence. —Whole ChapterThe whole chapter breaks up into three paragraphs, grouping themselves around three central words:— I. All-important, and Indispensable (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). II. All-enduring, and Invincible (1 Corinthians 13:4-7). III. All-outlasting, and Immortal (1 Corinthians 13:8-13). So, then, we have A Sermon to the Church at Corinth, and to all other Churches whom it may concern. How truly Paul might have said, “I speak this to move you to shame.” He has shown them themselves, in their factions, their jealousies, their vanity, their “carnality” in its many-sided manifestations. And he has a good deal more to say yet. But, as if for relief to himself, he turns aside from the direct counsels and rebukes of the letter to look at and to show to them an ideal Christian life, which is pretty much everything that theirs is not. He is like Bunyan’s Interpreter, taking these Christians into “a little room” where sat “the two children, Passion and Patience, and Passion seemed to be much discontent, but Patience was very quiet.” “Passion” indeed, in their very gathering at the Lord’s Table; but what an atmosphere of peace here. “Corinthians, I have shown you yourselves. Look on that picture,—and on this! Do you not love Love? Will you not conform yourselves to this?” He is working on Divine lines, with Divine wisdom. Thus does the Paraclete convict (John 16:8) the world of Sin; by exhibiting Christ in the sharp and condemning contrast of His righteousness, that they may sit in judgment upon themselves and be saved. I. You boast of your “tongues.”—In your Church gatherings here one, there another, starts up, all over the assembly, and utters his ecstatic, unintelligible words. Those less fortunate, as they think themselves, who have neither the tongue gift, nor the humbler but very useful gift of the interpreter, covet the showy, startling endowment. Well, give any one of you the Charism in its largest range and measure; add whatever vehicle of language, in any land, or race, or age, man’s thought may use for its expression; add, if you will—if God will—the speech of angels, and of beings belonging to orders unknown and unnamed by man; and then let him talk away! If there be no love in his life, none in his heart, he will have no real, no worthy, message! Clang! clang! goes the cymbal; loud, empty, meaningless. What is it worth? Let some plain man get up instead, and speak, as it were some simple, sweet strain of love’s coherent music, full of help and comfort for his tempted neighbour. That poor devil-driven Saul sitting next you wants David’s harping, not your brazen clanging. But is there no help in the next man there? He is “a prophet.” Pentecost has come; the very “servants and handmaidens” now share the gift of the grand men of the Old Covenant days. The written Word is not yet completed, to be God’s abiding Message and Messenger to men. We want the prophet as yet. Yes, there is help in him; he has from time to time a message from God for the congregation. (But so had Balaam, and so had Caiaphas, a message from God on their lips!) He has even been taken into long-hidden secrets of the counsels of God, and he comes forth a man to whom they are “mysteries” no longer. He is initiated; he has esoteric knowledge; and he is authorised to make them now the common property of you all. Indeed, “the deep things of God” are not wholly unsounded by the man of “knowledge.” Yes, there is help in him; but is there Love in him? No? Then he has much, and can give you much, but he is—nothing. A mere conduit-pipe, a mere vessel, to be thrown aside, when by him God has brought you blessing, and with no real part in it all whilst he conveys it. But try this other man. Subtler of intellect than any Rabbi of the schools of my youth, he can outdo them in “removing mountains.” Let him lead the company of scholars, and the mountain difficulties vanish and fall; there is a plain highway for the simplest learner who follows in his footsteps. And has, then, this man of acute intellect Love? He could even with strong faith, if need were, bow Nature to him, and make the very mountains to be moved, almost as if their Maker bade them be uprooted. (Let the thought be pardoned!) Yes? But has he Love? Is there Love for God and man behind all this miracle-working might? No? Then the Master will say, “Miracle-worker, but worker of iniquity, I never knew you! Depart!” It profiteth him nothing! The preacher himself, the office-bearer, the richly endowed worker, needs to beware. There are the gifts, these or those, more or fewer; but is there the Life, whose Spring of strength, whose Law, whose formative, governing Principle is, Love? If not, Paul’s verdict, God’s verdict, is—“nothing”! Love is all-important and indispensable. II. But now what manner of men and women are the rank and file of the membership?—Fifteen marks are here of the Life which is Christian life indeed! Parade the members; bring them up to these official standards of requirement. This first cannot long bear to be unfairly rated and dealt with. He is soon on fire at a slight put upon him. He will not long be kept out of his rights. And as to those who thus give him less than his due, you will not find him putting himself out of the way to do them the least service; indeed, he has hardly time to be kind to anybody, even when the kindness is readily in his way, so eagerly busy is he speedily to right himself. This next has no good word, no kind thought, no thankful thought, for his neighbour who is doing better than himself in the world, and whose gifts are making his mark for him in the Church. He is eaten up with envy. The object of his envy is also in danger. See him come into the assembly of the Church, for business or for worship. It is almost with a swagger. You can almost see the insignia of his every office blazing upon his puffed-up bosom and enwreathed about his uplifted neck. He is highly gifted and able, and he knows it. He is inflated with the knowledge! Hear him speak, watch him at the business of the Church; it is a perpetual offence against all Christlike seemliness of word and spirit and behaviour. “Seeketh his own;” offices might be made for him; he accumulates them all, and himself is the centre to which all must converge. Try another. Those are not his faults; but take care how you vex him: he is “touchy,” and readily suspects an evil motive. Moreover, his memory keeps most accurate account of all wrong done to him. If an adversary of his makes a slip likely to damage fatally his case or his reputation, how he chuckles and “rejoices in the iniquity!” You hardly stir him to such joy when, perhaps at the price of no small struggle, Truth of principle, or character, or life, is gloriously exhibited. Try yet one more. He—or is it she?—bears everything with long patience and multiplied forgiveness; insists, as long as possible, on believing the best conceivable construction to be the true one, even though getting laughed at as “simple” for her pains; when her Belief is staggered by what seem stubborn facts, and can hardly persist longer in its “loving” estimate and judgment, then Hope steps in, and pleads that perhaps even yet things may be found to be different, or, if not, that perhaps the offender may some day repent; and if, driven out at last from even the refuge of her Hope, she can no longer help but know the simple, bad truth, then her Love will bear, and bear on, and bear up and onward with the brave endurance of the Patience of Love! Those others, the standard condemns them. This one will alone pass muster. And happily, these last are the staple of which Church life is woven. However it may have been in Corinth, the gifted ones and the great are not many in the Churches. There are always more of these plainer stones and common bricks in the building, than of the sculptured headstones and pillars and of the costly marbles. Happy the Church “enriched” with these long-suffering, kind, non-obtrusive, humble ones; of fair and seemly behaviour in every detail of speech and conduct; unselfish, hard to kindle with wrath, slow to remember wrong, and loth to suspect it; whose joy is the discovery and the triumph of the Right; incredulous of evil intent in anything, doggedly hopeful, even against “facts”; strongly patient of the inevitable worst. A Church composed of only such would conquer the world. Such Love is conquering all, even when it seems only to be enduring all. “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Such Love wins; it is invincible! III. But now as to these “gifts,” God’s gifts.—Is there not something better? Has He no greater thing than these to give? You look around you, and see His distribution of temporal good. Evidently He does not appraise it very highly, or He would not give it so freely to men who do not love Him, or thank Him, or glorify Him in the use of it. Certainly, if it counted for as much with Him as it does with the men of the world, His children would never be left without it. He not only “knows how to give,” but gives, “good things to His children.” Look within your Church, and see how He gives these Charisms, to you factious, envious, impure Corinthians, rather than (say) to my dear, loving, blameless Philippian friends; to you, indeed, beyond any other Church. They are His endowments; not to be despised; each in its order and sphere and measure to be used for His work and glory. But beyond such gifts He values Character. It is the one eternally abiding enrichment of your life. You boast of your wide and deep “knowledge”; but it is accompanied by a wider and deeper ignorance. What is right is only outline, and very much will need revising or unlearning when the Perfect has come. Not a little of it will have lost all meaning and value in the new world of eternity; it was so entirely knowledge of, and adjusted to, this world of temporary things. You see only one aspect of any fact at once; from this partial view you gain only partial knowledge, relatively true. (Do not be dogmatic, and intolerant of the man who gets his own partial view exactly as you do yours. Let love remind you of that!) See all around things, as you will some day, and the knowledge of to-day will seem the mere A B C of the schooldays of God’s little children; your most confident judgments will seem the half-knowledge and often erroneous opinions of the boy. In the manhood of that life you shall “know,” as even now God “knows” you, and appraises you accordingly. You have deep insight into things? Why, you never get face to face with things themselves. You see, not realities, but their dim reflections in a mirror; and what you see is a very enigma, baffling you as you try to “know” it. You may call it “knowing” when in that world you learn without error, effort, hindrance. The “tongues” will hardly outlast your own age. “Prophecy” will more and more rapidly pass out of use as the Great Prophet begins more frequently and clearly and sufficiently to speak to His Church by His Word and His Spirit. Yourselves change and pass; and those things change and pass with you. Get hold of the one abiding wealth, Character, whose foundation is Love. Love is eternal as God Himself. Character will go forward when your unchanging Self goes forward, with a continuity of existence unbroken even in Death. Seek to have it God’s own “Character,” Love. The Life of Love finds its sphere as simply and naturally there as here. Love is the one grace which needs no modification to adjust it to the new conditions of life and employment in that world. Faith, “abiding” till then, will have perished in the moment of its consummation, dying as it sees what it believed for. Hope—our Christian hope, “abiding” till then—will have merged in enjoyment. Love “abides,” even then, All-outlasting and Immortal. [Strictly belongs to 1 Corinthians 12:31, “A more excellent way.”] Love’s “Way” of Life.—[I.e. “Life” as βίος, not as ζωή, the life which is lived, not by which man lives; the life that makes the matter of a biography, not that which animates the creatures of zoology.] Introduction.—Observe the sobriety of Paul’s judgment. In reaction from the excesses, the irregularities, the vauntings of the men gifted with “tongues,” some would have gone to an extreme in the other direction, and would have suppressed their exercise altogether, or, if that were impossible, would have discredited and decried them (as perhaps, 1 Thessalonians 5:19). Paul, “speaking with tongues more than they all,” could hardly do this; yet his estimate of the “tongues” might well have been affected, adversely, by their abuse at Corinth, or, too favourably, by the fact of his own sense of the value of gifts. Some can praise no gift but their own, can value nothing but it, can do nothing but overpraise it; or can keep no clear vision and calm balance of judgment when a good thing is abused. Paul: “Covet earnestly the best gifts,” viz. knowledge, prophecy, tongues. “They are all good; prefer prophecy to tongues; but there is something better yet—Love.” And this love is not so much a gift or a point of character; it is a “way,” a path, in which all gifts are to be sought and employed. It is I. A life; II. A rule of life. [I.e. like the Jewish Halachah, it is “the Way,” and “the Rule” which marks out “the way.” Love is the one all-embracing Christian Halachah, a Christian preceptive Talmud condensed into a word.] In both senses a novelty. I. A life.— 1. Striking that not wisdom, nor intellect, nor strength of character, is made the starting-point of the Gospel conception of life. No; but the one universally possible characteristic. The child, therefore, and the humble poor, the simple and unlettered, the scarce-recovered heathen, can live it. It is a “way” smooth for the feeblest foot, and level to the entrance and use of the lowliest. How few could hope to live the life of the philosopher or the ruler. All may live the life whose characteristic is love. The very conception of any other life must be to most a hidden secret. The conception of this style of life stands open to the thought and heart of all. All other ideals which teachers have sketched out and held up are for the few; this is for the many—for all. 2. [Cf. the description of the high-souled man in Aristotle, Ethics, 1 Corinthians 6:3 (as quoted in Luthardt, Moral Truths, p. 292). “It is also characteristic of him that he does not rush to places and opportunities which are highly esteemed, and where others have already played the first part; that he is in general but slowly roused except where a great honour or a great work is concerned,” etc. “He is candid, because he looks upon men with contempt; hence he is always inclined to speak the truth, except in cases when he ironically reserves his real opinion, a part which he may well play with respect to the multitude.” “Nothing can easily astonish him, because nothing is great in his eyes.” “Even in externals it is generally admitted that the gait of the high-souled man is slow, his voice deep and emphatic, his words few. For a man to whom few things are important is not inclined to haste, and he who regards nothing as great does not exert his voice.” All of which, when brought into the light of the New Testament, and judged in the presence of ideal human life as seen in The Man Christ Jesus, is simply Pride. As Luthardt adds: “So too the wise man, the Stoic ideal, is the representative of indifference towards men, and his morality is nothing more than cold resignation.”] 3. This is an ideal of life, moreover, which can be true for both man and God. Divine love translating itself into human expression, and exhibiting itself within the limits of human conditions, is seen in the God-Man, Who is in this, as in all else, the Mediator between, the Unifier of, God and man. 4. What a perplexity to reason that such a lovely ideal should have to suffer, to “endure”! 5. Moreover, it will not be content to exist as a mere passive virtue. It is very characteristic of Christianity throughout, that the strain of 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 should seem to be one of endurance and self-contained goodness and peace. The points of character lie within the circle of the man’s own personal life, and that rather as he is acted upon by, than as he is an actor in, or himself affecting, other lives. Yet, as matter of experiment, it is clearly certain that neither in man nor God can a life whose germinant principle is Love, be merely passive, or patient; it will be active, going out all around in search of objects on which it may spend its force. The love of God has sought man out; it has always made the first approaches in view of reconciliation and fellowship. Though God’s love is not (in Butler’s words) “a bare and singular disposition to bestow happiness,” this is its inevitably prevalent characteristic. And in man, where it is, it acts. It is as busy as it is patient. It discovers reasons for doing good, and develops a wonderful ingenuity in discovering methods of accomplishing good. Love gives wonderful wisdom, and there is no other spring of persevering activity which will not at times, or altogether, find its force outmatched or outwearied and exhausted. “Love never faileth.” II. A rule of life.— 1. All external directions and legislation must needs fail somewhere. Many cases will “crop up” which have not been, in so many words, provided against. Many rules will cease to be needed, or to be applicable. New rules are needed, often upon the instant, when there is no time for reference to authority, or indeed for any lengthy deliberation of the judgment. The one perfect legislator is a fully enlightened Love. No case can arise, so unexpectedly or so completely without precedent, but that a healthy heart, filled with that love which is the grace of the Spirit, will be equal to giving direction. Love will keep the moral sense active, the “touch” sensitive. It will need training, enlightening, informing, but it has in it an instinctive, native, legislative faculty. “What does God command? What does the Bible say?” “There is no express decision at all.” “What is customary?” “There has been no precedent within my knowledge.” “What does So-and so advise?” “There is no time to consult him.” “What does Love say? What would Incarnate Love have done? What would God’s love do?” A “law” for the occasion, which will not be far from the mark, will not be hard by that test to discover. 2. The niceties of justice, of courtesy, of kindness, between man and man can only be regulated by some such inner guiding “Law.” The finer points of personal bearing towards others, such as are expanded by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, need inculcating upon the child. For self-assertion is natural to man, however much society “manners”—which are, in this particular, cut-flowers that once grew upon the root of Christian love—may repress or refine its manifestations (see Fragments from Robertson). [No more perfect “gentleman” than Cicero; but the natural heart shows in such a sentence from a letter to his intimate friend Atticus (1 Corinthians 1:14, as given in Farrar), “Heavens! how I showed off” (cognate word to Paul’s “vaunteth”) “before my new auditor, Pompeius!”] But the only absolutely effectual education or repression will be that of the instinct of Love acting from within. “As the man thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7); most simply and truly, in that the real man is in the purposes of the heart, whether they come to the surface in expression or not; but also in the equally true sense that what the man is within that he will, in many points, certainly when “off his guard,” appear. “The man maketh the manners” (Evans, in Speaker), when the very germ and the summary also of the character is Love. 3. This is an atmosphere, an aroma, hanging about, given off by, a Christian life in every detail. It will control the desire for “gifts”; only those will be cared about which Love can use. It will control their exercise; they will only be employed for the purposes, and within the limits, which Love will allow. It is an inward “ointment which bewrayeth itself” [Proverbs 27:16, borrowing the illustration, though not the thought]. As the thought of a man is found by the “thought-reader” to betray itself in unconscious muscular action; so will the thought whose summing up is, most comprehensively, “Love,” betray itself in action, even when not directly intended by the man, or not distinctly adverted to by him. It makes, and marks, the “good man,” as distinguished from the “righteous man,” of Romans 5:7. 4. Give rules enough, and you may secure any required number of right acts; but you must get a right heart if you desire righteousness. Put love in, and you may get by outgrowth from within a Christlike life. 1 Corinthians 13:1-3. Without Love—Nothing!I. Applicable to the Church.—This goes back to an earlier thought in this letter to Corinth (chap. 1). Over against the great, swelling, proud entities of the world, Paul there sets the non-entities of the Gospel. God had already set them in array over against each other. Forces intellectual, social, political, the inclinations of the natural heart, its judgments, its desires, its passions, were all against the early Church. But it “brought to nought things that are.” The “power and the wisdom” of God in Christ brought to nought “the power and the wisdom” of the princes of this “world.” The thing that was “despised,” and was “set at nought” in the valuation of the world [as the Stone Himself had been “set at nought”], “overcame the world.” The nothings conquered the somethings. And what was true of the Church was true of the individual Christian. The woman, the child, the slave, often won the master, the house. The Decian persecution seemed to bring the hopes and prospects and numbers and strength of the Church to their lowest. But many a sufferer in the Decian troubles lived to see, after no long interval, a Christian emperor upon the Imperial throne. It is true simply to say that God “saw to it” that His work triumphed. The power of God was in the victory. But His power works by means, and uses instrumentalities; it accomplishes its purposes through and by means of the conditions and elements of ordinary human nature and life. Regarding the matter from this point, one might, must, say that the secret of the victory was “Love.” “Charity” conquered. Force might have crushed force. [“They that take the sword,” in defending or extending the kingdom of Christ, “shall perish by the sword.”] But force broke itself upon Love. The waves found Love an immovable rock against which their power was dissipated in vain spray. The “meek inherited the earth” (“wielded the world,” as the Wycliffe gospel has it) because of their “meekness.” The reed-sceptre ruled, where the rod of iron could only have coerced. Love was the secret of resistance and of conquest. The meekness, the patience, the forgiveness of injuries, the kindness which laid itself out to compass the good of their very persecutors, [protesting (e.g. in Tertullian, Apol., c. 39) that it was loyal to the government and prayed for the emperor],—these were all aspects of Love, the love which was as new a thing to the world, in language and thought, as it was in life and facts. Without this, for the conquest of the world, the Church had been “nothing.” A lesson for all time. It is “a universal law” of the extension of the kingdom of Christ. If all the Church had been “enriched” with gifts as the Corinthians were (1 Corinthians 1:4-7); if literally all the Church had spoken with “tongues”; if Moses’ wish had been literally realised, “and all the Lord’s people had been prophets” (Numbers 11:29), and had had “knowledge” to which no thought of God in His purposes toward man was any longer “a mystery”; if miracle-working faith, instead of being confined to narrow limits of place and age, had been the every-day, mountain-moving, mighty power, always at the command of the Church; if every Christian had been as wealthy as a Barnabas, and as liberal, so that the charities of the Church, not only towards its own “poor,” but towards the poor outside its membership, had been a hundredfold greater than they have ever by any possibility been; if a whole Church had stood before the world “ready to be offered,” or actually offered, to death, and that by fire,—yet the world would not have been conquered. By such means it never will be. These things have their meaning and their use; they have been factors in the great result, which meant the empire won, and a Christianity associated with the permanently progressive, intelligent, world-affecting, race-leading civilisation of the centuries, ever since the victory over the empire. The miraculous gifts, for example, were, like the bell tolled to announce that the worship is going to begin, arresting attention, awaking interest, inviting to participation, but ceasing after their brief, initial work was done. Not without these things, perhaps; the martyrdoms were an exceedingly impressive argument to every heathen spectator. But even given these things, not without Love. Gifts; eloquence in the literature or the press of the Church; deep and broad philosophy in the exponents and defenders of Christianity; the almost miraculous power of enthusiasm and of strong faith in the doctrines, the fortunes, the future, of Christianity, or of a special creed or Church; charities; martyrdoms of ascetic, or laborious, spending of life,—these alone are but the body; Love is the soul. These may be the instruments; Love wields them, and the victory is hers. All these have been divorced from Love many a time. The learning and acuteness of apologetics and polemics and didactics have undergone a transfiguration as fearful as when a demon entered into and looked out from the eyes, and uttered himself through the lips, of perhaps some tender father or affectionate son; love has been cast out by a stronger spirit, of evil. Almsgiving has become bribery to buy adherents to a sect, or a method of earning merit for one’s own salvation, or even of winning applause of men. At one period there was almost an epidemic of madness for volunteered martyrdom, which did not wait for the informer, but thrust itself upon the notice of the heathen magistrates, men and women claiming to be noticed as Christians; the motive being, in fact, not Love’s witness, unto death, for the Master, but the same winning of merit. The asceticisms of nearly every section of the Church have been martyrdoms whose whole character is altered, whose value is gone, because they have become voluntary sufferings, inflicted as the purchase-price of merit; self-love, not love, thus being, with more or less subtilty, their motive. To God these are nothing. As giving to the Church any real hold of, or victory over, the world, though they may seem to achieve a temporary and limited admiration and success, if these be her armour or her weapons, the Church is nothing. God cannot work through a loveless Church. II. Applied to the Christian man.—If the individual Christian have not, or lose, this characteristic and essential mark of life, he too has reverted to his old and true and native valuation before God. He is one of the “things that are not” (1 Corinthians 1:28),—“nothing!” “Of Him are ye.” All standing and life are of God and His grace. “Christ is made unto him” all that he is or has (1 Corinthians 1:29). “If he have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His” (Romans 8:9). And the “fruit of the Spirit” is “love.” “By this do all men know that he is a disciple, that he has love” (John 13:35). The charity of this chapter is the “love” of the Second Table (so-called) of the Law. But it has arisen out of “the love of God”—His to us—first “shed abroad in our heart” (Romans 5:5); with so close a connection that if the love of the brotherhood be wanting, it argues the absence of the love of the Father, and this, that the Father’s forgiving, adopting love (Romans 8:15-16) has never been known, or has been forfeited. Status, life, love—all with Paul are linked in vitally close association. A man may therefore test himself by this paragraph. “What must I do to be saved?” is one earlier form of the question. But afterwards, and frequently, “What must I be to reckon myself a Christian?” He may cast Paul’s inventory into analogous, modern forms, and say, “What have I?” 1. “Profession?”—It is something that a man can speak the “tongue” of God’s modern Israel—“the language of Canaan” (Isaiah 19:18). The dialect does not come naturally to, or sit with facility upon, the lips of a foreigner. It is the man who has “entered into the kingdom of God” by being “newborn” into it (John 3:3; John 3:5), and who has spoken it from his “new-birth” onward, who talks it “like a native.” He can detect the accent of a stranger who has merely “picked it up.” Yet the native citizen may lose his citizen heart without losing the old trick of speech. The prodigal among the swine will speak there with the gentleman’s accent he learnt at home from the father. “If a man say,” etc. (1 John 4:20). He may “say,” but lip evidence is not enough even for himself. Is that all? “Nothing!”2. “Intellect?”—There may be, happily, the closest alliance between intellect, naturally of the highest and most highly trained, and Christian revelation. Its believers and defenders and exponents have by no means been fools or unversed in learning. Augustine, Pascal, Butler, would have been intellectual giants, whatever their creed or their theme. Yet whilst great gifts have been consecrated in all their abundance to the service of Christ, again and again have the great thinkers been also simple believers. Indeed, they may “play the man” in the fight for Truth; but they must, each of them, be “the little child” in order to be Christians in any real, personally beneficial, saving sense. Intellectual appreciation of Christianity; hearty approval of its ethics and laws; and mastery both of its difficulties and its supports; intense vehemence in its defence against opponents,—all these may be divorced from the distinctive love for Christ or for redeemed man. “Nothing!” The noblest intellect is a noble gift to offer upon the altar of consecration. It finds no small acceptance with God. But if only the intellect has grasped Christianity, the man is not yet a Christian. Indeed, he only as yet knows the externals of Christianity, as he might know and defend Buddhism or Mahometanism. The loving heart of the pardoned, regenerate sinner alone knows Christianity. The intellect may give allegiance to the system of Truth; the loving heart alone gives union with Christ. That makes the Christian. Without it, the adherent of one amongst many creeds of the world,—“Nothing!”3. “Enthusiasm?”—A great power, which, when joined with the grip upon, and the allegiance of the intellect to, the Truth, makes a man a mighty worker. It may give “driving” power to the organiser and the ruler in the Church’s offices; it will to himself be a “staying” power. He may rouse others with his gift, a born leader of men. He may “pull things through” to a victory snatched out of the very jaws of defeat, when all but himself were despondent, or ready to yield. With enthusiasm and natural energy a man may “work” a Church as he would “work” a business, or some secular society, and may do it very successfully. But there come moments of self-revelation to men, when, under the searching light of the teaching Spirit, they discover that a passionate devotion to a particular Church, or to some special department of Christian work, with an enthusiasm and success which have made them bulk in the public eye as forefront “Christians” in labour and fruit, has been unaccompanied with the deep devotion of Christ Himself, without which men may “push” the business or the agencies of the Church as successfully, and in as secular a spirit, as they do their own business, or may be as devoted to the fortunes and interests of their Church or sect as they are,—and with precisely the same kind of devotion,—to their political party. “Nothing!”4. “Good works and charities?”—[God’s estimate of “good works,” let it be remembered, is qualitative, not quantitative. Further:] These may have many meanings besides love. [There was more than a child’s fun in the definition, “ ‘Charity’ is giving poor folks old stuff you can’t use yourself.”] (1) Mere weakness which cannot say, “No”; (2) A self-indulgence which gives, to get as quickly as may be out of sight and mind the unpleasantly painful object of “charity”; (3) An attempt to quiet conscience; (4) An indolence which cannot bear the trouble of inquiring into the truth of the applicant’s case, and still less of undertaking the often extremely difficult task of discovering how really to help the case; (5) A mere compliance with surrounding example or custom, from fear of singularity; (6) Self-glory. Indeed, no “religious” action needs watching by the actor more closely than does charity; none more readily misleads the man himself; nothing more readily than almsgiving can be accomplished without “love.” The motive which prompts almsgiving may indeed be a very real and genuine benevolence of heart. But if it be benevolence which has no eye set upon Christ, nor draws inspiration from His love shed abroad within, it is not yet enough. “Dole” away! “Dole” until you are yourself a beggar! Is that all? “Nothing!”5. “Devotion to self, self-denial, of the most rigorous, even to death?”—But whilst “death” may mean strength of principle, and of faith, it has meant, and may mean, stubbornness and obstinacy which would not go back of yield when once a position had been taken up and the man was publicly pledged to it; i.e. Pride. Labours or austerities that ruin health, or even end in death, may be the merest caput mortuum of a religious life, from which all that once gave them such imperfect meaning and value as they had, has evaporated. They may become the merest mechanics of a religious profession, from which all soul and love have departed. All these? Yet perhaps “Nothing!”6. Happy, then, if by the gift and grace of the Holy Spirit—whether with or without some, or all, of these—the man’s self-examination says, “Yet I do love!” (cf. John 21:17). 1 Corinthians 13:2. Man-worth. I. The greatest thing in the universe is Mind. The greatest thing in Mind is Love.—Whatever a human intelligence may be, have, or do, if destitute of love, it is nothing. 1. Not the gregarious sentiment which links us to our fellow-creatures. That is an instinct common to animal existence; in some men stronger than others, making those who possess it in the highest degree “amiable, good-natured.” Much domestic love and social benevolence is nothing but a development of this. It is a blessing, but not a virtue. There is no morality in it. It can feed the upas tree as well as nourish a tree of life. 2. Not theological love for one’s own faith and sect, which pours forth tender and pathetic benedictions upon all within the limits of one’s own creed, but fulminates anathemas upon all besides. This is not love; it is a demon working under the mask of the angel “Love.” 3. Nor sacerdotal love, “which speaks eloquently about the cure of souls and Church extension, but little about the physical and social woes of the race.” Priestly selfishness, not manly love. 4. We may describe, we cannot define, it as a generous moral sympathy for the race springing from love to the Creator. All real philanthropy will have its source in piety. Such love is no spasmodic emotion; it is an all-pervading element, the underground of character, the heart of the heart, the soul of the soul. It places man’s entire being in a right relation to God and the universe. It was incarnate in Jesus. This love alone can confer real worth on humanity. “What is he worth?” means not, “How much native force, spiritual attainment, or divine soul has he?” but, “How much money?” Gold outweighs soul in the social balance. Fill your purse, and though your soul be empty, you are great. “Wealth is the one thing needful; Mammon is God; love of the world is inspiration,”—such is the Gospel of the age! II. Without this love, man is nothing spiritually— 1. In relation to Nature.—Whatever does not minister to the spiritual in man does not minister to himself. Nature gives sensuous pleasures, measured in variety and extent by the senses. To a sensuous man “the world is a larder to feed him, a wardrobe to clothe him, a market to enrich him; or, at most, a riddle to amuse his intellect.” She gives intellectual pleasures, but thinking is necessary to their participation; they flow from nature only when it is turned into a science; the fountains of mental pleasure are concealed until by the Moses-rod of philosophic thought the outward crust of the flinty rock is broken through. But the spiritual pleasures she gives are the highest. Nature is then looked at through the heart, the self. “It is not merely a table for the animal, or a problem for the thinker; but a loving home for the child, a temple for the adoring saint. To impart these highest joys of nature is Nature’s highest function.” Love entering into the heart of a sensuous, selfish, or merely intellectual man, touches all nature into a new form, burns up his old world, causes its elements to melt with fervent heat, its heavens to pass away, till he rapturously exclaims, “A new heavens and a new earth! The former things are passed away!” To the sensual, nature is gratification; to the thinker, it is theory; to the loving, it is heaven! Without love “I am nothing” in relation to the spiritual enjoyments of nature. 2. In relation to Providence.—Providence is only absolutely good when it is realised that its grand design is moral goodness; “not to make a Dives in time, but a Lazarus in eternity.” If Providence only raises a man to fortune, enriches him with knowledge, or lifts him to fame, and does not refine and purify his sympathies, expand and elevate his soul, it has been a bane rather than a boon. Material blessings to a bad, unloving heart are spiritual curses. The ten thousand influences of Providence—its sun, its rains, its gracious breezes—make the healthy germ rooted in the soil of love rise every day into new forms of beauty and life; but the tree with no such rooting is by them all only stripped of its remaining verdure, and hastened to its dissolution and decay. As the mortally diseased may say, “I am nothing to the health-giving economy of nature,” so the unloving may say, “I am nothing in relation to the spiritual blessings of Providence.” Romans 5:3 sqq. links the series Tribulation, Patience, Experience, Hope, Confidence that fears no Shame, “because the love of God,” etc. “All things work together for good to them that love God.” The very God of Providence can make them so work together for none others. 3. In relation to Christianity.—Love alone can interpret love; none but the loving can rise to the meaning of such a revelation of love as Christianity. Power in philosophic analysis, accuracy in dialectics, skill in criticism, will be incapable of understanding its essence and genius. They may understand Theology, but not Christianity. The one is for the intellect, the other for the heart; and only the heart of love can reach it. It is a real unction from the Holy One, [a charism of the Spirit] by which, alone, we know all things in Christianity. Still more, that which renders us incapable of entering into its meaning, unfits also for applying its “exceeding great and precious promises.” They are for the children of love, and for them only. Its sublime disclosures and its quickening spirit, its promises of mercy and its radiant glories,—without love to them “I am nothing.” 4. In relation to the community of the good.—The “city,” the “church,” the “family,” wherever they exist, have the same bond of union, the same condition of friendship, the same justifying principle, the same standard of work. Not wealth, learning, talent, birth. In corrupt “society” especially does the first make a man a respectable member of it, however callous or evil his heart. But in the great community of the good, love is everything. Whatever else a man may have, if he have not this, he is not admitted into their circle, he is excluded from their fellowship. To this glorious community, without love “I am nothing.”—Adapted from “Homilist,” New Series, i. 433. 1 Corinthians 13:5. “Thinketh no evil.”—“Does not reckon, or reckon with, evil, does not take evil into the account.” Such is the full meaning of the word, which is thus a very far wider grace than merely an absence of suspiciousness of spirit and judgment. “Suspects no evil” is included; but there is much more. It suspects none, and imputes none; it entertains no thought of resentment, and devises no evil. I. Attributes no evil to others, nor thinks of such a thing. II. Contrives no evil against others, nor thinks of such a thing. I. 1. There are problems in life, of exceeding complexity, questions for our judgment and foresight, which must be solved. Not the smallest element in the complexity is introduced in the very fact that the character and conduct of men and women are involved; and character and conduct are problems in themselves, problems within the problem, often of yet greater complexity. We do not understand ourselves, of whom we know the elements of the problem more fully than we can ever hope to do in the case of any one else. Yet who has not found the disentangling of motive, for example, of worthy from unworthy, of blamable from laudable, and the resulting judgment upon the moral quality of his own conduct, a thing past his own wisdom and skill? Who has not, therefore, had to cast himself wholly upon the mercy of the one judgment that is built upon all the facts, and those read with Absolute Wisdom and Absolute Justice? Not yet do we know even ourselves “as we are known.” And how much less others? 2. Yet we must form an estimate. The Master said, “Judge not,” yet directly after bade His disciples “cast not pearls before swine.” They must, then, be able to judge who are the swinish men. Officially, at any rate, men must often “judge” others, and must speak out at all cost their judgment, whoever may be condemned or ruined. No man with a moral sense awake can help forming, swiftly and instinctively, a judgment, favourable or unfavourable, upon a thousand things he sees in the character and conduct of men around him, or even upon what he hears—suspending, in this case, his judgment upon the man, until he learns whether the facts be as reported. 3. There is a blind, foolish confidence which will not hear, or see, or be told; a simplicity which is the sport and the prey of every rogue; a simplicity which “passes on and is punished.” Carried to that extent, it is folly, not honour; childishness, not childlikeness. But it is an error in an honourable direction. There is no type of man less noble or exalted than the man of preternatural shrewdness, whose boast it is that he can always see through the millstone, that he is never deceived, and that nobody ever can blind him, who “numbers, weighs, and measures” everybody in scales of unfailing accuracy, and who has no misgivings about his skill or his method, even though somehow those weighed by him are always “found,” at least a little, “wanting.” That is a hateful type of man whose cardinal maxims are that he “never trusts any man any further than he can see him,” and “never believes a man honest until he cannot any longer believe him a rogue.” In solving the problem of men, their characters and conduct, his rough-and-ready method always is to “think evil” first; he will always first assume that “evil” is one of the elements of the problem; he “reckons with” that. 4. One would have thought that experience would abate the self-confidence of such a habit of judgment. How often has fuller, later knowledge of the persons and the facts shown that all the harsh judgments were unfounded and unfair; that, indeed, all our thinking and talking has been waste of time and words, all our virtuous indignation was quite gratuitous, and our disturbed feelings were nothing but needless distress! We had been pronouncing a judgment where we had not all the facts. No doubt bitter experience will show the most guileless and unsuspecting that all men are not worthy of trust; but some are thus worthy in the highest degree, some are so in an unexpected degree, and the average of even the world is high. “Be wise as serpents, harmless as doves.” 5. In even the graver matters of moral conduct there is room for the moderating hand of experience to restrain hasty judgment. We have seen a man sin—there was no room for question; have heard him speak unadvisedly. But fuller knowledge of his education and training, consideration of the subtle influences of inherited-physical conditions, have not indeed destroyed his responsibility, but have lightened his blameworthiness a little, and have modified what must needs be our condemnation. Only One Eye can take in—where there has been manifestly a poor performance of duty, or a very clear failure—all the struggle that went on before, and the repentance that came after; all the fight in which the poor fallen fellow for a long time held his own, and conquered, until the one fatal moment when he failed and fell. When the wrong, supposed or real, impinges upon oneself, it is doubly hard to be fair. Yet experience ought to contribute to teach a Christian man to “think no evil,” or at least as the first stage to “believe all things” to be the best, and to hope for some extenuation and abatements, when there is no longer room for simple acquittal of all blame. Yet not experience, nothing but a Love, which is not an easy-going temperament, too indolent to be severe or to be angry, but a grace, will cast out the habit of “taking evil into account.” To Love, the first presumption will be in favour of something better than appears. It will not readily believe evil of any, nor, except with much reluctance, review a favourable estimate long ago formed. When Love is judge, it will always be on the prisoner’s side. An evil solution is the last thing it will look for in the problem. It will take precaution, but not entertain suspicion. It will first put the best construction upon what is confessedly staggering to confidence, or difficult to understand. It will begin by believing the best it can about any man; it will first credit him with all the best intentions which can reasonably be supposed,—believes whilst it can; hopes when it hardly can hope; endures when it really cannot believe the best. The shrewd man “rejoices in iniquity”; chuckles that his harsh judgment was verified and his acuteness vindicated. The man of love “rejoices in the truth”; and that, even when the “truth” of the man suspected or blamed, has proved his “shrewd” suspicions to have been groundless. Love, like God, hates sin, but loves to “cover” sin with a veil of forgiveness. It does not love to carry even the memory of evil. 7. Such an indisposition “to think evil,” in our common phraseology often appropriates to itself, in a special application, the name “charity.” But charity in judgment needs to be kept clearly distinct from laxity. Laxity plays fast and loose with the standard; charity is cautious in applying it to an individual man. “Toleration in some men’s mouths means liberty to be as careless about religion as they are themselves” (Guesses at Truth). Kindness before truth is no “Charity.” There are broad lines of wrong and right which no man who is a Christian can leave open to challenge, and by them it is inevitable that conduct [and, on similar lines, opinions or doctrines held] should be condemned. But he hesitates to condemn the man. The history of the word “heresy” shows how close, as matter of observation, is the connection between the state of the heart and will, and the results arrived at by the intellect. Yet whilst general principles of responsibility are clearly insisted upon, they are only with much reservation applied by “charity” to any particular man. The Divine Judge may exempt some when man’s charity cannot, and indeed, with its knowledge of the facts, ought not to acquit. Man may, with the purest heart and from the very intensity of loyalty to Christ and truth, condemn in error. And, at all events, love “thinketh no evil.” Especially in theological controversy, whilst each must “contend earnestly” for the aspect of the whole Truth which is given to him and to his Church to teach and defend, motives should not be lightly imputed; and it should not readily be supposed that the holder of what seems a mischievous doctrine will follow it to its logical consequences. He may; Facts may be too strong for Love; but at any rate Love does not begin “reckoning up” the man and his doctrine by “taking evil into account.” II. Love plans no evil.—Here again Love is Godlike. 1. Need hardly nowadays take into any practical account positive religious persecution of any physical type. But there is need that a Christian man watch his own heart lest anything akin to revenge linger within. There may have been more than they know of personal feeling in some of the strong measures taken by professedly Christian men—who not infrequently were really such—against those who differed from them in theological opinion, or in some points of Christian or civil regulation or morality. The petty persecution, or annoyance, in an English village, which one form of religious faith may, with many a strange excuse and disguise to itself, devise against another, is something less than the love which “plans no evil.” In all opposition, whether of doctrinal controversy or practice, to condemn the opinion without bitterness, or distrust, or contempt, towards the man, is difficult. But love harbours no such evil, nor dreams of it; and casts it out, if it be found lurking within. No Christian man would ever deliberately plan harm gratuitously; nor even as a part of a revenge which calls itself “punishment”—no matter how greatly he has been wronged. To do so would be so utterly incongruous with the very life of God—the life of Love—as to argue either that there never had been any Christianity which was more than nominal, or that a real Christianity had declined and died. “Good for evil is Godlike; good for good is manlike; evil for evil is beastlike; evil for good is devil-like,” says old Mason. But what honest heart has not hated itself to find, if not exactly no unwillingness to see others “paying off his score” for him, yet at least a half-pleasure and satisfaction when some ill, which he would himself never have devised, falls upon the offender from some other source. The world’s wisdom checks the feeling so far as this (in the words of a Baralong proverb): “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls in the path; there are more slippery places in front.” A half-coward fear reminds a man tempted to ill-will that “curses, like chickens, come home to roost.” But this chapter lifts up the whole matter to a higher level, when it says, “Thinketh no evil,” towards, as well as of, another. Then the very wish to harm is gone. The thought of the offender suffering is foreign to the very instinct of the loving heart. It is a real pain to love to hear or see the wrong-doer suffer. Love cherishes no evil thought towards the offender. Godlike love has entirely and heartily cancelled the offence as well as foregone a penalty. [“Godlike.” Yet in the Parable of The Unmerciful Servant (Matthew 18:23-35) it is to be noted that while, as between servant and fellow-servant, there is to be no limit to mercy and forgiveness, yet, as between royal-master and servant-subject, there may, with perfect righteousness, be a final limit to both.] Nor indeed is this the whole work of love when this is made perfect. A mere negative abstinence from indulged evil in act or feeling may mean a great triumph for love over nature. It is grace, sometimes much grace. But more grace,* perfect grace, goes further. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/phc/ NOTES1 Corinthians 14:1. Follow after.—Taking up the thought of a “way,” 1 Corinthians 12:31; as this whole verse resumes the theme of 12, after the digression or episode of 13 “Pursue” love; righteousness (Romans 9:30, etc.; 1 Timothy 6:11; 2 Timothy 2:22; cf. Philippians 3:14); peace with all men (Hebrews 12:14; 1 Peter 3:11; Romans 14:19); good (1 Thessalonians 5:15); hospitality (Romans 12:13). “We pursue love by watching against and resisting everything contrary to it, by prayer and by the effort to believe that what we ask God will give, by pondering God’s love as manifested on the cross of Christ that thus we may experience its transforming power, and by endeavouring to (Romans 14:15) ‘walk according to love’ ” (Beet). Note, “gifts” is (as in 1 Corinthians 12:1) supplementary, but rightly so. Also note “yet” (R.V.); there should be no exaggeration, even of love, at the expense of other things in the spiritual life. “ ‘Follow’ marks the persistence, ‘desire earnestly’ the energy and earnestness of the search” (Ellicott). Rather.—“Seek any gift, all gifts, only in the path of love; and, in so seeking them, seek the useful rather than the showy.”1 Corinthians 14:2.—Observe throughout that “unknown” (A.V.) is inserted erroneously; it is no question merely of foreign languages. To God.—As in Acts 2:11; Acts 10:46; Acts 10:13-16, the matter spoken “in a tongue” was ecstatic [prayer (1 Corinthians 14:14) or] praise. The man was, so to speak, closeted with God in the shrine of his spirit [regarded as influenced and filled by the Spirit]; his experience is analogous to that of 2 Corinthians 12:1-4, only here he speaks, not hears, “unspeakable things,” and no quasi-local transference is suggested. He is speaking “mysteries,” i.e. things which, as a matter of fact, are concealed, but, given the qualified interpreter, may be readily communicated to the listeners around. But the “interpreter” must also be a man with a charism, himself therefore, for the time being, moving in, or at least in communication with, that inmost world of spiritual things where his fellow-worshipper is thus ecstatically holding converse with God. Without such a helper the listeners “hear”, yet “do not hear.” (See margin, and cf. Acts 9:7; Acts 12:9.)1 Corinthians 14:3.—Notice the more exact, “speaketh edification,” etc. “He builds up the inward life, … gives counsel to the mind, and comfort to the heart” (Ellicott). Good verse as casting light upon “comfort,” “comforter,” etc. Here are παράκλησις and “comfort” together, in clear, if not wide, distinction. Stanley notes that “Barnabas,” lit. “Son of Prophecy,” is in Acts 4:36 rendered “Son of παράκλησις.” Beet (like Ellicott and Evans) keeps “exhortation,” words prompting “to action” (Romans 12:1).1 Corinthians 14:5. All.—Then the gift was a desirable thing to possess. He interpret.—I.e. the speaker in a tongue himself. The same person might enjoy both gifts.1 Corinthians 14:6.—Notice the “but” i.e. “since there is no edification without interpretation.” Also “by way of,” as in 1 Corinthians 7:6, etc. Evidently, too, the sense is “unless I also speak,” etc. “Revelation” and “prophesying” are extraordinary, “knowledge” and “teaching” are ordinary, methods of gaining and of communicating knowledge respectively.1 Corinthians 14:8. Uncertain.—Not making distinguishable the special “bugle-call” intended. 1 Corinthians 14:9.—The physical organ, the tongue, is here meant, as shown by the analogy with musical instruments here traced out, and by the grammatical form of the phrase, “by the tongue”; there is really no “with” in, e.g., 1 Corinthians 14:6. The air.—Cf. 1 Corinthians 9:26.1 Corinthians 14:10. So many.—“Fill up the number according as you think, or as you may know the fact happens to be. No matter exactly how many.” The “tongue” was a true language, but not spoken or understood in this world of men. From the inarticulate though significant sounds of instruments, which all convey their meaning, he now passes to all articulate sounds of human languages, not one of which is of course really meaningless. Yet it can say nothing to the man who does not happen to understand it or use it as his native dialect. Quβ that particular language he is a “barbarian.”1 Corinthians 14:13.—Choose between (1) “that he may interpret” during his ecstasy, or (2) after his ecstatic condition. Both find support. [Both cases might surely be actually exemplified; why “choose”?]1 Corinthians 14:14.—“Take prayer as a particular case, illustrating my general principle.” “Sing” another (1 Corinthians 14:15), “bless” (1 Corinthians 14:16).1 Corinthians 14:15. Spirit … understanding.—The latter word, with its strong contrast to the former, and both read in the light of the chapter, fix “spirit” as meaning the human “spirit,” though under the influence of the Spirit of God, as nearly always with Paul. Observe “spirits,” the literal, marginal rendering in 1 Corinthians 14:12. The “I” is not necessarily so precisely personal, as that this should express “Paul’s resolve.” As to singing, see Ephesians 5:19; James 5:13.1 Corinthians 14:16. Bless.—Not to be restricted to the special “blessing” or “thanksgiving” [“but little distinction can here be drawn” (Ellicott)] at the Eucharistic Supper. (But see Appended Note.) Filleth the … unlearned—Dean Alford amusingly protests that this has nothing to do with the parish clerk of the old order in English Churches! Obviously is meant: Any person in the congregation who has no “gift,” or not these special gifts; who is, in regard to those who are exercising them, an outsider and “unlearned.” [“Unlearned” in the old sense, now become a vulgarism for “untaught.”] No distinction suggested between officials and private members. Such “sharply marked distinctions … do not seem to belong to this period” (Ellicott).1 Corinthians 14:19. In the Church.—“Whatever I do in private.”1 Corinthians 14:20. Understanding.—Not the word used in, e.g., 1 Corinthians 14:15. See Men.—Lit. “perfect,” as 1 Corinthians 2:6, well expounding that frequently used word. Malice.—Wider in meaning then than now.1 Corinthians 14:21.—Quoted (freely) from the LXX. of Isaiah 28:9-12, so freely that it is scarcely more, as Paul uses it, than a happy parallel case; for his purpose “happy” in two particulars above all: (1) the barbarian language of the Assyrian invaders was, like the “tongue” in Corinth, unintelligible jargon to the ordinary listener; (2) and of more importance, each was a sign, not a mere wonder, but a significant wonder, to “an unbelieving” age. The presence of men who should speak strange talk in the land of Israel would in itself be a token, a real message, of the will, the displeasure, of God to His unbelieving people, who had scoffed at the simple, plain talk of Israel to them [“line upon line,” etc., “as if he were talking to little children”; cf. 1 Corinthians 14:20]. So the unintelligibleness of the “tongues was a mark rather of the aloofness than of the nearness of God; rather of their low spiritual tone than of His full favour. Good as it was (1 Corinthians 14:39), “tongues” was a gift lower than the best. Ellicott would not supply in the case of prophecy the italicised words of the, preferring the A.V. Rightly.1 Corinthians 14:23. All.—Supposing an extreme case. Unlearned.—As above, “outsiders,” though more literally still here; persons, casually or from curiosity, “dropping in whether simply “outsiders” or distinct and pronounced “unbelievers.”1 Corinthians 14:24. Convinced.—Add the and its margin. [So John 16:8, which is well expounded by the facts of the Day of Pentecost, the first, earliest example of this particular operation of the Spirit.] All.—As each prophet in turn speaks. Judged.—Cf. 1 Corinthians 2:14; 1 Corinthians 15; 1 Corinthians 9:3; 1 Corinthians 10:25; 1 Corinthians 10:27. The familiar experience: “That preacher knows all about me.” See this graphically given in Hebrews 4:13. See also how Saul fell prostrate before Samuel’s prophesying (1 Samuel 19:24).1 Corinthians 14:25. God.—Not Christ. The more natural first step for a Jew or a heathen would be to “worship God.”1 Corinthians 14:27. By course.—I.e. in turn, not all springing to their feet at once. And if not on that particular occasion, then he may get his “turn” at another time.1 Corinthians 14:29. Judge.—Different word, of the same family, to that in 1 Corinthians 14:23. Here meaning, using the gift of “discerning of spirits” (1 Corinthians 12:10); and judging whether the “prophecy” be really that of the Holy Spirit, and not the Devil’s counterfeit (1 Corinthians 12:3).1 Corinthians 14:30.—Not necessarily breaking off abruptly, but finishing, and then giving “silent” hearing to the next.1 Corinthians 14:31. Comforted.—With the fuller meaning, as before in 1 Corinthians 14:3.1 Corinthians 14:32. Subject.—To their own control. No man was so “carried away” by the Spirit (2 Peter 1:21) as to lose the power to stop himself and be silent when “order” required it. [Evans sees an implied, contrasted thought,—that the spirits of the men “speaking with tongues” were not thus under their control.]1 Corinthians 14:33.—General, governing principle derived from the very nature of God Himself. Seen, e.g., in Nature, where the judgment, equally with the moral sense, says that the disorder, the dislocation of a manifestly designed order, is certainly not from the Creator. The governing principle is one recognised, and its practical application urged in this chapter is acted upon, in “all the Churches.”1 Corinthians 14:34.—In chap. 11, re the laying aside of their veil, there seems another trace of the tendency of the Corinthian women to over-use the equality with man which was so novel and important a point in their Charter, the Gospel, which said “neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28). The Law.—Used for “the Old Testament,” as in 1 Corinthians 14:21. “In the larger and public assemblies of the Church, which alone are under consideration in this chapter.… It is probable that the Apostle had here especially in his thoughts the office of teaching in public, 1 Timothy 2:12” (Ellicott). “And as to merely asking for information or instruction, let them do that at home.” And Beet, very wisely: “It may be questioned whether Paul’s absolute prohibition to women to speak in a Church meeting is binding now. It may be said that it was based on a position of women in the ancient world which has passed away; and that the commands of the Apostle, binding upon his original readers, are binding now only so far as the original circumstances remain, or as the commands are expressions of great universal principles. But the solemn emphasis and the assertion of Apostolic authority (so unusual to Paul), and the appeal to the parents of our race with which in two Epistles the same prohibition is supported, seem to imply that the prohibition sets forth a principle of universal and perpetual validity, and one resting upon the unchanging relation of the sexes. But this prohibition in no way touches the ministrations of women to women; and [N.B.] the gift in Paul’s day of the prophetic spirit to women proved plainly that there was evangelical work for them to do. And there is abundance of such work now.”1 Corinthians 14:36.—Same appeal as in 1 Corinthians 14:33; 1 Corinthians 11:16. “Word of God,” the Old Testament phrase so frequently connected with the gift of prophecy: “The word of the Lord came unto us,” etc. “Are you Corinthians the fountain of all law or custom for the Churches? Or have you been exclusively favoured with the communication of the Divine will. I also—to go no further—claim the inspired authority to speak and determine” (cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:27). Another test of the nature and origin of the Spirit at work in a man, in far-off parallelism to that of 1 Corinthians 12:3. Almost: “Let any man who is really a prophet not only say, ‘Jesus I acknowledge,’ but let him also say, ‘Paul I know’;” like the evil spirits which just about this time were so confessing both in Ephesus (Acts 19:15).1 Corinthians 14:37.—“The Lord” Christ, to whom Paul stands in this matter in the relation of Aaron to Moses, and (higher) Moses to God (Exodus 4:15, and, particularly, 16). This and 1 Corinthians 14:28 have many various readings, important, but not greatly affecting the homiletic use of the verses.1 Corinthians 14:38.—Moral causes are supposed under the “ignorance.” Cf. the tone of Rev 22:11. If the marginal be adopted, then cf. Galatians 4:9; 1 Corinthians 13:12; and the solemn Matthew 25:12.1 Corinthians 14:39.—Resumes verbally 1 Corinthians 14:1, but with still further abatement of value set upon “tongues”1 Corinthians 14:40. Decently.—Cognate forms of the word are in 1 Corinthians 7:35; Romans 13:13; 1 Thessalonians 4:12, etc. .—Whole ChapterPublic Worship in the Christian Church. 1. Public, united worship is an instinct in the devout heart.—The Church at Corinth assembled for worship (1 Corinthians 14:26). There may be a “Church in a house,” many such. The worship there may be of the most spiritual, precious, acceptable; it is the prerogative, the honour, of a father to be the priest in his home; the patriarchal order lives on in the household life of the people of God. Two or three met in Christ’s name form a quorum for constituting a true assembly having the prerogatives and privileges—particularly “There am I in the midst”—of the largest Church (Matthew 18:20). Many a solitary soul, cut off from fellowship and the sanctuary, offers a true worship in the sanctuary of the heart. But “the Lord loveth the gates of Zion”—the place of public resort, the very centre and focus of all the city’s life—“more than” even “the dwellings of Jacob” (Psalms 87:2), dear as every one of these and its little “Church” is to Him. And the people of God so love them too. The “citizen” (Philippians 3:20) of the new Zion, where Christ is “Lord,” should need a very good reason for being absent when his fellow-citizens “come together” (1 Corinthians 14:23) “unto one place.” [Or “unto the same thing,” i.e. with the same object of central purpose. E.g. in very exact translation, “unto the name of Christ” (Matthew 18:20).] 2. The Christian “sanctifies Christ as Lord” in the temple and worship of his heart (1 Peter 3:15, correct reading). Yet Christian worship is the “worship of God” (1 Corinthians 14:25), differentiated, indeed, from Jewish, or Mahometan, or “Theistic” worship of that same God by its founding upon the intermediation of Christ. The “convicted” outsider, who falls prostrate in the assembly under the power of the “prophetic” word (1 Corinthians 14:24-25), naturally does not go definitely beyond the general recognition that “God,” as a Supernatural Power and Presence, is “amongst them.” The Christian worshipper also, whilst taking his “Lord” into direct account, is “worshipping God” too. His appearance in the place of assembly for common worship is in itself “worship.” It is a confession of God; in the face of the world which says, “No God” (Psalms 14:1), he openly professes his belief in a God and his sense of grateful dependence upon Him. All public worship means this; it is of the very essence of the act. Christian worship has specially its grateful recognition of the One Supreme Mercy, the “Unspeakable Gift.” 3. In this chapter also is manifest the very early and very natural use of the opportunity afforded by the presence of so large a company, to “edify” the new or elementary life by instruction; in the case before us by “prophecy,” which should embody a “revelation” given to the “prophet,” or by a “doctrine” which should be the “teacher’s” exposition of what he had learned by his special “charism” of “knowledge,” an unusually direct and deep, Spirit-guided, insight into the new disclosures of truth belonging to the stage of Revelation reached in the Gospel days (1 Corinthians 14:6). This may be—ought to be—on the part both of the speaker and hearers an act of most real “worship.” It is such, when the act of teaching and that of listening are, in the intention of each, distinctly directed to the glory of Christ. There is no more really Godward act of the spiritual life than to listen, waiting to hear “the word of God” (1 Corinthians 14:36). 4. If in 1 Corinthians 14:16 we find at the least a reminiscence of the Eucharistic blessing and the popular response, we have the cycle of the elements of Christian worship—praise (1 Corinthians 14:15), prayer (ib.), teaching (1 Corinthians 14:6), Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 14:16)—completed. 5. And the chapter is an instructive, typical case of the regulative, legislative method of “the Lord” of the Church. “The things which” Paul here “writes are the commandments of the Lord,” in regard to the public worship, not only of Corinth, but of “all the Churches of the saints.” It is conceivable that He might have “drawn up” a code of rules and regulations for the Worship of His Church, which, unlike human legislation, should in no part have, sooner or later, become inapplicable, or impracticable, or obsolete, by reason of altered circumstances or change of age, or of personal or national peculiarities or needs. Conceivable, inasmuch as to Him nothing is impossible. But it would be unlike His method. This chapter is, informally but very really, a code of regulations, or rather of principles, embodied in the special facts of Corinth and the comments of St. Paul. “Within the four corners” of these leading instances in this chapter must the arrangements of Christian worship be found, or be made, to lie. Four points fix the lines which limit the area of liberty. Nothing must violate or sin against: 1. Salutary Christian custom; 2. Seemly “order”; 3. The demand for intelligent worship; 4. Above all, “edification.” I. Salutary Christian custom, particularly such as is based on Apostolic injunction (1 Corinthians 14:33; 1 Corinthians 14:37). (Cf. on this topic the material supplied under 1 Corinthians 11:16.) There is a comity amongst Christian Churches which should not lightly be set aside. None knew so surely as did the Head of His Church how hopeless was uniformity of ritual or even of creed. It is only by speaking and acting in very broad generalities that agreement can be supposed feasible or be realised. Yet there will be a family likeness in the types of worship in the various sections of the Church, national and confessional. Distinctively “Christian” worship will everywhere be one in type. The diversities will be family diversities only. One such distinguishing line is the exclusion of women from the office of public teaching (1 Corinthians 14:34-35). Such points of family likeness can be very few, but they should in all ordinary cases be respected. Paramount demands of “edification” may override everything else. But no one Church should set itself up as an independent source of authority, and least of all as having over other Churches (1 Corinthians 14:38) any prescriptive power to insist upon its local speciality, or its “fad” of exaggerated individualism, as if it were a sine quβ non of Church order. II. Seemly order.—The Church has a character which is at stake before angels (chap. 11) and the world. Each Church, each member, is responsible for the keeping of its character. 1. What is reverent and orderly in Divine worship is a matter incapable of any rigid, of any ΰ priori, absolute and universally applicable, definition. Demonstrative races, as, for example, the negro in the States or the West Indian Islands, will feel no impropriety or extravagance in what the self-repression of culture would revolt against as even socially “bad form,” not to say religious irreverence. The Salvation Army congregation is not to be judged of by the same standard as the ιlite gathered in the choir of an ancient English cathedral, nor will they appreciate “reverence” and “irreverence” at the same estimation. Both sides need to be broad in sympathy in the matter. The peril of all culture in any direction is fastidiousness; whilst the less-cultured “heart” is not infrequently unfair to, and impatient with, the less-demonstrative character, and the form of service in Christian worship which it demands. Our section reminds us that where a fulness of the new life of the Spirit is suddenly given, there is often the appearance, and always the danger, of disorder. In the first outburst of the “tongues” at Pentecost, there seemed disorder enough. Peter’s voice soon subdued all into listening attention, no doubt; yet during his “many words” of “testimony and exhortation” [Acts 2:40, a very notable summation of Pentecostal preaching in all time], occupying as they did many hours of the day, his congregation would be continually changing, “many coming and going,” the courtyard of the house filled over and over again with new faces; surely not without confusion. And when the appeals “cut to the heart,” Eastern demonstrativeness and outcry would certainly beget no small tumult, as the inquirers eagerly ask from this apostle or that believer, “What must we do?” There is a disorder which is unseemly and may grieve the Spirit; there is a criticism of the “disorder,” which grieves Him too. A modern analogue is often found in some time of revival, such as thirty years ago swept over the north of Ireland. A self-repressed observer, a keen critic of his own emotional tendencies, might stand in the midst of some large hall or sanctuary, in every part of which were little groups, in perfect independence of those nearest them, engaged in prayer, or conversation, or now and again stirred by fervent exclamations of thanksgiving or even a snatch of song. The place full of sound; now and again “a Babel” of tumult. No central conduct of the proceedings at all. Yet a little inquiry would discover that it was an orderly disorder. The “penitent” who would be the centre of one group knew well what he needed and was pleading for with God; they who helped him by their prayers or instruction were intelligently enough endeavouring to supply his need. The outburst of song or thanksgiving from another little knot was not an incoherent disturbance of the quiet or a meaningless addition to the sounds which filled the place. There was no “confusion,” except such as in a soul or in a Church over which the life-giving Holy Ghost has been “brooding” (Genesis 1:2), will always mark the transition from chaos and darkness and death, to cosmos and light and life. 2. Yet such scenes and conditions must always be exceptional, and the accompaniments of the creative crises of the life, whether of the Church or the soul. They are for the sovereignty of the Spirit to originate and to rule. Their permanent and abundant fruitfulness will justify them. They are not to be cultivated or “worked up.” There is no necessary “heartiness” in disorder or noise, or in leaving the conduct of religious worship to the impulse of the moment or the (not always too wise or spiritual) man; as, on the other hand, a fixed order of worship, and quiet, undemonstrative, self-repressed bearing in the assembly of the Church at worship, need not be “formality” or “stiffness,” or check the fulness of the Spirit’s grace in the approach of each heart to God, or in the communication of blessing to each. Usually the “New Wine” is best put into the “bottles” of order and seemly arrangement. The exaggeration of orderliness is when the “bottles” are regarded—whether “new” or “old”—as too sacred for even the “New Wine” Himself to be allowed to stretch or burst. 3. Especially is this true of the “teaching” element in Christian worship.—Paul is not contemplating what in modern phrase would be called a “testimony meeting,” or a prayer meeting. (Especially is this true in regard to the silence of women.) The raising of the dead soul is a sovereign exercise of Divine power, which may well be allowed to choose its own methods, and to have its accompaniments exempt from unspiritual criticism, if not from “spiritual men’s” control. But next follows “giving something to the raised one to eat” (Mark 5:43), which lies within the fair range of human ordering, according to the best available judgment, though this of course not apart from the prayerfully sought aid of the Spirit of God. In Corinth the teachers—the very “prophets”—were found starting up, several at once. Each man had come full of his “psalm” or his “doctrine” or his “revelation,” or these seemed given him at the time with an overmastering fulness of urgency of importance. Neither will the “prophet” who starts up whilst another is yet speaking wait, nor will the other give way to him and draw his own “prophesying” to a close (1 Corinthians 14:29-30). The very purpose of the Inspiring Spirit was frustrated by such an overlapping of teachers, two or three delivering their message together. “One by one,” says Paul, with Apostolic authority. Even the very “tongues” are to be “by course,” i.e. in orderly turn. “Two or three tongues” “two or three prophecies” in each assembly—no more—are sufficient for each “diet” of worship. “Let that prophet sit down; this other wants to speak” (1 Corinthians 14:30). “But you are sinning against the liberty of the Spirit. You with your stiff, formal propriety, you are grieving Him! Who are you to close the mouth of a ‘prophet,’ so long as he believes that the Spirit has something to communicate or reveal through him? If you cut him short like that, or give ‘only two or three’ opportunity to deliver themselves, whilst the rest, as much ‘prophets’ as they are, must ‘bottle up’ their prophecy and carry it home again, you are restraining the Holy Ghost; the hearers will lose some truth, perhaps some truth they needed!” There is sufficient approximation to truth in this ever-recurring protest, to keep the “orderly” temper on its guard against the dangers of its very excellence. The “prophetic” grace which made Paul able, with inspired authority and wisdom (1 Corinthians 14:37), to “put his foot down” and definitely and finally to repress or regulate a gift as extraordinary as his own, belongs to an order which is past. But the whole matter is lifted up to and set upon a permanent basis, when Paul appeals to the very character and known manner of the “God not of confusion, but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33). The teaching work of the Church demands, in the very nature of things, order, propriety, attention, quiet. 4. In the ordering of the programme of public, Christian worship, nothing should be admitted, nothing forbidden, but as subject to His sanction or revision, Who, in every sense and in every way, works for “peace.” This will not lead to any uniformity of practice, it never has done, never can do; but it will be the guiding, testing principle to which practice should be ever adjusted. Nor is the truth of practice hard in that way to arrive at—particularly in the way of love (1 Corinthians 12:31)—in any given type of local or national Church. Especially when 3. and 4. are kept paramount. III. The demand for intelligent worship and teaching (1 Corinthians 14:15; 1 Corinthians 14:19).— 1. Paul’s Example. “I speak with tongues more than ye all;—I thank God for it” gives us an interesting, seldom-regarded, side-light upon Paul’s character and work; it is a touch in the portrait of him too often omitted. But it is a perpetually recurring trait in his self-revelation in his letters, that he should go on to say, “I had rather, in the Church, speak,” etc. It might be his “glory” (2 Corinthians 12) to hear the language of “the third heaven.” But he lived very much and very practically on earth. He might draw support under his “thorn” from such “revelations of the Lord,” and in the ecstasy of the “tongue,” with its deep communings of his adoring “spirit” with God, he no doubt found strength and (in our looser modern sense) “inspiration” for his work; but to men he spoke with the “tongue of men” (1 Corinthians 13:1). [True, by a not unfair accommodation, of all men of spiritual power. Jacob has “power with God” first, and then “power with men” (Genesis 32:28). Of Richard Lynch Cotton it was said, “His mind was always engaged in prayer.” The Rev. R. Wright said of him, “I was much impressed by his standing up in the carriage and offering up silent prayer before we started.” His servant found that he must needs pause before entering his master’s library; he might very probably otherwise find him upon his knees (Burgon, Twelve Good Men). A Sheffield woman, speaking the vernacular, described Rev. Joseph Entwisle, “Yon mon’s thick wi’ God.” Of S. H. Smith, a Sheffield manufacturer, it was said (Memoir, by W. H. Tindall) that whoever heard him speak in any meeting of Christian people felt that he dwelt habitually with God, and came forth on such occasions to speak to men.] 2. A contrast and a combination.—The true meaning of 1 Corinthians 14:15 sets aside a good deal of the customary and very devout exposition of the force of the contrast, “with the spirit and with the understanding also.” There can hardly now be any doubt that the “spirit” is the human “spirit,” and that here, as usual, Paul’s vocabulary is moulded upon the trichotomic scheme of 1 Thessalonians 5:23. (For homiletic purposes it will be sufficient, and all that is practicable, to make pictorial the relation between the “spirit” and the “understanding.”) Regard redeemed manhood as a grand Temple, one of God’s own building, in whose “inner man God in Christ may dwell” (Ephesians 3:17). The body and the lower faculties, the sensuous ones, of the natural life are its outer court, its Court of the Gentiles. Then within, court within court, lie successively the nobler and yet nobler ranges of faculties, which more and more differentiate man from the noblest of the creatures round him. At last is reached the Holy Place, the “Understanding,” the intellectual part, perhaps the personal, where—grace apart—man most closely images, and approaches to, God. If the very animal creation share with him, and may tread, the great outer court of man’s complex nature, they go no further; and at the inmost, within even the holy place of the “understanding,” there is another, most sacred, spot, where not even the natural man, of understanding and intellect cultured to their highest of capacity, may tread. It is the Holy of Holies of manhood, the “spirit”; the inmost shrine, where God Who “is a Spirit” dwells and reveals Himself in glory, and where the spiritual man holds a fellowship with God, of worship on the one side, and of revelation and blessing on the other, which is a holy secret between them. 3. In that innermost secrecy, in the holy privacy of this Holy of Holies, the man “speaking in a tongue” is for the time closeted with God. In a holy outpouring of prayer and praise, and even of song, he is a high priest standing before God within the central shrine of His personality. The bystanders in the assembly may hear his voice, as it were through the thick, dulling veil of the physical organs, but their ear catches nothing of the sense of the ecstatic words of holy communion between him and God. The man with the gift of “interpretation of tongues” can hear, and can even report to his fellows; but without that gift he and they are only in some outer court of their fellow-worshipper’s manhood. 4. The man so favoured of God may well “covet” to enjoy “tongues”; he may well hesitate to “forbid” any man to make use of His gift; [to the cautious, cooler temperaments at Thessalonica, inclined to regulate very strictly, to discourage or suppress, the “tongues” because of the disorder and extravagance which were their ever-present danger, Paul says: “Do not ‘throw cold water, upon,’ quench not, the Spirit, in any manifestation of His firelike presence and work.” To the men who had “tongues” or coveted them, who were liable to depreciate such a gift as “prophecy,”—“only the intelligible utterance of Divine truth in plain language!”—he says, “Despise not prophesyings” (1 Thessalonians 5:19-20);] in the fulness of his own blessing and privilege he may well desire that “all might speak with tongues” (1 Corinthians 14:5). Yet it is a grace for the man himself alone; a gift for the man only; his face is set Godward in its exercise; he speaks “to himself and to God” (1 Corinthians 14:28). 5. True it has an indirect use.—It is “a sign” to the outside world (1 Corinthians 14:22). The “unbelief” of the world is something far deeper and more subtle than mere disbelief of any primal propositions about God or the things of God. It is a habit, not an act, of the mind and will and heart. As truly as it is said of “faith” or of “religion,” so unbelief is “not merely a set of opinions, but a life.” It becomes a dull, crass ignorance of, or a dead-set, apathetic indifference to, the unseen and the spiritual, which goes its way, and seeks its aims, leaving altogether out of the reckoning—and not desiring to include—anything higher than man, or beyond the narrow horizon of man’s earthly sojourn, with its interests and consequences. The first, greatest difficulty in the recovery of lost man—le premier pas qui coϋte—is the awakening of the soul from its indifference and death. In conviction of sin, the unseen and spiritual for the first time to any practical effect breaks in upon, and through, the hard, narrowing, incrusting “unbelief”; this high-raised and all but impassable barrier built around the understanding and the heart. God has many “signs” which should arouse attention, and waken the drowsy sense, to the fact and near presence of this environing, real world of spiritual things—God, the soul, sin, eternity, judgment; He has many occasions and instrumentalities and methods, of thus bringing close to the mind and heart in their unbelieving insensibility, Himself and the works of the Eternal and the Spiritual. Sometimes a Paul in his course meets a Felix in the course of a life of successful, high-placed, wicked worldliness, and for once Felix hears of “righteousness and temperance and judgment,” and is aroused and trembles; strange providences—earthquakes that shake jailers of Philippi out of their sleep—do it; miracle did it [“If I … then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12:28)]; the “tongues” did it in Corinth. A Jewish or heathen passer-by turns in to the little gathering, the former perhaps definitely hostile in his “unbelief,” the latter simply “unlearned,” with a quasi-neutral unacquaintance with all these matters (1 Corinthians 14:23). It may happen that such a visitor turns in at a very disorderly time, when many are uttering the strange “tongues,” and all at once. It is a Babel of sound. There is a strange language being talked—if indeed it be a language at all, and not mere incoherent raving, which he hears. It may be that he turns away with a contemptuous laugh as he leaves the room: “They are a pack of madmen together in there!” But if it be a seemly and orderly occasion, when only “two or three” are exercising their gift, and those “in turn,” first one and then another rising, and delivering themselves of what—though he can “hear” no speech—fills every hearer with awe; his unaccustomed heart is filled with awe too, as though the room were filled with a Presence, and as though another world, ordinarily a “mystery” were suddenly unveiled. If that be all, he may not become a believer, but at least indifference is gone; the “sign” has spoken to his understanding; indifference is stirred by the new fear. The way of the Lord is perhaps prepared. A breach is made in the high wall of utter, careless secularity, and through it something more may enter, to the saving of the man. [To the children growing up in the congregation, to the heathen just coming within the range of the message of the Christian Gospel, the very ritual of the service may sometimes be in its degree a “sign,” appealing to the attention through eye or ear, and impressing the thought with the idea of a supersensuous world.] 6. But more, much more, is needed. For the man’s own worship this inner, God directed communing may be enough, but for common worship intelligent speech is required. And, above all, if worship is to be a “fruitful” thing (1 Corinthians 14:14), if the Church are all to “learn” or to be “comforted” (1 Corinthians 14:31), and if the unbeliever is to be “judged” and “convinced” (1 Corinthians 14:24), then the “understanding” must be joined with “the spirit,” or even a Paul will do little or no good. The high priest must come out from the holy of holies of the “spirit”; what he has seen and heard and gained he must bring out through the course of the “understanding”; there he may meet his fellows on more equal terms. And, lastly, his very physical organs must translate what is published in the understanding. 7. He who is to be of use to his fellows, the leader of their worship, the instructor of their life, the awakener of their conscience, must be a real mediator going in for men to God, coming forth from God, and for God, to men. He who has not first learned something in the secret place of the communing of the “spirit,” he who has himself gone no further within than the “understanding,” will be only an imperfect instructor of men. He will never lead their worship any further inward, any nearer to God, than he has gone himself. Above all, he will never carry the supreme credential of a “prophet,”—that his words reveal men to themselves, in all their sin and guilt and spiritual need (1 Corinthians 14:24-25). Yet many a man’s work is marred because, “prophet” as he is, his understanding does not translate his message into clearly stated truth, nor does he find a way for it to the understanding, or commend it to the judgment, of his fellow-worshippers. There is “an art of preaching” which needs to be learnt. A native “gift” of formal speech, of public address, underlies all pulpit success; it is the natural basis of fitness upon which grace does its work in equipping a preacher. But this needs cultivation and training. The greatest natural powers need furnishing; and whilst it is in the inner, secret place alone that a true message for God may be gained, yet the “understanding,” at its very best of training and fulness of acquired knowledge, must pass the message through its own mint, and put its own form and stamp upon it. He who, under ordinary circumstances, cries down the office, or practically disregards the use, of the “understanding,” in the man who leads the worship of the congregation, or is its “prophet” for instruction or conviction, is repeating the mistake of the Thessalonian or Corinthian who valued and gloried in the unintelligible “tongue” and, in comparison, rated low the less showy gift of “prophecy.” 8. Worship in an unknown tongue.—Naturally, and properly, the Reformers of the sixteenth century strengthened their protest against the conduct of worship for (sometimes unlettered) German or English people in Latin, by appeal to this passage of St. Paul. Rome is not alone in having clung to a language which once was the vulgar tongue, but which has become unintelligible through change of circumstance. In the Syrian Churches the language of the Liturgy is the once ordinary, but now antiquated, Syriac. The very Brahmin does not now understand the language of the mantras he chants through life. The Parsee priest cannot translate the old Zend of the invocations he uses. It is the vice of heathen worship to be veiled, to the point of being unintelligible to the people. All ordered worship should be on a level with the understanding of those of whose devotions it professes to be the vehicle, or to whom it professes to offer a message of instruction. The devotional part of the order of worship should at least be intelligible to the worshipper, “else how shall he say Amen?” (1 Corinthians 14:16). So the very music should help the intelligence of the worship. The didactic, or hortatory, or convincing should be intelligent in matter and in form, on its human side, as fit as “understanding” can make it, to accomplish its work with the heart and will, and to commend the message to the intelligence, of the hearer. It may be—it must be, or it is “unfruitful” and useless—“plain preaching.” The great themes of the Gospel are worthy that the highest intelligence should match and measure itself against them. “Wisdom is plain to him that understandeth.” But it is the noblest function of the noblest mind to bring these themes into a shape apprehensible by the humblest and narrowest. “Unfruitful” preaching is either (1) passing the understanding of the hearer, or (2) indefinite in statement, or (3) pointless and unimpressive in application [J. L.]. 9. Interpreters sometimes needed.—There are true seers who get real messages from God, but cannot “interpret” them (1 Corinthians 14:18). They may print their message, or may speak to a select few who can understand them. But there are many, a much larger company, whose gift, and whose call and function, it is to popularise the truth given to the inner circle of these illuminated ones. The “interpretation of tongues” has its modern analogue to-day, as also has the office of the “prophet.” When the man who dwells in the holy of holies is also the man who comes out into the outer court direct from God’s presence, and is the interpreter or the forthteller of the things he has seen and heard within, then the worshippers are led nearest to God, and the whole order of the service fulfils Paul’s fourth requirement:— IV. Edification (1 Corinthians 14:1-3; 1 Corinthians 14:6; 1 Corinthians 14:12).— 1. The reiterated emphasis upon this point shows how predominant in importance this ranked in the thought of St. Paul. It manifestly takes precedence of every other consideration. [Love is not so much a “gift” as the very life in which the “gifts” should root themselves, and from which they should draw an all-pervasive character. Everything should be full of love. But next to love] Paul ranks prophecy above every gift. It “edifies” as does no other, and what will do this is his primary care. No doubt this plea has sometimes been made to cover some very wide departures from Christian reverence and sobriety, to say nothing of the comity of Christian custom. It has been said in their defence, “But you see that good is being done!” What has only roused the emotions and even the senses, unintelligent appeal to the feelings, a religious life built only upon the foundation of those feelings, have sheltered themselves under the same plea. The feelings have their place; “disorder” is sometimes an accompaniment of a true Pentecost, and justifies itself in its issues; but, under ordinary circumstances, prudent order, seemly custom, intelligent devotions and instructions, best promote edification. 2. None of them is worth anything if it do not.—Better, e.g., that customary, beautiful order be swept away before the “rushing wind” of a real Pentecost, than that “the breath” of the Spirit should never breathe upon dead souls. Order must not become a fetish, a tyranny. Any innovation upon the established order in a Christian Church will need good vindication; but it can, and does, vindicate itself, if it bring men to the Foundation and build them up upon it. Paul reminds his readers (1 Corinthians 2:1-5, etc.) how the intellectual gifts and the graces of oratory may become a snare to the preachers and a difficulty to the hearers. In neither order nor custom is there anything so sacred but that real “edification” may justify anything. 3. Edification demands a clear, definite, intelligible message.—“If the trumpet,” etc. Most hearers want from the “prophet” who stands in their midst, what is profitable, helpful, true. But often the week has been a time of ceaseless conflict, and in weariness they are ready to give all up. Just then does the speaker in the public service need to be “a leader and a commander to the people” (Isaiah 55:4). They want a man who can order their life for them. They will follow his “trumpet-call” if they find that he knows his own mind and gives no “uncertain sound.” He may put heart into the faint by his “certain” sound, e.g., of confident proclamation of an Almighty Helper and Friend by their side in the conflict. [If it be the “joyful sound” of the Jubilee trumpet proclaiming that the lost heritage is to be had once more by its rightful owner, then also does its blast need to accompany a clear, plain, heartening declaration of the Atonement and its redeeming effect, and of the conditions on which this effect becomes available. An “uncertain sound” on this point may mean an eternally lost heritage, to some soul that hears and yet hears nothing.] The man who has nothing, or nothing definite, to blow upon his trumpet, had better stand aside for some other leader. 4. Paul suggests one remarkable piece of “edification”—the sudden arrest and conviction of a casual hearer (1 Corinthians 14:24-25). He is the Jew or the heathen who came in during the “madness” of the “tongues” (1 Corinthians 14:23). This time the prophets are exercising their gift—“all are prophesying.” Their words are “with the understanding.” They are a message to his conscience. There is the “sign” once more, but there is sense too. He is laid bare to himself. Sin which he never saw and never suspected; a self which he never knew and never suspected; are disclosed to him. [The man known least to many a man is himself.] “The secrets of his heart are made manifest” to himself, and perhaps by open confession are made manifest to the assembled congregation also. [“The word cleaves asunder the soul and spirit, and discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).] In the presence of God he “falls prostrate” in awe and guilty shame. “The speaker might know all about me,” many a modern hearer has said, in the presence of the searching Spirit of God. He confesses that of a truth he has found God amongst this people. If the Supper be the embodiment par excellence of the element of orderly, seemly, sacred, formal arrangement in worship, so also is such a “conviction” the chief glory of the teaching. No prophet should long exercise his gift without this conviction following the word he utters. If it be really the word of the Spirit through his lips, then awakening will be one of its constant credentials. Intelligent, plain, profitable, edifying words for the believer; arousing, alarming, convincing words for the “ignorant” and the “unbeliever.” There are preachers who will not learn; as there are hearers who will not listen. Paul might, but we dare not, anticipate the final judgment, and say, “If he be ignorant, let him be ignorant.” HOMILY1 Corinthians 14:34-35. Woman’s Place and Woman’s Work. I. How far Paul’s words are binding.— 1. Paul’s pronouncements upon the position of woman in Christendom and her relation to man are not to be reckoned as simply remainders of “Oriental” or “Israelite” preconceptions, from which even he, who wrote Galatians 3:28, had not worked himself free. Nor are they to be regarded as merely intended to apply to a temporary phase of social life which found its typical exemplifications in Corinth or Ephesus in Paul’s day; and as therefore without force for English or American life today. As to the former point,—whilst the human element in Revelation is to be recognised, the Divine is not to be minimised. The abundant literary and historical material in whose light (say) the Epistles of Paul can to-day be studied, and that development of the historic sense in the students, which they share with the writers and readers of all history to-day, tend to obscure the fact,—ascertainable and verifiable on other lines of approach to and examination of the topic of Inspiration,—that the Spirit of God makes Himself responsible for the Book which is the product of the historical, or epistolary, or other activity of Paul and the other contributors to it. The judgments on this topic are Paul’s; but not those of a Jew, only half-emancipated from the prejudices of his early education and training, on whom more enlightened or advanced readers may sit in judgment in their turn, and with fresher light review or revise his pronouncements. To assume this takes all finality, all authority, from Revelation on this topic or any other. As does the alternative suggestion. Is anything merely and only temporary put upon permanent record in the Bible at all? Rather, everything is of permanent value and authority, if even indirectly. If the temporary and “accidental” is put upon record, it is because in it is embodied some truth of abiding value. The temporary and accidental form carries a principle which is part of the universally applicable and binding Revelation of the mind and will of God. 2. Here Paul, in point of fact, does most pointedly claim for his dicta on our topic an absolute, Divine authority. He claims to speak as a prophet. Every true prophet will recognise the prophet in him. “The word of the Lord has come” to him; the words which he utters and bids his amanuensis write are “the commandments of the Lord.” [The assertion is made in regard to this one topic, indeed, or to the group of topics dealt with in this chapter. But it would hardly be denied that this is a test case, a sample case, and, that when coupled with Colossians 4:16 and 1 Thessalonians 5:27, it extends its applicability to all his Epistles and their instructions.] He also lifts the case, both here and in the two other places where the topic is formerly dealt with (chap. 11, and 1 Timothy 2), above the level of the temporary and local. He traces the relation of woman to man up to the primal ordering of Creation. It is no novelty; it is no Oriental peculiarity; it is no wrong done to women by the men of the ancient world. Abused the principle may have been,—shamefully and cruelly,—until woman has become the slave, or at best the plaything, of man, the drudge of his idle, selfish, masterful will, or the vehicle of his sensuality. But the relation of subordination of woman to man is shown to be rooted in the physical characteristics and the creation-history of both. 3. Hence, then, the only “dispensing power” which can relax these positive injunctions and modify the force of these pronouncements, is His Who through Paul uttered them. He is Lord of His Revelation. In His sovereignty He may manifestly overrule, override, set aside, His usual, and to us peremptory, command. But the “dispensing power” should never be assumed by man, and very assured credentials should be presented by the “woman suffered to teach.” [So conservative a man as John Wesley, e.g., wrote to a Mrs. Crosby, who had been led into a modified public activity: “I think the strength of the cause rests … on your having an extraordinary call.… It is plain to me that the whole work of God termed Methodism is an extraordinary dispensation of His providence. Therefore I do not wonder if several things occur therein which do not fall under ordinary rules of discipline. St. Paul’s ordinary rule was: ‘I permit not a woman to speak in the congregation.’ Yet, in extraordinary cases, he made a few exceptions; at Corinth in particular.” (For this he offers no proof. See 1 Corinthians 11:5.) Works, xii. 339, Anno 1771. II. What the Gospel did for woman.—Every woman who sits by her husband “in the Church” is a standing witness to its elevating, vindicating work on behalf of her sex. The Mahometan woman practically never goes to public worship at all. In ancient and modern synagogues of Judaism the Jewess is always present indeed, but in the women’s galley, and takes no open part in the worship. [She is not permitted to adapt to her sex, as in other cases, the thanksgiving: “I thank Thee who hast made me a man.” For her it must be: “I thank Thee who hast made me according to Thy will.”] Woman is prominent enough in religious ceremonial and worship in some well-known Asiatic and even in African forms of idolatry. But it is matter of common knowledge that outside Christendom, even at its most nearly nominal, woman has no such position as is the natural and necessary consequence of the teaching of the New Testament. She is at man’s side in the home, an equal sharer of its responsibilities, its happiness, its honours. Chivalry caught the inspiration of its Ideal of Womanhood—confined in practice as this often was to women of gentle birth—from the Church. The Gospel began by declaring that in the new, the Christian, form of the Abrahamic covenant (Galatians 3:15-18) the woman had an equal status before God. In contradistinction to the old practice of Judaism, the woman was baptized as the men were. [That she might have her share thus publicly acknowledged and ratified was a reason, subsidiary but real, for the change in the sign and seal of the covenant.] She drew near to God with equal right of approach through Christ. Every woman in the Churches of Corinth, or Rome, or Ephesus, or elsewhere, knew by many daily proofs that the Gospel of Christ was on her side. See how Luke notes, “with the women” (Acts 1:14); their equal presence in the prayer of the upper room was a revolutionary novelty. Let the prohibition of these verses be as stern as it may, and be pressed as absolutely as it may, it is a very small abatement from a freedom such as never was hers until the Gospel became the Great Charter of womanhood and its rights. Let her be prohibited most absolutely from eating the—not always pleasant—“fruit” of the office of public teacher, yet she dwells in an assured possession and enjoyment of a garden of happiness and of abundant “fruit,” such as never was nor is hers until the Gospel of Christ has borne its message and done its work. Women owe much to the Gospel. III. It has opened to them many forms of activity.— 1. It may well be questioned whether Romans 16:1 calls Ph�be a “deaconess” in any precise or quasi-official sense. Almost certainly not; the date is too early. In the Pastoral Epistles there is more appearance of a definite “order,” that of “widows.” Pliny’s letter to Trajan speaks of some “ministr�” whom he had put to the question. Lucian’s keen wit is directed against some aged Christian women who carried food to their co-religionists in prison. Organised, systematic work for the poor was very early part of the duty of the deaconess. Romans 16 is a very early documentary evidence of the many-sided activities of Christian women. They could “labour,” and “labour much” they could “succour” Paul and “many besides,” and “bestow much labour” on him. Priscilla, equally with her husband, could risk her life—“lay down her neck”—to save Paul’s life. All the martyrologies of the Churches give evidence of the noble share the women took in the work of witnessing for Christ even to death. 2. It is manifest in how many ways the woman is better adapted than man for much work which needs doing to-day at home and abroad. There is much work for women—“rescue work,” for example—which women can do best. The woman’s heart and sympathetic nature often give her a power over degraded men which men can never wield. The children are naturally the woman’s care, and, more than even woman herself, does the child owe much to the Gospel of that Christ Who was once the Babe of Bethlehem. Temperance work lies as fitly to their hand as it lies near to the heart of many of the noblest of the sex. “It is little grief to the Christian woman that she is excluded from the great offices in the Church, since it is hers to exercise the most glorious and effectual of all ministries,” that of love (Pressense, Life and Practice, 73). Woman has her primacy in the Church in all works of charity and beneficence. 3. The Spirit of “prophecy” made no distinction of sex. Pentecost began to fulfil Joel’s word in a point which perhaps even Peter hardly appreciated as he quoted it [Acts 2:17-18 (Joe 2:28-32)]; the “daughters” should prophesy as well as the “sons”; the very “handmaidens” [i.e. be it noted, the female slaves; station should matter as little as sex] should share with the “servants” the outpouring of the Spirit. If 1 Corinthians 11:5 stood alone, it might be unfair to make it evidence of anything more than that some Corinthian women were actually “prophesying” and “praying” in the assembly, and that Paul for the moment expresses no opinion as to the right or wrong of the practice, but passes on to the immediately urgent matter that they were doing it with unveiled heads. But he says here, “Ye may all prophesy,” which, coupled with the equal treatment accorded to women by the endowing Spirit, seems still further to narrow his absolute prohibition, to “teaching” (1 Timothy 2:12), an office which once at least he distinguishes from “prophesying” (Ephesians 4:11; cf. Acts 13:1). As was said above, the extraordinary charism was above ordinary prudential regulations; the Spirit is sovereign. Very early in the Church, accordingly, we find the deaconess occasionally “in apt and holy speech” teaching the women who were preparing for baptism. (Quoted in Pressensι, Life and Practice, 72, note.) The “apt” speech can hardly be forbidden to exercise itself amongst women in almost every possible or needful way, whether in the cottage-meeting handful, or the [cottage-meeting handfuls aggregated into the great] “congregation.” The line of division between the public “speaking in the Church” which is forbidden, and the “Bible lesson” given by a lady to a class of big lads or men in a Sunday school, which everybody sanctions, becomes a very fine one, and is indeed nearly at the vanishing-point. If it do not altogether disappear, it is manifestly rather retained, and, by Apostolic authority, absolutely retained, lest the sex should be unsexed, and because also of a primacy of man which is part of the original and abiding order of the God “not of confusion, but of” order and “peace.” As always, the “commandment of God” has the woman’s interest at heart. It is for her sex’s sake. [John Wesley may again be quoted as typical of a Scriptural conservatism and caution in dealing with this matter. He is writing two years earlier, to the same correspondent as above: “I advise you, as I did Grace Walton formerly, 1. Pray in private or public, as much as you Song of Solomon 2. Even in public, you may properly enough intermix short exhortations with prayer, but keep as far from what is called preaching as you can: Therefore, never take a text; never speak in a continued discourse, without some break, about four or five minutes” (Works, xiii. 339).] There are also traces in the early Church of a distinct duty laid upon the “widows” to keep up a perpetual intercession on behalf of the active, busy, younger Church. The prayer meeting is a field for a grand activity for woman which none will rebuke. Her testimony in a meeting for witness-bearing or praise is help which must not be refused; nor should she withhold it, if, as part of her consecration of herself to Christ, she may, by doing violence to her temperament and her modest reticence, honour Him, or may help seeking or battling and oppressed souls, in telling “how great things the Lord hath done for” her. [Note how Christ would not allow the woman with “the issue” to steal away in silence with her blessing, but will have her testimony borne, there in the street, before all the crowd (Luke 8:45-47).] Women who often enter into the Holy of Holies of the “spirit,” and there commune with God, are not idlers in the Church. IV. The one reserved thing is “teaching.”—[Woman has never publicly given the bread and the wine of the Supper. There is no masculine “priestism” in this, however, or in the restraining of the woman from the office of the public teacher.] “But they are often better qualified to teach than the man who stands up to teach them.” Perhaps, but such “hard cases” make “bad law.” The salutary, seemly, general, binding rule gives the man the conduct of the worship in the congregation, [and, as shown in the Homiletic Analysis, the “worship” includes the teaching and the Supper]. NOTE“The Amen” of 1 Corinthians 14:16. From Stanley.—“After the prayers,” says Justin (Apol., c. 65, 67), “bread is offered, and wine and water, and the president offers up according to his power prayers and thanksgivings at once, and the people shout the Amen.… The president offers praise and glory to the Father of all, and through the name of His Son and of the Holy Spirit, and at length returns thanks to God for having vouchsafed us to partake of these things. When he has finished the prayers and thanksgivings, all the people present shout, saying, ‘Amen,’ which is the Hebrew for ‘So be it.’ ” The “Amen” thus used was borrowed from the worship of the synagogue, and hence probably the article is prefixed as to a well-known form. It was there regarded as the necessary ratification of the prayer or blessing (cf. 2 Corinthians 1:20).… Compare the use of the word as uttered by the vast assembly of pilgrims at Mecca, to express their assent to the great sermon at the Kaaba (Burton’s Pilgrimage, iii. 314). The whole chapter may be reviewed as An Easter Bible Reading on 1 Corinthians 15. I. A piece of history. II. A piece of revelation. III. A piece of exhortation. 1. History.—I Keen-witted Corinthians fond of speculation. Too “wise” (2 Corinthians 11:19, etc.) to take any doctrine simply on trust, even from most thoroughly accredited teacher. They must understand the Resurrection. They must get it into a form that could be understood. If that not the original form, or “orthodox,” so much the worse for the original. “Yes; we understand ‘the Resurrection.’ There is no mystery about it. In fact, in the only true sense, it is ‘past already’ (probably, as 2 Timothy 2:18). Merely a rhetorical expression for the experience of the New Birth. We all have had our Resurrection—all the Resurrection we ever shall have. There is in the literal, physical sense no resurrection of the dead.” 2. This the exaggeration of a glorious truth. The new, eternal life did begin at “conversion.” That was the event, the date, of all others in our history; the real dividing-line was there, between Old and New, between Death and Life. There is a dividing-line at death and another at the resurrection. But these are only between newer and newer stages of the new life. In death the body drops away; the full Life, in which the parting of the spiritual nature from its old companion of many years is a mere momentary incident, goes on to become fuller and larger. At the resurrection it will go on from fuller to fullest. But we did rise out of Death into Life at conversion. Corinthians so far held truth, but exaggerated it. 3. They did not do justice to the place of the body in the Man. It is as essentially part of him as the spirit or the soul. Man is not soul only, any more than he is body only. He is body, soul, spirit; these three are one man. By the Redeemer’s grace the body has its future. He died for the whole manhood; the body therefore is to have its redemption and after-life. 4. “Cannot have!” these said; “cannot be! How are the dead—the Dead!—the Dead! Look at them; think of them after a month’s interment! The DEAD! don’t you see them?—raised up? With what (sort of a) body do these dead come (forth)?” “Well,” replies Paul, “you must not say ‘Cannot be.’ It has been.” [So neither has a modern scientist or unbeliever any right to sweep away miracle with a preliminary and all-excluding flourish of denials. Have miracles been? It is not speculation or theory, but evidence and history, which come first in the discussion.] “Deny all resurrection of the dead, and you fight against History. History will win; and, meanwhile, remember that if there cannot be a resurrection of the body, then your Lord lies still in death in Joseph’s grave—or at least is only so alive as any other ordinary departed friend or teacher is. No Resurrection? Then there is no Risen Lord!” 5. Christianity is historical. Its doctrines are rooted in facts of history. The Incarnation is bound up with—stands or falls with—the historical fact that Jesus Christ was born by the Holy Ghost of a pure Virgin. If Jesus Christ did not actually, historically die on a certain day [in probably April, A.D. 30] there has been no Atonement. If He did so die, but did not actually rise again on the following Sunday morning, and a few weeks after return to heaven and take His place in that world once more, then the death was nothing to the purpose of an Atonement, and there is no living, incarnate Representative of humanity to be its Intercessor with God. If assailants can do anything, they can disprove “facts” alleged, or show the “evidence” for them valueless. If the facts are gone, or not verifiable and as good as gone, Christianity is really as good as gone—Salvation is gone. Prove that the Resurrection of Christ is not history,—that is their task; then His death is vain, “your faith vain” too. 6. But the history has all the verification possible—not to speak of the prophetic intimations of it—and that very strong. “The eleven saw Him. Peter saw Him. I saw Him. ‘Hallucination? Enthusiasm?’ Five hundred saw Him at once. A crowd does not all see visions, nor do all see the same visions. All that is subjective is eliminated by the multiplication of the witnesses. The larger half, more than two hundred and fifty at least, are alive; you can examine them. ‘Fraud?’ You do not get five hundred, or two hundred and fifty, conspirators all to keep the secret of a fraud, or not for long.” If any fact of ancient history can be established by sober testimony, this can. Christ’s resurrection is a Piece of History, the sure historical foundation of our faith and hope. “Now is Christ risen from the dead! And become the firstfruits of them that slept.” But this last truth, further, is— II. A piece of revelation.— 1. Of this, at present, we can only say we believe it. The fact is mere revelation; unascertainable by us beforehand; and now that it is asserted, we can barely do more than tell what the words mean. We can hardly conceive what the fact may prove to be in the historical working out and fulfilment. There is to be a resurrection of All (see Critical Notes); an ordered, orderly gathering of all Christ’s then living and raised ones. Christ has already, as the firstfruits of the harvest for the heavenly garner, led the way. “At His Coming.” “The End.” 2. The relations, even of time, between these revealed facts of the future are involved in great obscurity. The interpretation of what is here said in connection with “the End” is full of mystery. But the symbolic language gives an impressive picture. We see heaven’s Crown Prince, the Colleague in the Father’s throne, to Whom has been apportioned the government of our redeemed race, and the task of bringing this rebel world into subjection by the power of His cross, or by the arm of His might. There He stands. His task is finished. He stands Victor over the last Enemy to be destroyed; His foot is upon Death! His fellow-conquerors stand with Him in triumphant array, in their risen bodies, fashioned like His. Then (may we say it?) He lowers His sword, and bends His head, and bows His knee, and gives back to the Father the kingdom—the Mediator’s kingdom—which was committed to Him long ago, in the morning of His own resurrection (Psalms 2; Romans 14:9, etc.). What a history that of redemption has been! What a history that of His kingdom! And that is “the end” of it! 3. But those bodies of His fellow-conquerors? “How are the Dead raised? How raised? How raised? Where do they get a body? [For they cannot be men without a body; a mere unclothed human spirit is not a man.] What kind of body have they found given them?” How? Revelation does not help us much. But at least (1) “Death is per se no barrier. In nature the seed which yourselves sow must die if it is to live again. Death is, for it, the way to life. ‘God gives it a body;’ for the present that is the best answer. And so God is pledged to clothe the immaterial in man.” (2) “With what kind of body? Do not know; and what matter? Even now, amongst these material, fleshly enwrappings of the Life-principle, animal, aviar, piscine, there is infinite variety, suggesting infinite possibilities of new kinds. There may easily be another kind of a body for a risen man. These are all “flesh,” in their infinite varieties, as his may be in its kind; and all are real bodies. All glory, again, is glory, but with differences; sun, moon, star as compared with star, varying in kind as well as degree, of glory. That we cannot conceive of so new, so novel, a condition and glory of the body does not carry us very far in the direction of disbelief, nor hinder faith very much. We do not understand, we can hardly conceive of, the real, material, angelic “bodies celestial.” If there are Jovians, or Saturnians, or Mercurials in yonder planets, what are Jovian, Saturnian, Martial “celestial bodies” like? As was said (1 Corinthians 2:14), between the “natural” and the “spiritual” is a great gulf, in fact and knowledge. The “natural” body can give very scanty suggestion as to the “spiritual” body. This will be “my own” (kind of) “body,” and “God gives it me”; a body which makes me—the “spiritual man” who used to wear a “natural” body—even in body a “spiritual” man complete, redeemed in body, soul, spirit. My life repeats the old order of history: first the “natural” Adam, the earth-born; next the “spiritual,” life-giving Adam, the Lord, heaven-born. “Flesh and blood inherit the kingdom of God?” Of course not. If that be your difficulty, we are agreed. I also say “Flesh and blood cannot.” “This corruptible?” No, no! Incorruption. “This mortal?” No! Immortality. “This weakness and frailty and liability to suffering?” Away with the thought! Thank God, No! We shall have done with these. I do not know much, but I know, “raised in power,” in all the light and strength and glory of an eternal Life. I do not know how; it has not been told me how. All is Revelation; even that does not go far. III. Exhortation.—Does the belief in the resurrection matter so much? Cannot a man be “steadfast, unmovable,” and the rest, without it? The holding of the doctrine involves: 1. Without it the man’s creed is no longer Christian. And the connection between creed and life is close. In the discussion in this chapter it is assumed that the question is not merely one of the Resurrection and future of the Body, but of the future and immortality of the Man. And if in the man’s creed Immortality be not found, it will affect his life, sooner or later, radically. At all events, to disbelieve the doctrine is to disbelieve the resurrection of Christ, with all the serious issues connected therewith. “And why do you baptize for the dead?” 2. “Then are we of all men the most miserable!” Die like the brutes, and yet be doomed to live without their insouciance, their freedom from responsibility and from fear of the future, from the sting of conscience and the sense and shame of failure? Sacrifice the pleasure—such as it is—of the men to whom this life is all, and afterwards find that we have no more to hope for than they? “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” Why risk everything—anything at all—for Christ? Why “fight with beasts at Ephesus,” or “die daily,” if it be only “after the manner of men”—with ordinary men’s hopes and no more? 3. “Do not listen to such things, lest you come to think such things!” “Evil communications corrupt good manners.” We shall suffer hurt in even mental contact with such teaching. 4. “Do not listen; labour; abound in the work.” Work is the best antidote to [sinful desires and to] vain speculations. An idle life leaves open the door to temptation, to unbelief, or to a sensuous or sensual life—perhaps to both. A Christian may be too busy to doubt; never too busy to enjoy and love and live. 5. “You are in the Lord; your hope is that of men ‘in Him’ (1 Corinthians 15:19); your activities are His, wrought through you. Can His life and work be in vain, ending unworthily, or in a complete failure?” If He had no resurrection, His own work was in vain; if you have none, yours will be. But stand fast in your faith in His resurrection and your own. (Many of these points, and some omitted ones, fully stated in Separate Homilies.) “Take the objective facts away from Christianity,” you lose the “definiteness and outward reality,” the more “strong and definite service.” You get “endless and useless introspection upon the mysteries of our nature, the rehearsal of which comes to be regarded as the fulfilment of righteousness,”—“a very tiresome thing, and so dropped, or exchanged for … Atheism.” (See Munger, Freedom of Faith, p. 195.) NOTESNote: 1. The main teaching of chapter is almost pure dogma. It is for the most part matter of simple revelation and belief. 2. The earliest extant written account of the appearances of the Risen Lord. The earliest Gospel is not so early as this. This account written not more than thirty years after the asserted Resurrection of Christ. [Important in its bearing upon 1 Corinthians 15:6.1 Corinthians 15:1. I declare.—With some shade of reproach that they required it. See the same phrase, 1 Corinthians 12:3; 2 Corinthians 8:1; Ephesians 6:21; Colossians 4:7; 2 Peter 1:16. 1. Note, Christ’s resurrection is an integral part of “the Gospel”; which is here both the historical facts, and the good news founded upon, rooted in, the facts. (Cf. Galatians 1:6-9.) 2. Note the cumulative “also, also, also.” Q.d. “You have as great a stake in the matter of its falsehood or truth as I have. True, I preached it; but so did you accept it, and it is your basis of life.” 3. Note “which … in which … by (means of) which.” (Cf. “we stand” in Romans 5:2; Romans 11:20.)1 Corinthians 15:2.—Note the punctuation and supplied words of the Ye are (being) saved.—Continuously; present part., as usual. In what word.—Literally; so then “the word of the Cross” (1 Corinthians 1:18) includes much more than merely the Crucifixion; there would be no Atonement without a Resurrection. In vain Choose between (1) margin, and (2) “so as to end after all in no saving result” (Galatians 3:4; Galatians 4:11). (1) would imply a baseless belief; (2) a fruitless belief. (For the thought of (2) Hebrews 2:11.) Evans prefers “rashly, without due reflection.”1 Corinthians 15:3. I received, … I delivered.… Ye received (1 Corinthians 15:1).—Three first links in tradition. A typical preacher: (1) A witness; of (2) what he heard at first-hand and himself had seen; (3) not creator of message; it is objective, not subjective. First of all.—Not (1) in order of time in the history of his preaching at Corinth, nor (2) in the order of doctrine in their Christian instruction, but (3) as of first-rate importance. Died … buried … rose.—These are all included in the “word of The Cross” (1 Corinthians 1:18). For our sins.—Evidently, then, the vicarious character of the death of Christ must not be made to rest, in (say) 2 Corinthians 5:15, upon the mere lexical force of the preposition; it is abundantly to be gathered from the sense of (say) John 11:50. See other prepositions in Romans 4:25; Galatians 1:4; 1 Peter 3:18. According to the Scriptures.—E.g. Isaiah 53:5; Isaiah 53:8; (Daniel 9:26); Psalms 22.; Zechariah 12:10; the Paschal Lamb. See how authoritatively the Risen Lord put His disciples into this Christian way of reading the Old Testament (Luke 24:25-27; Luke 24:44-46). [Everything He did and said on that first Christian “Sunday” was carefully chosen and significant—typical—carrying a large principle with it.] So before His death (Luke 22:37). Peter, at Pentecost, at once began using this Christian method of exposition; N.B., at Pentecost, another day which carried ruling precedents with it (Acts 2:25-31). [Peter kept to this principle (1 Peter 1:11; 1 Peter 2:24). As to New Testament in Old Testament, cf. also Acts 8:35; Acts 13:33-35; Acts 17:3; Acts 26:22-23; John 2:22; John 20:9. “These words carry us back to a time when the events of Christianity required not only to be illustrated or confirmed, but to be justified by reference to Judaism” (Stanley).1 Corinthians 15:4. Buried.—Not an unimportant link in the chain of Christian evidences. Looks, moreover, like a touch of the oral detail with which the story was by the first preachers communicated. Emphasised also in each of the four Gospels. Yet did not need the emphatic clenching “According to the Scriptures.” “Earth sacred above all planets as the burial-place of the Redeemer” (Beecher). Was raised.—Not “rose”: cf. Psalms 2:7; Isaiah 55:3 (Hosea 6:2); Psalms 16:10.1 Corinthians 15:5. Cephas.—The first man, to see the Risen Christ. A very important coincidence with apparently casual words in Mark 16:7 (and Luke 24:34, which most probably has this force). Cephas too [“Cephas,” as they said at Corinth] was an authority at Corinth; an ad homines touch, this. Twelve.—Already “officially” equivalent to “the Apostolic college”; in fact ten (Luke, as above), and then eleven (John 20:26).1 Corinthians 15:6. Five hundred … at once.—Probably in Matthew 28:16 (perhaps confirmed by John 21:1). The one hundred and twenty of Acts 1 were only those in Jerusalem. Paul’s word, so obviously open to challenge, and, if false or mistaken, to refutation, is authority for this fact. [Not to insist upon his inspiration.] The omission of this in the Gospels agrees with John 20:30. Fallen asleep.—(1 Corinthians 15:18; cf. 1 Corinthians 7:39; 1 Corinthians 11:30.) After the death of Christ, dying is never in the New Testament called “death,” in connection with Christians. Was the phrase born of the words of Christ, Matthew 9:24? “The Church never dies or thinks of death, though she buries her dead” (Pope). Remain.—John 21:22-23; 1 Thessalonians 4:15.1 Corinthians 15:7. James.—Unrecorded. The James of Acts 15, and of the Epistle. Tradition (in “Gospel of the Hebrews”) that (from Matthew 26:29) James (unbelieving in John 7:5) had vowed neither to eat, from the Last Supper onward, until he had seen the Risen Lord. Jesus appeared to Him. “Bring a table and bread. My brother, eat thy bread because the Son of Man is risen from the dead.” See the prominence of Cephas and James in Galatians 1, 2. All the apostles.—Choose between John 20:26; Matthew 28:16; and Acts 1:4. [Evans would emphasise “apostles” rather than “all.”]1 Corinthians 15:8. Due time.—Rather lay stress on the physical inferiority of the abortive-born than upon the comparative time of birth. [Paul was born long after time, not before time.] Stanley gives Suet., Octavius, xxxv. 2, as authority for magistrates appointed irregularly being called abortivi. To me.—A necessary credential to put him on equality with Cephas and the rest. See 1 Corinthians 9:1; Acts 9:17 (where Ananias is presumably reporting what he has learned from Christ Himself), Acts 26:16 (read in connection with Galatians 1:16, which must not be forced into mechanically restricted coincidence with this “appearance” alone). Last of (them) all.1 Corinthians 15:9.—“I am nothing;” 1 Corinthians 15:10, “I am greater than any of them.” Cf. another Pharisee (Luke 18:10).1 Corinthians 15:10. In vain.—Cf. 2 Corinthians 6:1. [Like the stony ground, or thorny-ground, hearers.] Cf. also Ephesians 3:8; 1 Timothy 1:12-16. .—1 Corinthians 15:1-11 Paul and the Gospel. I. Paul himself.— 1. The evangelist.—Note this: (1) He is preaching the Gospel whilst he is teaching such many-sided facts as these of our paragraph, and whilst rising to such an exalted strain of prophecy as follows in the chapter. He is “the Prophet Paul.” He claims in 1 Thessalonians 4:15 to speak “in the word of the Lord,” like a prophet of the old dispensation (cf., e.g., 1 Kings 20:35-36). In this very chapter he soon leaves behind him Old Testament Scripture and Contemporary Testimony, and soars away to a height and into a glory of Revelation as to the future, where our eye can scarcely see anything distinctly for very brightness, and where we hear his words indeed, but can hardly interpret some of them. Yet he never ceases to be practical. The lark at her highest flight, and lost in a blaze of glory where her song is indistinct for very distance, belongs to earth. Paul’s sudden, swift return to theology in 1 Corinthians 15:56-57, and to the practical, prosaic round of daily duty and service in 1 Corinthians 15:58, is very like her sudden drop to her nest, and to her motherly duty to her young ones, when her song is done. None of these exalted themes are revealed merely for the sake of giving, even accurate, information about the future. What is revealed is for the sake of its bearing upon practical life; so much only is revealed as may serve this purpose, [(a) “What is that to thee? Follow thou Me” (John 21:22). (b) “Are there few that be saved?” “Enter ye in at the strait gate,” i.e. “Few or many, see that you make one” (Luke 13:23). (c) “Lord, who did sin, this man or his parents?… We must work the works of Him that sent Me while it is day” (John 9:2; John 9:4). (d) These may illustrate a Bible reading on 2 Timothy 2:23. (2) All this sheds useful light on his words in 1 Corinthians 2:2 : “Christ, and Him crucified,” is no narrow theme. “The Cross” touches everything in the history of a fallen, redeemed race. But “the Cross” here includes the Resurrection. “So we preached,” when he came to Corinth. No scorn should be poured on the Evangelical preachers of the Georgian Revival that with them it was all “the Cross,” “the blood.” These themes were greatly prominent; the men were physicians for souls, who had found by observation and comparison of many thousands of “cases,” of all types, ages, ranks, what was the mischief of the human heart, and, by as wide experiment, what form of presentation of the truth, and what particular detail of the whole round of Truth, best cured their “sick.” Certainly results justified them. But they did not, in point of fact, confine themselves so literally to the Cross. They quite understood, “saved by His life” (Romans 5:10), and preached the Resurrection and the high-priestly Intercession as the necessary complements of Calvary. A “Gospel” preacher will roam far and wide in the field of revealed knowledge; he will explore in many directions, but he will always start from the Cross; he will account himself to have lost his bearings when he can no longer see it; he will account himself “lost” when he has wandered so far that the Cross has sunk beneath his mental horizon; he will keep open, however far afield, his communications with this Sacred Base of operations. Every theme will be traced up to, and treated as it is related to, the Cross and its atonement; subject to that condition, every theme of Revelation and its suggestions is open to him. Such themes as the Resurrection of the Lord, of the saints, of the sinner; the victory of the Lord over all opposing evil; the mysterious “End”;—so dealt with, these are all part of “the Gospel.” His prime qualification is that he is— 2. Paul the witness.— (1) To have seen Christ Jesus as the Risen Lord was a necessary credential of apostleship, in the narrowest sense of that title. It made Paul, perhaps, rather than Matthias (Acts 1:26), the twelfth of these patriarchs of the new Israel. [The Benjamite was the youngest-born, the Benjamin, amongst them.] Peter may have been too forward [Pentecost had not yet given the fulness of the Spirit] in choosing the man, but at least he was right as to the requisite credential: “One must be ordained to be a witness with us of His resurrection.” The Resurrection gives an adequate account of the origin of the Christian Church; thus actually to have seen Christ gives an adequate account of the transformation of Saul into Paul; taking all the circumstances of the case into the reckoning, nothing else does. To see the glorious Form, and to hear the voice of Jesus of Nazareth speaking as from heaven to him, years after He had been accounted dead, buried, and finally disposed of, like any other dead man,—this was a fact which at one blow brought down in ruins all the creed and all the personal righteousness of Saul of Tarsus. “These Nazarenes, then, whom I have been imprisoning because they said that the Crucified One was living again, and even bringing to the death when I could not get them to apostatise,—they were right; I have been wrong. My orthodox Judaism has no room for this fact; I must needs recast it. And who is He Whom I have despised, hated, calling Him a ‘blasphemer,’ who deserved to be crucified? I have been mistaken. I have been the blasphemer. I am the sinner—chief of sinners!” The one fact revolutionised Paul’s life. [No man’s life is ever the same, he cannot himself be again the same, when once he has intelligently, distinctly, come face to face with the Risen Christ and His claims. The meeting may lead to salvation; it may intensify rebellion: but life can never after be the same.] He also would have been the most earnest in saying that his capacity to be a witness to the Resurrection was no mere eyewitness capacity for testifying to a bare historical fact, however important and however far-reaching in its consequences. He knows of a belief in and a confession of a Risen Christ which only coexists with, which indeed is, salvation (Romans 10:9-10). The aim of his personal life is to have a knowledge, which is a sharing, of the resurrection of his Lord (Philippians 3:10-11). The Christian apologist of to-day, rightly enough, only appeals to the eyewitnesses of the historic fact; but Paul would have made the appeal of his “testimony” to lie here,—not that, so many years ago, God revealed His (risen) Son to him—a fact to grow more and more dim, perhaps, as it receded into the perspective of the past, and to become every year more and more a memory, open to challenge and to critical doubt as to its validity,—but that God, then and ever after, “revealed His (risen) Son in him” (Galatians 1:16); the historical fact became an experienced one; the objective having a subjective which was its counterpart, and its continuously new verification. (2) Still, here Paul is the historic witness, “delivering what” he has “first received.” For apologetic or evidential purposes, the “simpler” the witness, so he be manifestly honest, the stronger the evidence he gives. The man who has evidently no arrière pensée, who in all transparent directness does nothing but repeat what he knows at first-hand, is the best purveyor of facts for a verdict. Paul, like his brother apostles, was “put in trust with the Gospel” (1 Thessalonians 2:4); they were simply “stewards of the mysteries,” not creators or proprietors (1 Corinthians 4:1); it is “a deposit” (2 Timothy 1:14); as with every true preacher, there is with him no “feigning these things out of his own mind.” [He had, moreover, “received” it just as the Corinthians had received it in their turn from him. In them it had been a “believing” which made them, who were once “without strength,” to “stand,” and had “saved” them.] The old argument is of perpetual force, that the very inartificiality of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, the very “discrepancies” which testify to independence and to absence of collusive design, are guarantees of the truthfulness of the witnesses, and so inferentially to the truth of their story. [So, again, the only effective preacher of the Gospel is one who “delivers what” he has “received.” Hence his knowledge of the facts and of the dogmas depending upon them, here passes over into his personal character. He is—]. 3. Paul the sinner saved.— (1) How diverse his tone: in 1 Corinthians 15:9 he labours, he accumulates language of depreciation, to make out that he is nothing before God and in comparison with the rest of the Apostolic company; in 1 Corinthians 15:10 he boldly claims equality with the best of men, and to be more than they all. “Is that honest and consistent with Christian sincerity? Particularly, is it true when he says ‘least of all’ [and ‘chief of sinners’]? (1 Timothy 1:15). Would you not rather call him chief of apostles, chief of saints?” Natural questions. Yet all he says is true. [2 Corinthians 2:17 should apply most strictly to a man’s statement of his Christian experience, particularly to his relation of his ante-conversion experience. There is no use, and no honour done to God, in forgetting, or undervaluing, or denying, the good wrought in a man by the Spirit of God, even before by regeneration he became definitely a Christian.] For “I persecuted the Church of God.” (a) Sin once committed, not even God can undo it. Pardon of the past cannot alter the past. It may be forgiven, but it abides a fact. Paul did stand by, “consenting,” when Stephen was stoned, as certainly as he did study in the school of Gamaliel. The veil of Divine mercy may “cover” the sin, but the thing is there. Sins fade from our memory, or the remembrance may lose its poignancy by time [it evidently did not with Paul]; God’s anger on account of them is turned away, from the moment that the sinner trusts in Christ; from that moment there is no hell to fear on their account: but they are there. The prodigal sits forgiven and happy at his father’s table, but the riot of a far country is a fact and the inheritance is wasted. The bankrupt gets his order of discharge, but his debts are facts nevertheless. And he owes them still. Legally they no longer concern him; he is “justified” from them. He may prosper, and his new gains are safe; but he is in debt still. The law and the favour of his creditors make him safe; but an honest man feels that morally and in fact he is a debtor still. So Paul, the chief apostle, is God’s debtor still. In the moment fixed precisely for his readers in Philippians 3:7, a line was graciously drawn across the record of his life; nothing beyond it would again come up to his condemnation. But the line was drawn by grace, by mere favour for the sake of Another. The persecutor might and did build high in holy attainment, but the foundation was an act of favour, grace, and only grace. “By the grace of God I am,” etc., is as continuously true of his standing before God as of his abundant and fruitful life-activity. In himself and his own status, this chief apostle is “not meet to be called an apostle, because,” etc. The guilt of his persecution is not now upon him; he is being sanctified from his love of sin; it has no dominion over him, we may well believe; he is pardoned, rejoicing, God-honoured, holy. But there is the fact, unalterable to all eternity,—“I persecuted.” And the remembrance of all this will make such words as 1 Corinthians 15:9 always natural and always true. (b) How does that father [e.g. John Tregenoweth: His Mark, M. G. Pearse] in after-years look upon that child whom years ago he injured or blinded in the utter ignorance of deep intoxication? How does that man look upon his friend, when he finds that in an hour of passion, though in perfect good faith [the good faith of a madman], he said and did what proves to have been utterly false and to have done a lifelong wrong to his friend, at least with some who have not come, or will not, to know his friend as he now knows him? How does he feel, who in the dark has struck his very brother, supposing the while that he was resisting an enemy? With all the energy of a grand native capacity and all the force of intense conviction, Paul had flung himself against [“fallen upon” (Matthew 21:44)] his Brother, his Best Friend, the Redeemer of his soul, his Divine Messiah. True he “did it ignorantly,” but he did it. Oh, the horror of it! Oh, the shame of it! Oh, the wrong, the sin, of it! “Chief of sinners!” “Least of the apostles! Not worthy to be called an apostle!” The words are natural, honest, true. All this, then, being remembered, he is free to say— (2) “More than they all.” But “by the grace of God.” [Some poor, wretched, lost souls on earth have to say, and in hell will have to say eternally, “In spite of the grace of God, I am what I am!” Men may “receive the grace of God in vain,” making it to end in no such saving result as it was designed to accomplish. There are some lives of which one has to say, reversing Romans 5:20, “Where grace abounded, sin did much more abound.” In many senses true, “What maketh heaven, that maketh hell.” Paul is a “good steward of the grace of God” (1 Peter 4:10).] He is not here thinking only or principally of his standing with God, but of himself as measured by what he has been able to accomplish for his Master’s work. Not merely “by the favour of God”; “grace” seldom means so little as that in the New Testament. It is rather the actual power which has quickened and enlightened the mind, and energised the will, and aroused the devotion of the heart; a power and force which, when pursued to its last analysis, is revealed as the indwelling, personal Spirit of God. [John Hunt, one of the early missionaries to the Fiji islands, desiring to impress this practical interchangeableness of the thoughts, “grace” and “Holy Spirit,” in a preliminary and confessedly tentative rendering of some of the Epistles into the Bau dialect, several times deliberately translated “grace” by “Holy Spirit” (told to H. J. F. by Hunt’s colleague, R. B. Lyth).] (3) The meaning and practical value of such self-assertion as is here found in Paul’s letters, is dealt with in many other places of these Epistles, particularly chap. 9 and 2 Corinthians 10 sqq. It is never the gratuitous parading of himself which is natural to the vain man, who cannot be happy unless he is the centre of attention; nor the masterful self-assertion of the consciously strong man. It is always forced upon him by others (2 Corinthians 12:11, “Ye have compelled me”); it is forced out from him by others. It is here a question of safeguarding and vindicating an Apostolic status and consequent authority, whose primary purpose and main worth were the service of the Churches and the “edification” of the Corinthians themselves (2 Corinthians 10:8). And, moreover, with the more reason, that he found his action in declining the maintenance by the Church which other teachers accepted, was misconstrued into a confession of conscious inferiority of status. A Christian man cannot be too utterly humble as before God; his sense of abundant and entire indebtedness to the grace of God for all he is, and for all he has been able to accomplish, cannot be kept too keen. After every new success [and at every new “failure”] he will do wisely to present himself before God, with fullest acknowledgment that in it all he is only the organon of the Spirit of God. [There are two moments when Self is very near and when self-centering thought is a very real peril to the spiritual life; the moment of “more abundant” success, and the moment of more abundant failure.] Comparison with his fellow-workers is a dangerous occupation of thought for any man, and, as here, needs instantly and constantly guarding with the fullest acknowledgment, “Yet not I, but … God.” [Cf. another, “Yet not I, but,” etc. (Galatians 2:20), where the thought is substantially unaffected by the important various reading.] It will be the rarest occupation of his meditation, and still more rarely will such words of self-assertion come to his lips. The facts of his life and work best speak for him. Yet, like Paul, he may thankfully appear before his Master,—like the servant in the Parable of the Pounds [not, of course, the Talents, the structure and teaching of which illustrate a distinctly different point],—whose pound has gained ten pounds, whilst the same original “capital” in the case of his fellow-servants has only produced five or none (Luke 19:16-20); and may remember how greater native capacity and more abundant work have co-operated with the grace of God, to give him a real pre-eminence in toil and fruit. And he may bear himself amongst his fellows as one in whom the grace of God has found a conspicuous and instructive example of what it can do in human nature. But all for the glory of God, and for the advancement of the work committed to his hands. We have also in this paragraph:— II. An early account of “the Gospel” as, 1. Resting on facts; 2. Rooted in Old Testament Scripture; 3. Received by faith. 1. Resting on facts.— (1) If any facts of ancient history can be attested at all, such main outlines at the least of the Gospel story as are given here may be. Naturally such facts, particularly that of Christ’s resurrection from a real death, need more evidence than do facts against which no presumption arises from their being unlike those of ordinary experience. “Need,” for producing conviction in ordinary minds; for one “proof,” if it were irrefragable and gave demonstration, may establish a certainty; anything beyond simply facilitates belief, by eliminating the chances of error which may lurk behind a single proof, and by giving the (not simply added, but) multiple certainty of convergent proofs, and by reducing to a minimum the force of any preliminary presumption against. When a writer says, “Early Christianity was, in all its essentials, a special development of the common religious ideas of Asia Minor and Syria. It was the creed of Adonis, the creed of Attis, dressed up afresh and applied with minor differences to a certain historical or mythical personage, said to have lived in Galilee about the beginning of the Christian era. Of this personage himself we know really nothing but the name or names; every supposed fact or incident related of him is merely one of the common and universal incidents related of all the other gods” (Grant Allen, Fortnightly Review, September 1893),—he is not only asserting what few responsible historical students would affirm, but is displaying a scepticism which would make any certainty about all ancient history, or about any facts not actually within a man’s direct personal knowledge, impossible. Historical evidence is probable evidence; but sufficient testimony may make probability practical certainty. (2) These verses are a piece of documentary evidence acknowledged on all hands to be of the highest value. There is no important disbelief that they are part of a letter of a man practically a contemporary of the events he chronicles, writing not more than twenty-eight or thirty years after the date assumed for them. They are of a good class of testimony; epistolary, incidentally stated, not formally proved; asserted to be accepted by the readers of the letters as well as by the writer; and that, moreover, by readers many of whom were at most not favourably disposed towards the writer, whilst some of them would have been glad to discredit anything he was or said; especially when also he is here using what he claims to be their belief, to rebuke and refute what he asserts to be their inexcusable, unreasonable, mischievous error. The fact of a resurrection of a dead Christ is not one hard to be brought to the test; it is not easy, or a thing easily credible as an explanatory theory, to mistake for a Divine man risen from the dead in full vigour and glory a crucified sufferer, never really dead, reviving from a swoon, creeping feebly out of a grave (and this especially guarded) to an obscure life where no most interested enemy ever suspected His presence, or succeeded in discovering Him. The death was officially secured and acknowledged; the burial was conducted by friends, but with the cognisance and under the surveillance of enemies; a real resurrection was not difficult of verification or disproof. Fraud or conscious deception on the part of the early witnesses is not now seriously alleged. (3) Very marked and warranted attention has of late been drawn to the evidence of 1 Corinthians 15:6. Its force was long ago perceived, but it has come into prominence as meeting the suggestion of some hallucination of a woman, infecting other women, and working with a predisposition to believe [a thing entirely without evidence, and against all such evidence as is extant, whatever be its value], to make a company of disheartened men believe that, not only was Jesus risen, but that they had seen Him so risen. “The greater part” of five hundred simultaneous spectators and auditors of the Risen Lord remained for testimony and examination. I.e. not fewer than two hundred and fifty-one, and perhaps three or four hundred, persons are asserted by Paul to be still living, not later than thirty years (at the outside) after the fact in question,—a fact about which there could be little room for mistake,—and all of them most thoroughly assured that they all saw the Crucified Christ at one and the same time. The history of conspiracies does not make it likely that in this one case only there should never have been either a penitent, or a traitor, to reveal a concerted deception, if even so many could have been brought to agree to it in the first instance. One person may be under an illusion, but hardly twelve, or two hundred and fifty-one, or five hundred; and certainly no two or twelve or five hundred would be under the same illusion, and all under the same at once. The number of the simultaneous witnesses eliminates everything subjective,—predisposition, illusion, temperament, fraud. [Myths, it is also urged, take longer time to grow than did this “myth” of Christ’s miracles and resurrection, which (N.B.) had plainly already “grown,” some years earlier than this Corinthian date. Myth, or subjective persuasion, does not account for the holy character and effects of the story. A myth, or a story whose basis was a predisposition or a temperament or a mistake, does not afford adequate foundation for the Christian Church, or account for the character and the steadfastness of the first Christians, who, against all their interests, against all the tendencies of the sinful human heart, and at severe and deadly cost, persisted in their creed and succeeded in spreading it. Nor do they account for the perennial vitality of the belief age after age, or for its renewing power in all races, Churches, social ranks, ages, both sexes, etc. 2. Rooted in Old Testament Scripture.— (1) Christianity and its several basal facts are never fairly judged if brought to the bar standing alone. Its most startlingly miraculous fact loses much presumptive improbability, gains some presumptive probability, if it is seen to be part of a coherent scheme of facts and doctrines, in which each lends meaning and support to every other, and which gives an adequate reason for the divergence from the “natural” order and ordinary human experience. The whole company of facts must be brought to trial in their combination. [E.g. on the Christian theory of the nature and work of Christ, it is not improbable that His entrance into the world should be exceptional, or that His departure from it should be exceptional; that such a person for such a purpose should work miracles, or rise from the dead. Christianity, on its own suppositions, gives an adequate reason for all the “miraculous” in it.] (2) Christianity must be read in the light of this fact amongst others, that it was preceded by a collection of books, held sacred by its Jewish opponents, of which it claims to be the continuation, the expansion, the complement, the fulfilment (Hebrews 1:1). The very claim is noteworthy, in face of the notoriously unfriendly attitude of Judaism to Christianity from the very first; let the reasons for making such a claim be considered. However to be accounted for, the fact remains that the Old Testament from beginning to end contains many things, many passages, which exhibit a wonderful coincidence with, and suitableness to, the history and the Christian account of the work of Christ. The Founder of Christianity Himself put His followers upon the track of discovery of such correspondences. (See Critical Notes.) Christianity and the Resurrection of its Christ are no isolated facts, sprung full-grown into a void place in the history of religions. The theory of the creation of a Christ by His followers out of presuppositions and expectations gathered from their reading of the Old Testament, disregards the only available or colourable historic evidence, that their reading and training in the Old Testament led them, as it led their Jewish enemies, into quite another line of conception and expectation of the Christ. Old Testament and New Testament are two parts of one Revelation. The Mosaic system is not the main stream of the Old Testament. It “came in” by the way; “it was added” for a special purpose (Romans 5:20; Galatians 3:19); it flows alongside of the main stream. It is abundantly rich in teaching about Christ and the Gospel, the very arrangements of the Tabernacle being an object lesson in Divine truth (Hebrews 9:8; Hebrews 9:11). But “the Scriptures” are larger than “the Law,” and some are older, or contain a record of an older revelation, than “the Law.” Christ, and the Resurrection which sets the seal of completeness upon His redeeming work, are the fulfilment of, not the hope of Israel only, but of man. In Christ are the pledge and the contents of a covenant as old as Abraham (Galatians 3:14; Galatians 3:16; Galatians 3:29). Christ is a new Adam, over against the first Adam. The importance of rooting the new Gospel thus firmly in the Old Testament Scriptures lay in this, that it was not Israelite only in its scope and redemption grace, but wide as mankind. And amongst its cogent “evidences” is this, that it fulfils previsions, predictions, promises, hopes, put on record long before—fulfils them where only One Mind, the Divine, could have arranged the coincidences, the correspondences, the paired anticipations and realisations (see Appended Note). 3. Received by faith.—“Ye believed;” “unless ye believed in vain.” How vital was the connection between the truth of the history and their personal Christian life will be seen subsequently in the chapter (1 Corinthians 15:12-19). But it is there discussed with regard rather to the theory of the Christian life. Practically the connection is very close. John often connects faith in the Incarnation with regeneration (1 Eph 4:15; Ephesians 5:5; Ephesians 5:10-12, etc.). Paul himself very closely connects salvation with faith in the Resurrection of Christ [Romans 10:9; observe also how this is rooted in Old Testament Scripture, Deuteronomy 30:14]. The Lord and Teacher of both had connected “eternal life” with “knowing the Only True God” (John 17:3). In fact, no doctrine is believed in until it has become a truth into which living experience has admitted a man. He may indeed fall away, fearfully, from such knowledge as is even thus gained (Hebrews 10:26; Hebrews 6:4-6). But it is a remote possibility. The people of Christ are “sanctified by the truth.” They have within themselves a Faith deeper than a mere Creed, however intelligently accepted and held. Without being a theologian a man may be a believer, and one also who can give a good account of his “faith.” A new environment, where unbelief is customary; a crop of difficulties and objections, not known or appreciated earlier; above all, a moral deterioration; may sever the merely “othodox man” from his creed. The believer “stands” by his faith; it gives him status before God—his only status; it brings him a real strength in which he “stands” against trial, persecution, doubt. The martyrs were drawn from this class of believers. They died for truths which had become part of their very selves, for truths which had made them what they were. [Might it be said by way of illustration, that the merely orthodox man, like the crustacean, carries his skeleton and shield and strength outside him, and so can easily “cast” it, as the crustaceans do; whilst the believer has his supporting, strengthening “truth” within, where vertebrates have their skeleton? The skeleton within the man is belief; the skeleton outside the man is orthodoxy.] 1 Corinthians 15:5-6. “According to the Scriptures.”—Two points grow out of this phrase:— I. This organic unity between Old Testament and New Testament, and between their separate component parts, must not be underestimated. It is a fact perceived by so many students of Scripture, of such various types of mind and training, and so variously equipped with “learning,” possessing much or little of it, or (in the ordinary sense) none; it is a fact the evidence for which, whilst it can be conclusively stated in broad outline, nevertheless so reveals its full force, and the abundance of material from which it is drawn, only to patient and minute students of the Scripture, every fresh reading adding to the evidence both wealth and cogency; that it cannot be dismissed as a mistake, a subjective fancy, the dream of a particular, “mystical,” cast of mind, or of a particular school of interpretation. All devout readers find forced upon them a consistent scheme and plan in a Revelation developing from the earliest ages, and from what have hitherto been reputed the earliest books, to the latest. Above all, they have seen a disclosure of the coming Christ, growing fuller in detail, more definite in outline, from the beginning onwards. The fact has been too often perceived and verified by too great a number and variety of students of Scripture to be dismissed as an error. Part and part “hang together”; part and part give and receive light and confirmation in turn; the coincidences between Old Testament and New Testament are so many, so often incidental, so often “trivial”—many times escaping notice at a first or many a subsequent reading—that, even mathematically speaking, the chances are infinite against the Coincidence being anything less than, any other than, a real, designed, organic Connection. All the results of many centuries of study of Scripture by students of all types have accumulated “evidence” of internal harmony, of a coherent history, embodying a consistent, gradually unfolding scheme of truth, and an ever clearer disclosure of a Personality, all of which culminates in Christianity and Christ, and finds its clearest expression in Him as He is expounded by the Holy Spirit. All this must be taken account of in the present-day inquiries into the historical value of (say) the earlier story of Israel or of the Mosaic Institute, and into the literary history of the process by which the Bible has reached its present form. Higher Criticism approaches the problem of the origin and composition of the extant Bible, simply as dealing with an ancient literature. It endeavours to discover and exhibit the constituent elements of those books which it believes to show a composite structure; it hopes to trace the process of literary composition, as conducted by several hands at several points of time; it endeavours to trace and date the sources from which material has been gathered for our present books; it hopes to fix scientifically the authorship of whole books or separate portions. Moreover, it endeavours to appraise the historical value or no-value of the contents of the books. The process of inquiry is perfectly legitimate; the Bible may be examined from that standpoint, as from many others. The results arrived at are reached under the conditions and with the risks attaching to all “specialist” inquiry, or any many-sided or complex subject whatsoever. And they need checking by and co-ordinating with the results arrived at on all other lines of inquiry, and yielded by the examination of all other kinds of evidence, which may bear upon the problem of the literary origin and history of the composition of what, in the issue, is in the hands of the Church as the Old Testament and the New Testament,—the Bible. Inquirers and students who are not competent to attack the problem from the side of literary criticism can and do attack it from the side and study of the organic connection and consistent development of both history and doctrine which is found to obtain in the extant Bible. When some Higher Criticism pronounces that no books in their present form, and no very reliable history amongst their contents, date much farther back than (say) the days of Josiah, and that very much of the Mosaic Ritual Law, and even the Tabernacle itself, is a late, very late, and not very honest, after-thought of a priestly order, then the students of the organic structure and development ask that their results may also be taken into account before the verdict on the whole case is finally given. They point out, e.g., that in 1 Corinthians 15:22; 1 Corinthians 15:45-49 a parallel is brought out, and wrought out, between Adam and Christ and their respective relations to the race—a parallel which is by no means a mere Rabbinic allegorising of a story which may be a pretty and serviceable myth, but is a development of a great idea of God underlying the whole scheme of ruin and redemption, from its inception in Eden to its consummation in glory. Before the early pages of Genesis are dismissed as unhistoric, the place their narrative occupies in the organically developing Divine plan should be considered. If “Abraham” be a mere eponymic personage, it is difficult to attribute any serious present-day value to the arguments in Galatians 3, 4 as to the relation of “the covenant confirmed to him by God in Christ” to the Law and to the Gospel and the privileges of believers. If the widely current critical account of the origin and history of the Tabernacle and its ritual of atoning and other sacrifices be true, what permanent worth, what truth which would be more than pretty fancies or happy allegorising, what truth for which God could be held responsible, would there be in all the discoveries therein, by (say) the writer of Hebrews, of anticipations of the Great Sacrifice and of the whole scheme of Sin and its Remedy? The whole story of Israel, and especially of its Exodus from Egypt and its Eisodus into Canaan, yields an abundant and abundantly verified harvest of points of spiritual significance and of parallelism with the regenerate life, and with even the historic life of Jesus of Nazareth. All these separate and very significant episodes of the Old Testament story are so used by Christ and His apostles as to bring them into the closest designed connection with the one, whole, harmonious, age-long unfolding of God’s redeeming idea and its historical introduction into the world. if Christ, if Redemption, if the Christian life are all “according to the Scriptures,”—“Law, Prophets, Psalms,” all (Luke 24:44),—then what are the Scriptures, even in their earliest portions? If they be not history, then there might have been indeed a developing story of a Redemptive Work, but at all events we have no reliable account of it. If Adam and Abraham and Moses and David are not certainly historical, then all the New Testament account of the Old Testament preparation for Christ, in which they are essential factors, has no practically certain value. II. Another suggestion may also be of some practical value. If the Author of Nature be the same with the Author of Revelation, and if there is development apparent in the history of the process by which Nature and Revelation have reached, each of them, their present form and stage, it would only be in agreement with all we know of His work in other directions to expect that the principle of the development would be identical, though the facts with which in the one case and the other it stands connected would belong to diverse orders, whilst yet presenting some analogies to each other. Many a student of Scripture and Revelation can pretend to no such acquaintance with the facts of the natural world as enable him to exercise an independent judgment on the methods or conclusions of the man who is a student of biological science; but he does claim a fairly complete knowledge of the facts of his own special field, where moreover the area of the field is not too large to be very thoroughly known. What be finds to be the truth about development in revelation he would expect to find to hold true in nature—that and no more. He would expect to find that the ultimate form of the theory of Origins, accepted by the students of physical science, will coincide with the result of his own working on his own group of facts, and in his familiar field. He would say, e.g., that “Man came, and is, ‘according to the Scriptures’ of the ‘stone book’ of the earlier geological history of the earth, just as Christ is, and came, and died, and rose, ‘according to the Scriptures’ of the earlier, the Old Testament ‘strata’ of the successive stages of Revelation.” The idea of the Creator, first set forth in very meagre, simple form, has in both cases been more and more fully developed. From time to time, never apart from a distinct interposition of the will of the Author of all, a new stage has been reached, a new departure has been taken, a new embodiment of His idea has been exhibited, in both Nature and Revelation. The new form has always been on the same essential lines as the older, but with many modifications, with new touches here and there, with fuller detail everywhere, adapting the old to new conditions and to the requirements of a new stage in the ruling purpose. Until at last the one series of developing expositions of the Worker’s thought culminated in Man, and the other in the God-man. [Both in the end meet in Him (Hebrews 2).] Man is the goal of Creation; Christ of Revelation. Man sums up all the creatures which have preceded him; Christ and His history sum up all the persons and the history which preceded them. The development which is verifiable in the history that leads up to Christ will be found to be the verifiable development in the geological and biological history which has led up to man. 1 Corinthians 15:6. “Fallen asleep.”—Sleep the new, Christian name for Death. The new, Christian name for a burial-place: Cœmetery (= Sleeping-place). I. Merely an incident in a continuous life.— 1. No break at death in the personal life. The same Self awakes; and, through the night’s parenthesis in consciousness and activity, the same Self has gone on. [No inference to be drawn from the figure, as to any asserted loss of consciousness between death and resurrection. Figure only suitable at all as seen from the spectator’s standpoint, not the sleeper’s.] “I shall awake—I.” “I shall see for myself,” etc. Shall answer the call of the awakening trumpet, with the consciousness that it is my same Self which greets the dawn of the eternal Day. 2. As, of a morning, the happy soul has many a time awoke eager to resume “fellowship with the Father”; has awoke to find the Father, Who has been waking whilst the child slept, still there, just as He was there, filling the last moments of last night’s consciousness with the sense of His presence; so the soul which closed its eyes in the presence of the Father, wakes from this “Sleep” to say, as its first glad greeting of the Morning of Eternity: “When I awake I am still with Thee!” The same Self awakes, to find the same God, and to enjoy the same holy fellowship. II. Sleep has the prospect of awakening.—Bold unbelief in the French Revolution wrote upon the gate of Père la Chaise, “Death is an eternal sleep.” No. Whatever Death may introduce to, it is but to a terminable, temporary experience. The “grave is not the goal” of life; only another, passing, stage towards the goal. [The certainty of the awakening “in Christ” is mainly in this chapter. But the man out of Christ is to remember how temporary is the episode called “Death”; how certain is the awakening; how he then takes up again, how indeed he has all through taken along with him, the old responsibility and guilt.] III. A brief passage in our continuous existence.—Psalms 90:5 reminds how a night’s sound sleep seems but as a moment; a man seems only just to have come to rest. It will not be long before our “sleeping” shall be broken in upon by the voice of one who says tenderly, and yet mightily, “Talitha cumi” (almost = “Awake up, my child”). Then also rest is suggested; an escape from the trouble and clamour of life, and from the tension which strain brain and heart almost past endurance (2 Thessalonians 1:7). IV. Remember: “Asleep in Christ;” “asleep through Jesus.” V. Remember the first instance of the phrase: Stephen has struggled to his knees for a prayer, after the crush of the first stones, hurled upon his chest by the witnesses, as he lay upon the ground. Next he is struck down again by the hail of stones, or sinks exhausted. But he sees his Lord “standing,” watching the scene with keen interest; standing, as if He could not keep His seat upon His throne, in His eager restlessness to welcome the first to follow Him through the gate of blood into heaven’s rest. And he no longer sees the scowling, angry, murderous faces that glower upon “the Nazarene blasphemer.” The shouts of execration die out of his ears. He perhaps hardly longer feels the stones. He sees the Son of Man, and “falls asleep.” A rough bed for the death scene! 1 Corinthians 15:6. Some are fallen asleep.—The first reflection upon the early resting of one of the ministers [workers] of Jesus Christ comes most naturally in the words of His own comforting question, “Are there not twelve hours in the day?” He gave it as a reason for not shrinking from the risk of returning into a dangerous place at the call of duty. “Immortal till His work was done,” He would “go into Judæa again.” He would “walk today and to-morrow and the day following,” regardless alike of Herod’s threatening and of Judas’s treachery; the day has twelve hours, and it will surely see them to their close. This teaches us a new measurement of time. It is not the accomplishment of the threescore and ten or fourscore years which makes a life complete in the reckoning of God’s sanctuary. The life of a little child has its twelve hours. It may be a complete life, as God sees it, quite as truly as the life which has been dragged out to its utmost length of ninety years on a hundred. It may as perfectly have accomplished the thing whereto He sent it—it may have borne as real a testimony to His loving, life-giving grace—as if childhood had lived on into youth, and youth into manhood, and manhood into old age. “They reckon not by days and years, Where he has gone to dwell.” There were twelve hours, even in that life’s brief day. Though the constituent “hour” may not have been one year long, still—to apply, somewhat inaccurately, the words of a Prophet—still “the child may die,” in God’s reckoning, “a hundred years old.” Certainly there may be the twelve hours of a very full day in a [ministerial] life very brief in years. Some of the men of everlasting remembrance in the Church [of England] have died at the age of thirty years or under. It is the devotion which counts. It is the earnestness which tells. We do not undervalue the testimony of a long life—a life protracted into days even of weakness, suffering, and silence in the holy service. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/phc/ NOTES1 Corinthians 15:12.—Cf. the strain of 1 Thessalonians 4:14, or Romans 8:11. Also see that it is “Christ” [and not first of all facts about Him] who is the burden and substance of the preaching. Cf. 2 Corinthians 4:5, “We preach Christ Jesus, as Lord.” Perhaps “denying” a resurrection in fact, whilst claiming still to “believe in it” in the (non-natural) sense of 2 Timothy 2:18. [Epicureans were practically Materialists; Stoics taught (a Nirvana-like or Pantheist) return of the individual into the Great, Central Being. So they laughed with polite contempt at Athens. “A new god and goddess: Jesus and Anastasis” (Acts 17:18). Common people believed that death was either extinction of the soul or a worthless shadow life, and this most likely the form of disbelief which would be prevalent in the Church at Corinth. (After all, in this, as in many similar cases, the philosophers only state more explicitly what common people with native shrewdness feel. E.g. the difficulties raised in 1 Corinthians 15:35 are recurrent perpetually amongst plain people who never heard of even the names of the philosophers.) Very important to notice in this discussion how the resurrection of the body is made to stand or fall with the after-life of the man. As in Mark 12:18 sqq. Christ enlarges the scope of the discussion from one merely concerning the resurrection, to an argument for the immortality of the man in covenant with God, and hence for his body also, as an integral part of his redeemed and covenanted manhood.]1 Corinthians 15:12.—“If one, then all.”1 Corinthians 15:13.—“All, or none at all.”1 Corinthians 15:14.—Not this time “vain” through any fault or failure on their part, but because the very basis of faith and life has been an unreality.1 Corinthians 15:15.—“We were chosen to be His witnesses of this very fact (Acts 10:41; Acts 2:32; Acts 3:15; Acts 13:31); it would turn out that we were God’s false witnesses!” Of God (second time) is “as to God, and what He has done.”1 Corinthians 15:18. In Christ.—As Revelation 14:13; 1 Thessalonians 4:16. [But not 1 Corinthians 15:14, which is “through Jesus,” rendering the connection more probable “will God bring through Jesus with Him” (viz. Jesus).]1 Corinthians 15:19.—Do not connect “hoped in Christ.” [Cf. for this, 1 John 3:3 (no longer ambiguous in R.V.). Yet see Ephesians 1:12. Our whole life is “in Christ”; our “hope” is the hope of men who are “in Christ.” Miserable.—In the old sense (cf. “miserable sinners” in the Anglican Liturgy) “to be pitied, or compassionated, unhappy that we are!” .—1 Corinthians 15:12-191. “Does death end all?” Well, answer another question: “Did His death end all?” A popular illustrated edition of Renan’s Vie de Jésus has, as its last page, inserted even after the “Fin,” which closes the text, a woodcut of the Crucified. It is simply and only a crucified peasant, one before whose cross a man might pass with half-contemptuous pity, and cry in modern slang, “Poor beggar! Pauvre diable!” He is alone as he hangs in the picture; not even the raven of the classical quotation is yet wheeling around the gibbet; the sky behind is cloudy and angry; the head hangs slouched in death’s relaxation; the hair is the uncombed, matted mass of a wretched peasant who for twenty-four hours has been in the hands of enemies. The title of the picture might have been “Fin” too. The realistic page, the execution of a Jewish fanatic, is the last in Renan’s book. When He says, “It is finished,” Renan thinks it is finished too. The Vie de Jésus goes no further. Forsaken, a failure, finished,—so He hangs in the illustration. If that were all, if the life of Jesus did end there, what a difference! But is that the end of the story of the Incarnate Son? No. His life did not begin at Bethlehem; nor did it finish at Calvary. Yet such talk as was rife at Corinth, at least in some quarters, could only have one logical consequence, viz. that it did there finish, that Christ, like any other dear or great name of the past, is nothing but a memory. 2. Doubtless a good deal of such talk was the informal, loose, “liberal,” “intellectual” theologising on this particular topic, of which the first and last and only specimen was by no means that in Corinth. Some caught up, parrot-fashion, the current novelty of their circle: “No intelligent man, you know, believes in any resurrection of literally dead men. Nobody, you know, denies the Resurrection. Oh no; but of course it is agreed that nothing was ever meant but a moral rising again. ‘Awake to righteousness,’ for example.” Or a superficial, natural sharpness, in danger of making that native shrewdness which so generally proves right in common things, the arbiter of judgment in every sort of case which comes under its review, pronounces off-hand: “Cannot be, you know! The dead rise again? The dead? Why, look at them! Is not that enough?” (1 Corinthians 15:35). Or another of these exceedingly clever, reasonable people, with great wisdom propounds their pet difficulty: “Well, you see, our point is here. We cannot see where they are to get a body. What sort of body is conceivable for them? No, no; such a doctrine cannot pass muster with us.” Human nature is the same in all ages and Churches and lands. It likes to pose as the philosopher; it likes to be amongst the people “not quite so easily satisfied as some folks, you know!” And there may have been some in their hearts really half afraid of the doctrine; hardly caring to face the thought of having some day to confront in a restored life the past and its account. 3. By-and-by (1 Corinthians 15:36 sqq.) Paul deals fully with the objections raised by such “sharp,” “’cute” people, rather vain of their wisdom, and of their emancipation from old and foolish beliefs. Here he drives home at their Christianity. He gives them credit for being sincerely Christian, so far as they understood it. In 1 Corinthians 15:36 he is bitingly satirical: “Yes, you are exceedingly clever, no doubt, to perceive such difficulties. But you are really fools, with all your wisdom.” Here he takes the most favourable estimate: They do really care to be Christians; they do really prize their Christian hope; they would be distressed, he is willing to believe, if all ended in vanity and mocking emptiness. Then let them look where they are being led, before they commit themselves to such rash pronouncements. Are they prepared to go all the length of the path into which, with such a light heart and confident, they have begun to enter? 4. “No resurrection of dead persons” at all? Then take a choice; read the alternative in two directions: “All, or none at all.” All, or no risen Christ! (1 Corinthians 15:13; 1 Corinthians 15:16). “One and all.” A risen Christ, and therefore all! If no risen Christ, then all distinctively “Christian” preaching is folly (1 Corinthians 15:14), or falsehood (1 Corinthians 15:15), whether intentionally so or not. To recast, reconstruct, the Christian scheme, so as to leave out a Risen Christ, is to produce what is not Christianity at all. For what underlies this elimination of His rising again in the proposed scheme of doctrine? Naturalism; which presumes always against the breaking-in of the supernatural, and even the exceptional, upon the natural and ordinary in the world’s course. [“Are we then, by assuming this one event, to abandon the entire modern view of the world?” (A. Schweizer, quoted by Delitzsch). “So soon as I can convince myself of the reality of the resurrection of Christ, this absolute miracle, as Paul seems to declare it, I shatter the modern conception of the word. This breach in the order of nature, which I regard as inviolable, would be an irreparable breach in my system, in my whole world of thought” (H. Lang, apud Delitzsch, Expositor, January 1889).] And that is no “Christianity” which is not full of God’s present-day, active, wise, loving operativeness in His world, especially as incessantly “elaborating” its Redemption by His Son, Christ. As well, moreover, delete the Cross as the Resurrection, and hope to call the expurgated story the story of Christ. It may be an imitation of the story; like some clever historical novels, making use of known facts, and keeping in many parts fairly parallel with them. But though it may borrow the name, and try to pass as “a Gospel,” though with differences; it is a “different Gospel”; another there cannot be (Galatians 1:6-7). The old “preaching is vain” if this be true. A vexatiously restrictive code of ethics is left, without adequate motive or power, and encumbered with a good deal else besides the Resurrection which is “top-hamper,” some day to be thrown overboard to lighten the ship. 5. Nor has it only theological consequences. The practical consequences are many and serious. Faith in good testimony is seriously shaken (1 Corinthians 15:15); but of more consequence is it that Faith has been groping after, laying hold of, a shadow, a memory, a name, a vanished Christ. There may have been an offering of the Lamb of God on Calvary, but we have no token by which to differentiate that death from any other crucifixion. The offering may have been accepted, but we have no evidence of the fact. Behind the veil there is for a guilty soul no real, living, interceding High Priest drawing near to God with its burden of “sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Long ago that “High Priest’s” body was left to corrupt in its new grave in a garden near Jerusalem. Jesus is no more than the Lazarus now finally dead; He is only living as Paul is still living. The death on the cross may then well have been only the abortive end, unfortunately premature, of a life which might have done much more for its generation if it had been longer spared. But everything distinctive of the Christian hope, everything of a real Atonement on which a guilty conscience may stay itself, is gone. Christ is one of the world’s great names—perhaps the greatest. But “in Christ”? As well say “in Paul”? 6. “In Christ.” It is a restricted life. It has its joys and its compensations, whatever its value, or truth, or falsehood. But it has its restrictions, its sacrifices, its self-denial; it goes entirely against the “grain” of human nature; it entails heavy penalties, social and other. And if, after all, its eternal compensation is a delusion; if, above all, the guilty soul must pass into eternity without a Saviour and an Atonement, left eternally “in the lurch,” “made ashamed by our hope” (Romans 5:5); then Christians have lived in a fool’s paradise, and made a fool’s bargain. In the arena as they are, before a gazing world (1 Corinthians 4:9), they may well expect the laughter of the spectators, unless indeed these accord them pity. They are of “all men most pitiable.” “Nos perituri salutamus.” [And this is not much mitigated, if—seeing that the argument of the chapter assumes that no resurrection means no after-life at all, and so no judgment or (perhaps) hell—it be the earthly bargain of which account is alone taken by Paul.] 1 Corinthians 15:19. “If … of all men most miserable.” I. A few of the facts which this implies.— 1. There is misery among men upon earth. Obviously. But remember three things: (1) Not so great misery as man’s sin deserves. (2) Not so great as man’s happiness. Days, weeks, of affliction; years of health and happiness. (3) Not so great as the good it will ultimately work out. Suffering in perdition works no good; here, under Mediatorial rule, it is disciplinary and corrective. 2. Misery amongst men exists in different degrees.—Some are “most miserable.” Calm and sunshine in one lot; storm and darkness in another. One knows nothing of sickness or poverty; another nothing of health and sufficiency. Some followed by consequences of sin, lashed by guilty conscience; some sin and suffer nothing; some have the Christian peace. A day is coming when eternal justice must balance the accounts, for earth’s inequalities. 3. The degree of misery is sometimes regulated by hope.—Hope directed to right objects, and rightly founded, will bear a man up under all the ills of life, make him calm in the tempest and valiant in the fight; will give him such a grasp on the future as will prevent him from sinking under the present. It will be a firm anchor, holding his ship securely amidst the tumultuous billows of his stormy life. Yet does not all disappointment grow out of hope? What is disappointment but a hope lost? And this, but a kind of life lost? Loss of hope is hell. 4. The hope of a Christian, if false, will make him “of all men most miserable.”—These words must not be taken to teach: (1) That apart from the resurrection of Christ man has no [kind or measure of] evidence of a future state. “It is said that the Emperor Frederick III., hearing of the death of a very wicked man, who had lived in prosperity, without having had at any time his health or fortune impaired, and died at the age of ninety-three, said, ‘See here a proof of another life.’ ” So whispers the rational instinct of all. (2) That, on the supposition that there is no future life, the practice of virtue here would place man in a worse condition than vice. Virtue, as embodied in Christianity, would give a man considerable advantage even in this world. “Ways of pleasantness,” etc. (3) That, apart from a future state, a godly life is not binding on man. So long as man and his Maker exist in relation to each other, so long his obligation to love Him “with all his heart,” etc., must continue. What, then, do they mean? [The writer then greatly limits the truth of the text to the Apostle and his “evangelical contemporaries.” (But query this?) Also (he says) remember “that he supposes the disappointed to survive the discovery of the delusion.” Else existence would terminate in, or the next moment after, the discovery of the delusion, and there would be no misery at all. (Query, this over subtle?)] The misery of a tremendous disappointment. [Is not the usual, “superficial” view truer, that it is that present loss and unhappiness which to the outside world seems in varying degree always to be the price of being a Christian? “The game not worth the candle.”] II. Several things will tend to aggravate this disappointment.— 1. The hold which the blighted hope had obtained over the whole soul. Solomon speaks of the loss of a hope as “the giving up of the ghost.” His idea was that the dissolution of a soul from hope was as terrible and distressing as the dissolution of soul from body. Imagine the case of a man who had thrown his whole being into Christianity, who had allowed its doctrines to absorb his thoughts, its precepts to rule his life, its promises to fire his aspirations, and who sanctified all the comforts, advantages, and honours of this life for its sake, being met at the moment when his hopes were at their zenith, and when his death was at hand, with the conviction that all was a delusion; and you have a man “of all men most miserable.” 2. The deception which this blighted hope prompted [Query, “led”?] its subjects to practise.—“False witnesses of God.” The deception of a hearty and practical believer in Christianity is earnest. If he believes in the leading subjects contained in the Gospel, he must become an enthusiastic propagandist; the desire to make men believe as he does becomes the dominant passion. His deception is systematic, not an occasional attempt, a spasmodic effort, a desultory endeavour; it is the organised purpose of his life. It is influential. No system has proved itself more victoriously aggressive. By it these workers “turned the world upside down.” To think, then, that not only themselves had been the victims of delusion, but had helped to make others such, would intensify the disappointment, and render them “most miserable.” 3. The destitution in which the departure of the hope would leave the soul.—Christianity makes a most radical change in a man: what he once loved he loathes, what he once sought he shuns, once valued now despises, what seemed gain to him counts loss. On the discovery of the delusion, he would be left with tastes and desires for which there was no pleasure correspondent. Nothing in the old to meet the new proclivities, and the new has melted away into thin air. Conclusion.—Add these things together, and then—“most miserable.” Thank God all this only hypothetic. “But now Is Christ risen,” etc.—Adapted from “Homilist” New Series, 4:61. 1 Corinthians 15:14. Reverse the Proposition. I. Preaching is not in vain.—It has power. It effects moral miracles. II. Faith is not vain.—It brings comfort, pardon, life. Therefore— III. Christ is risen.—[J. L.] NOTES1 Corinthians 15:20. Hath.—Emphasis here, not on “now” or “Christ.” Over against their doubts, and speculations, and “impossibilities,” Paul sets the one conclusive fact. Firstfruits.—Read in the light of Rom 11:16; James 1:18; Revelation 14:4; Matthew 27:52-53. With a variant figure the thought is in Colossians 1:18; Revelation 1:5.1 Corinthians 15:20-23. By man … by man.—Resurrection actually comes “by man”; we may almost say must so come, and so He became man. He the Judge also because “the Son of Man” (John 5:27). All … All.—How wide is the second “all”? Is the verse to read, (1) “All (men) … (we believers) all”? Not exegetically very natural. Is it (2) “(We believers) all … (we believers) all”? True; but the first member of the sentence is narrower than the fact, and scarcely worthy of the race-wide view here taken of the two Adams and their connected “posterities.” Urged, from Augustine downwards, that Paul’s argument throughout has only those “in Christ” in view [true]; that the Resurrection existence of these out of Him is never called “life” [true]; also that 1 Corinthians 15:23 limits the argument to believers. The Greek fathers [Ellicott] read 1 Corinthians 15:22 of physical quickening, and make the verse, (3) “All (men) … all (men)”; and bring in the limitation of the scope at 1 Corinthians 15:23. [One obvious qualification of “all die” is found in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. [“The great resurrection chapter is, as it were, an expansion of the Lord’s own word, ‘Because I live, ye shall live also’ ” (Pope).] See Homiletic Analysis. The resurrection of the unsaved is asserted, on the highest authority, in John 5:28-29.1 Corinthians 15:23. Order.—Quite another detail as to “order” in the Resurrection is revealed in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 : “first … then.” Order here is “troop.” The race defiles before us, an army in three divisions: First Division—The Lord (Hebrews 12:2); Second Division—The Church of the Redeemed, some following Him already nearly two millenniums in the rear; Third Division—The rest of mankind (Evans). At His coming.—Note the (exegetical) comma. See Appended Note.1 Corinthians 15:24. The end.—Derived perhaps from Christ’s words, reported in Matthew 24:13. “What [this] may signify cannot be determined; alii alia; in all likelihood ‘the end’ is its own [and only] interpreter.” So, wisely, Evans, who adds, with most: “It seems probable that the kingship will be handed over by the Incarnate Son to Him who is God and Father; but the kingdom of His own founding, in its contents of citizens, … Philippians 3:10, will continue; so that ‘His kingdom shall have no end’ (Daniel 7:13-14).” “The only expression about which there may reasonably be some doubt is kingdom. That it is more inclusive than the ‘regnum grati�’ in its ordinary acceptance, and that it may have some reference to the millennial kingdom, is probably to be inferred from the wide horizon of this holy revelation. This kingdom the Eternal Son … delivers up to the Eternal Father, not as though He were Himself thereby divested of the kingdom, but as a sharer in it for evermore.” (Ellicott.) “Then” viz. “when,.… (or, again) when.” All the consecrated words re the Second Advent are found in 2 Thessalonians 1:7; 2 Thessalonians 2:17 : Parousia, Epiphany, Apocalypse. The kingdom.—Revelation 19:15-16. Put down.—, “abolished,” as in 2 Timothy 1:10 (A.V.). “Not total destruction, but absolute subjugation.” Favourite word of Paul’s; nine times in this Epistle, with various shades of the one meaning: “to reduce to such practical unimportance, or non-importance, that it may be left out of the account altogether.” Rule, authority, power.—Abstract, for personal concretes, as in Ephesians 1:21; Ephesians 3:10; Ephesians 6:13; Colossians 1:16; Romans 8:38. He.—Viz. Christ.1 Corinthians 15:25. He … He.—Christ … the Father (1 Corinthians 15:27, end). 1 Corinthians 15:26.—Observe the present tense of a dateless event that is, as it were, seen to be happening.1 Corinthians 15:27.—Combine in exposition Psalms 2:6-9; Psalms 8:6; (Hebrews 2:8); Psalms 110:1.; (Hebrews 1:13); Matthew 22:44; Acts 2:34-35; (Psalms 45:6). Observe the margin, “shall have said,”—a solemn announcement to the listening world, by God Himself, parallel to that of Pa. 1 Corinthians 2:7-8, the “decree” of the Son’s investiture with His mediatorial royalty.1 Corinthians 15:28. All in all.—Cf. Colossians 3:11, an anticipatory, suggestive fulfilment of the idea.1 Corinthians 15:29.—Very obscure to us; obviously well known to, and understood by, the Corinthians. An ad homines argument entirely. Q.d. “You deny or question the resurrection; I take you, then, on the ground of your own practice: why, then, do you baptize?” etc. There is some patristic tradition, but of uncertain value even to the Fathers who report it, of a practice of baptizing a “representative” of a man who, as yet only a catechumen, had died without baptism, lest he should for want of it be lost. [Some say putting the living man under the bed, and letting him give answers to the usual questions, addressed to the corpse!] A question is raised whether this very expression of Paul’s did not in some cases occasion such a practice. [Certainly no fair homiletic use is to be made of these words in any sense of appealing to the survivors in a Church to come forward and seek a new baptism of the Spirit, that they may fill the place, and do the work, of some who have died.]1 Corinthians 15:30.—Another ad hominem (or ab homine) argument, but this time of abiding, real value. We.—Primarily the apostles (2 Corinthians 1:8-10; 2 Corinthians 4:10, etc.); but all Christians, sooner or later, had a taste of peril.1 Corinthians 15:31. Your rejoicing.—As text. Q.d. “I say emphatically, brethren—and to you of whom I so constantly make my boast, should I be likely to say anything but what is the simple fact? You will believe me—I die daily.”1 Corinthians 15:32. After the manner of men.—I.e. “With no better hopes or prospect of the future, than ‘natural’ men, and men without even the Gospel revelation, have when they endure risk, and face conflict and danger.” The converse case is put in 1 Corinthians 15:58, “Wherefore,” i.e. “Seeing you have such hopes,” etc. Fought with beasts.—Cf. the unrecorded, perhaps identical, peril of 2 Corinthians 1:8. All one word in Greek; no specialising of literal “beasts,” such as the English suggests: “I was like a beast-fighting gladiator in an amphitheatre.” [Precisely similar idealising of the fact in Psalms 22:11-13. Also, Ignatius writes of his guards (“leopards,” he calls them): “All the way from Syria to Rome (on his way to martyrdom) did I beast-fight by land and sea.”] Observe the varying connection by punctuation in A.V. and; either good, A.V. better. Quotation from Isaiah 22:13, of Jerusalem profligacy when Sennacherib was at hand.1 Corinthians 15:33.—Perhaps the fall into immorality in the Church at Corinth had been facilitated by a weakened faith in the Resurrection.1 Corinthians 15:34. “Arouse yourselves,” as if from the sleep after the orgies of Isa 22:13, “and show yourselves, and bear yourselves, righteously.” Well expounded by 1 Thessalonians 5:2-8. “I speak this, in order to your shaming.” (So 1 Corinthians 6:5.) .—1 Corinthians 15:20-34 The Divine Goal of Creation History. I. Contrasts.—This section divides at 1 Corinthians 15:29. In the one half and in the other we are at two levels, in two worlds. [Cf. Raphael’s “Transfiguration,” where literal truth is sacrificed to the higher truth of the nearness and close relation between the upper, mountain-top world of calm, light, heaven, glory, and the lower world of scoffing Pharisees, bewildered disciples, and demon-possessed humanity.] In 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 we are amongst the most sublime disclosures of all the Christian Scriptures—disclosures which with their very excess of glory almost cease to disclose anything. They are sublime almost to being obscure. The horizon is so bright, and the facts are so far away and so low down towards it, that we can scarcely make out anything. We hear such words as 1 Corinthians 15:28; we repeat the words; but we can scarcely do more than let our hearts ponder, and reverently and soberly imagine; we can make nothing precise. Paul is borne up and along in soaring flights of confident strength, where we can hardly follow, even with our eyes. On the other hand, in 1 Corinthians 15:29-34, we are on a very earthly level indeed. There is mystery here, but only such as wraps around an obscure, superstitious practice of a few half Christianised Corinthians. The rest is plain enough! A Paul in the midst of men who are like the very “beasts” of the amphitheatre. Corinthians sinking into a drunken sleep of unrighteousness, from which he seeks to “awaken” them to “righteousness,” or, at the least, to “shame.” [Such revelations to be first given to the world in a letter to such “Christians”! “Kind to the unthankful and to the evil” indeed (Luke 6:35).] So near, also, are the two worlds always. The evil closely enfolds the holy. Or is it the holy which enfolds the evil? The salt is—just where it is wanted—in the midst of what but for it would be corruption. We live in both worlds. In the seclusion of the mountain-top sometimes; oftener at the mountain-foot amongst the enemies and the demons, or in the arena amongst the beasts. Happy if the memories of the upper level are our strength down on the lower. Happy if such truths as are in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 may keep our souls from the infection of “evil communications,” or from the “sleep” of the intoxication of scepticism or sin. So, again, are the two worlds near together, the two levels not very remote, in the inner life of the soul. Glorious revelations; miserable superstitions. Soaring hopes of victories; battles for very life with the “beast” within our nature. Standing by the side of our Lord, with our foot placed where His has first been, on the neck of some foe of our soul’s Life; sinking into the perilous, criminal sloth or torpor induced by an atmosphere of “evil communications.” And thus we knit together the two ends of the paragraph. “Now is Christ risen.” Spite of all the theorisers and speculators and keen creators of “insuperable” difficulties, the fact is sure. Paul stands by the slothful, sleeping, drunken-souled Corinthians, and shouts his cry into the drowsy ear: “Christ is risen! Do ye arise; awake; shake off your sleep; arouse yourselves and be righteous! Righteous! Why you are past shaming. You have not the knowledge of God.” I.e. they are back again in, and of, the “world which knew not God” (1 Corinthians 1:21). If Regeneration was an upward development, there has now been Degeneration; these men who “knew God” were only a variation wrought and sustained by Grace. They have now sinned against grace; in them nature has “reverted to type.” “You have not the knowledge of God.” [Observe the close connection between unrighteousness and the loss of the knowledge of God. Cf. Romans 1:18-23. II. Christ.—Like the Russians and Greeks on Easter morning, Paul is ready to go up and down, saying with a holy cheerfulness of salutation to every fellow-Christian, “Brother, now is Christ risen!” This is a perpetual Easter-morning age for the Church of the Risen Christ. Every Christian may look every other in the face with the glad cry, “He is risen.” But why should not He be simply treated as an isolated case? Why should we not believe in His rising, whilst disbelieving or doubting any other, or our own? 1. Because He is another “Adam”—The race is not made up of aggregated units. There is a solidarity in the history and fortunes of mankind. Contrast the angels. So far as we know, they are each one an independent creation; probably they have been contemporaries in age from the first; each living a natural life complete within itself, dependent only upon God. But any one generation of mankind owes life to the preceding, and these to another preceding them, and so on till “Adam” [= Adam + Eve] is reached. The angels are an aggregate of individuals only. Each might stand or fall alone. The human race is a unity; it is a tree, where branch springs out of branch in periodic succession. [It is a Vine, a wild vine.] The old theologians called this a federal principle. There is a law of dealing with great Unities in God’s administration of His rule over our race. “Abraham” means for some purposes Abraham and his descendants; “Christ” means Christ and His people; Adam stood for himself and mankind. And so the authorised, official, inspired, “prophetic” exposition of history here given makes it clear that the human race may be summarised in two “Adams.” Or, to change the aspect of the truth, without affecting its substance, there are two Mankinds, each with its Adam, each with its close-knit unity and continuity of life, each with its solidarity of history and fortunes. But the link which forms the unity is in the one case a physical derivation and succession, in the other a spiritual unity and succession. [A real sense in which the Christians of any one age are the descendants of, and owe their life to, those of the next, and all, preceding.] The first, dying Adam involved a race of natural descendants in his death—in all its senses. The Risen Adam includes in His resurrection victory another race in whom His Spirit is the link of continuous, corporate life, quickening even their “mortal bodies.” No man stands or falls alone; isolation, independence, is not the “law” of the history of Humanity. The Christ did not die or rise alone; that is not the law of the new Humanity, of which he is the new “Adam.” To change the figure again, 2. Because He is the Firstfruits of the harvest of rising humanity.—“Sown” through long ages, in all nooks and corners of earth’s field. The field is full of its human seed. The seed is waiting for the touch of the Eternal Springtide. The call of Spring yearly awakens sleeping Nature into bud, and flower, and fruit, and harvest. That other Spring shall come with a “trumpet” call,— [“Tuba mirum spargens sonum,Per sepulchra regionum”],—and every buried seed shall start forth into perfect and eternally mature life. The “firstfruits” says that there is a harvest behind; it promises a harvest; it pledges a harvest; it “samples” the following harvest; the offering of the firstfruits consecrates the coming harvest. [As in another application, the firstfruits of the week, the Sunday, is no quittance paid to God that then we may claim and use the six remaining for ourselves, as if our own. The firstfruits of the week thus given to Him acknowledge that all the days are His, all to be spent as He will approve, whilst He lends us six and keeps only one exclusively for Himself.] 3. Captain of a host.— (1) Hebrews 2:10 [which is in closest connection with the quotation here given of Psa 8:6] makes the “perfection” of our “Captain” to lie just here, that He is not isolated as He leads the host, but has been partaker with them of “flesh and blood” and “sufferings.” Else would they who follow look forward “where their Chief precedes them” with a feeling that the Captain knew nothing of the life of the common soldier, that He alone of all the great “sacramental host” had never known the fighting and the “roughing” of their lot. Here the “partaking” looks forward into the future. The great host defiles in glorious resurrection review; each company and rank passes in its “order” before the throne of God. (See the review illustration followed somewhat further in the Homiletic Analysis of whole chapter.) (2) If no resurrection, it has been seen (1 Corinthians 15:16-19) that, hoping to be partakers with Christ, we wake up to find ourselves partakers of nothing! No. “Now is Christ risen,” and we are partakers of His victory. Our resurrection is part of our victory. We rise, that so in that fact the finishing stroke may be given to the dominion of death over our redeemed human nature. A mortal body was the last fetter of death, the last token of our sometime bondage. We rise, that so the last fetter may be stricken off. No part of our nature, spirit, soul, body, that is not delivered. It is part of His victory. We now dare, every one of us, to put our foot on the neck of Goliath, when our David has first brought him down, and planted His victorious foot upon our foe and His. This particular victory is part of a larger victory, by which is regained a lost lordship belonging to mankind. In Psalms 8:6 the opened eye of the prophet sees into the heart of things—into the inner secret of the order of Creation as it existed in the mind of the Creator. The geological history of the earth leads up to an earth fitted to be man’s home. A palζontological history can be made out, whether it be an ideal sequence only, or an historical and physical one, leading up to man. And when the home was ready, and the tenant was ready, the investiture of occupancy ran, “Let them have dominion,” etc. (Genesis 1:8). Thus he who was the goal of all the earliest history, the climax (and indeed the summation) of all the series of animate creaturely structures, the crown of creation, was also its King. [Perhaps also its High Priest, voicing the praise, the thanksgiving, the prayers, of the mute, unintelligent creation, which found in Him a brain and a heart and a voice.] Yet even this royalty is not the thought of God in its furthest reach. We speak of ascending from this to a higher. Yet it would be the truer order to work backwards and downwards, from the higher to this; as God did. We ascend from the earliest creature-life to man, the ruler of all; nor do we stop there, but go forward and upward to the Son of Man. But though we reverently so shape our thought, God began there, began with Him. He is the mediation between God and the creature, between Spirit and Matter. He is the Link. “In Him all things were created.” Man’s original royalty was but the adumbration of His. As the lower creatures had shadowed Man forth, so did he shadow the Son forth. After all, he was not the last link, but the last but one, in the chain which led up from some quasi-eozoic form to the Incarnate Son. [The Gospel is Creation’s order over again. “All things man’s. Man is Christ’s. Christ is God’s.”] But sin entered. Creation’s course had so far gone true and straight to man; now, when it should have gone true and straight through him to God, it swerved aside and was sinfully deflected. The race “missed its mark.” The race no longer rose to the Son; the Son’s garment of royalty no longer descended on man. But, ever since, slowly, piecemeal, has the lost dominion, the forfeited position, been recovered by all those who are “in” the Second Adam. The first note of the recovered victory is in the Protevangelion (Genesis 3:15); fulfilled most gloriously in the Wilderness and the Garden and at Calvary, no doubt; yet even there only anticipating the last crowning triumph of a long series of triumphs for our Captain. And with a heel sore wounded, very often does each Christian soldier step upon his foe and go on to conquer, with the heartening word ringing in his ears, “God shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly” (Romans 16:20). There is an enemy within him, whose dominion is broken [in closest connection with his Lord’s resurrection once more (Romans 6:10-11)]: “Sin shall not have dominion over you” (ib. 1 Corinthians 15:14). The very world with all its trials, difficulties, opposition, is a subject thing to them who are in the Man Who has never lost, who has more abundantly fulfilled, the Royalty of Man. “In jeopardy every hour;” “dying daily,” yet “all things work together for good” to men. The world is “under their feet.” [Nor need there be hesitation in seeing more than merely the relics of the original dominion, but a real mediatorially-recovered dominion, in the growing mastery wielded by man over the physical forces of the natural world, subjecting all to his daily service. Certainly in the power of Christ over even His pre-resurrection body, making it vanish from amongst His foes or walk upon the waters,—a power which was once even communicated to Peter,—we get a little opening, giving us largest views into a world of vast, dim possibilities of the power of man’s spirit, itself enfranchised from the dominion of sin, over even the material world.] There is a “last enemy” for him, as for the race,—Death. “Death is his” (1 Corinthians 3:22) already; it comes to him conquered by his Captain, and made to run on his Captain’s errand, and bear his Captain’s summons to him to a more glorious life. He is delivered from the bondage to its fear: the fear is “put under his feet”; when at last he meets it, he finds that he has but to deal with a “stingless” serpent, on whose head he can “put his foot” boldly. He is meeting nothing but the Shadow of a great Name, the Shadow of a great Dread, a thing whose substantial power is “abolished,” “destroyed.” And this detailed victory of His dying people, in succession, is part of His own (cf. Luke 10:18), which by-and-by shall be consummated in one grand public demonstration of His triumph, in the day when even the very bodies of His people have death’s yoke struck off and death itself underfoot. “All things under His feet.” III. Consummation.—What is this “end” and the subjection of even the “Son Himself”? Answer as one did who was asked, “What is heaven like?” “I will tell you when we meet there.” NOTES1 Corinthians 15:23-24. “The coming; the end.”—This “coming” of Christ is not, merely or exclusively, to establish His kingdom, but to judge the quick and the dead … (compare 1 Thessalonians 2:19; 1 Thessalonians 3:13; 1 Thessalonians 4:15; 1 Thessalonians 5:23, al.). Whether any, and, if any, what interval is to be supposed to exist between this “coming” and “the end” of the following verse—in fact, between “then” and “then”—the sober interpreter cannot presume even to attempt to indicate. This only may be said, that the language seems to imply a kind of interval; but that there is nothing in the particles or in the passage to warrant our conceiving it to be longer than would include the subjugation of every foe and every power of evil, and all that may be immediately associated with the mighty “end” which is specified in the succeeding verse.… It must be carefully remembered that the Apostle is here dealing with a single subject, the resurrection of the dead, and not with the connected details of eschatology. These must be gathered from other passages and other portions of Scripture.… The great difficulty in Christian eschatology is the exact position which all that is specified in Revelation 20:4 is to be supposed to hold in the sequences of the unfolding future.… Perhaps all that can be safely said is, that neither here nor in 1 Thessalonians 4:16 does the Apostle preclude the conception of a resurrection of the just (compare Luke 14:14)—possibly gradual; that in some passages (consider Romans 11:12-15) he does seem to have looked for a “flowering time” of the Church prior to the close of human history; and that here he distinctly implies a closing conflict with all the powers of evil (compare Revelation 20:7; Revelation 20:15) immediately prior to the end. That the millennial binding of Satan is to be dated from the death and resurrection of our Lord has been recently urged, … but to the detriment, as it would seem, of the distinctive idea of the millennium.—Bishop Ellicott.1 Corinthians 15:23. “His coming.”—Parousia, indicating that when He comes He will always be present; the time of His absence will have passed away for ever.… His presence, which will then be so different from what it is now that the change from the one to the other is no less than a coming again.—Pope.1 Corinthians 15:24. “The end.”—There will be an end and beginning of the Redeemer’s Kingdom, as it is a kingdom of grace translated into glory.I. The mediatorial economy will cease in its relation to the Triune God; the redemptional Trinity which introduced the economy of subordination in the Two Persons will be again the absolute Trinity. The Son Incarnate will cease to mediate; as Incarnate He will be for ever subordinate, but there will be nothing to declare His subordination: no mediatorial rule over enemies, no mediatorial service or worship of His people. The Triune God will be seen by all mankind in the face of Jesus Christ, and the mediation of grace will become the mediation of glory. The Intercessor will pray for us no more, but will reveal the Father openly for ever.… The prayer of our Lord (John 17:21) will then have been fulfilled, “one in Us.” Man taken up into the Us of the Triune God will need a mediator no more.II. The kingdom will cease because its ends will have been attained. “Then cometh the end” … to the Father as the Representative of the Trinity; “when He shall have put down.” … The process of His victories is declared in the Apocalypse: first and last, the Anti-Christ, which is a spirit of infidelity, Against Christ, having many forms, such as the Beast and the Man of Sin, and also a final personal manifestation; every description of heathenism to the ends of the earth; the corruption of Christianity, exhibited in Babylon and the Second Beast and the Harlot; and finally Death, the last enemy that shall be destroyed. In all these conflicts the Church is the fellowship of companions in “tribulation,” etc. (Revelation 1:9). We are one with our Lord, and He is one with us, in this progressive warfare and final victory. It is as “Head over all things to the Church” that the Redeemer exercises now and will end then His rule; nor is any other supression of authority alluded to than that which opposed the designs of His mediatorial kingdom. Moreover, there is nothing said of the destruction, only of the putting down of all hostile authority and power.III. The kingdom will have a new beginning: new as the kingdom of the “new heavens,” etc.… The Spirit of Christ will be the immanent bond between Him and us, between us and the Holy Trinity (1 Corinthians 6:17). The Incarnate Person will then be glorified as never before; His personality as Divine will be no more veiled or obscured by any humiliation, nor will it be intermittently revealed. God shall be all in all, first in the Holy Trinity and then through Christ in us.—Pope, “Compend. of Theology,” iii. 425, 426.1 Corinthians 15:27. “He hath put all things under His feet.”—It has often been asked whether David, in ascribing such dignity as he here does to man, was speaking of man in his present condition, degraded from his supremacy by the fall, or of man as originally made in the image of God and gifted with dominion over the lower creation. Now the language of the Psalm certainly points to the present. There is no trait in it of any difference between man’s original destiny and his present condition, between the ideal and the actual. Man is king of this lower world; though, because he has cast off his allegiance to the King of kings, his own subjects have renounced their allegiance to him, so that he rules by force, or manifold arts, rather than by right acknowledged and respected. But were there any higher thoughts in David’s mind? Was he thinking of man as redeemed and restored in the second Adam to his rightful supremacy?… We, who read these words in the light of the Incarnation, may see in them a significance which to his own mind they would hardly have possessed. Twice in the New Testament passages of this Psalm are applied to Christ: once by St. Paul rather in the way of allusion than of direct quotation (1 Corinthians 15:27), where he teaches that what was said by David of man is in its truest and highest sense applicable to Christ as the Great Head of Mankind; and, again, by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews (1 Corinthians 2:6-9), who, arguing that the words [of our verse] have not yet been literally fulfilled of man, declares that their proper fulfilment is to be seen only in Jesus … “crowned with glory and honour.” He does not say that the Psalm is a direct prophecy of Christ; but he shows that man’s destiny as depicted in the Psalm is not and cannot be accomplished out of Christ. He is the true Lord of all. In Him man recovers his rightful lordship, and shall really be in the new world of Redemption what now he is very imperfectly, God’s vicegerent ruling a subject creation in peace and harmony and love.—Perowne, “Psalms,” Psalms 8.[Much also of the following passage is illustrative of 1 Corinthians 15:27 :] “The use made of this Psalm in the Epistle to the Hebrews proceeds on the understanding that it describes ideal humanity. Where, then, says the writer of the Epistle, shall we look for the realisation of that ideal? Do not the grand words sound liker irony than truth? Is this poor creature that crawls about the world, its slave, discrowned and sure to die, the Man whom the Psalmist saw? No. Then was the fair vision a baseless fabric, and is there nothing to be looked for but a dreary continuance of such abortions dragging out their futile being through hopeless generations? No; the promise shall be fulfilled for humanity, because it has been fulfilled in one man, the Man Christ Jesus. He is the realised ideal, and in Him is a life which will be communicated to all who trust and obey Him, and they, too, will become all that God meant man to be. The Psalm was not intended as a prophecy, but every clear vision of God’s purpose is a prophecy, for none of His purposes remain unfulfilled. It was not intended as a picture of the Christ, but it is so; for He and He alone is the Man who answers to that fair Divine Ideal, and He will make all His people partakers of His royalty and perfect Manhood.”—Maclaren, “Psalms,” Expositor’s Bible.Who does not know how the tone of evil has communicated itself? Worldly minds, irreverent minds, licentious minds, leaven Society. You cannot be long with persons who by innuendo, double meaning, or lax language show an acquaintance with evil, without feeling in some degree assimilated to them, nor can you easily retain enthusiasm for right amongst those who detract and scoff at goodness. None but Christ could remain with the impenitent and be untainted.—Robertson, “Expos. Lectures,” on 1 Corinthians 5:6. 1 Corinthians 15:33. “Evil communications corrupt good manners.” I. 1. Hasty, crude thinking would say: “But that is not Scripture, though it is in Scripture. That is a verse from a heathen poet; not an inspired saying at all.” [As might similarly be said of the letter of Claudius Lysias (Acts 23:26-30).] But wherever an architect gets his materials, from whatever quarry he gets a stone, and whatever therefore be its varying quality or character, if he puts it into his building, he makes it his own. It becomes part of his embodiment of his design and idea. He is responsible for its selection and presence and use. He is the author of the whole structure and of every part of it, whether he obtained the constituent parts “ready made” to his hand and purpose, or had to find them in the rough and fashion them himself. This sentence, like the pillars of St. Sophia at Constantinople, the spoils of many more ancient temples, is fetched from another earlier building, where it had its fitness and its strength. This is a stone from a heathen quarry. But the wise builder, Paul, working at the growing, and nearly completed, structure of Revelation, under the direction of its Divine Architect works it into the fabric, and when it is once there the Directing Mind is responsible for it; He has made it His own; it serves His purpose of conveying with authority His mind and will to men. [No knowledge—not even of heathen proverbs—comes amiss to a Christian teacher; everything may be made available. All the quarries, all the kingdoms, of the earth belong to our Christ. He will guide His servants how wisely to lay toll on them all!] 2. Whatever be its origin, the saying is truth. He who said it formulated the bitter experience of many a benevolent social reformer, of many a parent filled with the sorrow of hopes for his children blighted into worse than failure, of many an amiable theorist starting with some “natural goodness of human nature,” only to find that his theory is no cadre into which he can fit all the facts. [Take only a limited amount of mental luggage; pack away into the portmanteau of your theory just a few selected facts—just those you need—and you may walk away comfortably, triumphantly, in your path of hope and endeavour. But] take entire, universal human nature; take entire, universal experiment and its results; and human nature is not to be trusted to love and follow and struggle for Good. It may approve it, applaud it, love it with a very platonic sort of devotion; but it is divided against itself, and what seems, unhappily, the stronger part gravitates too easily toward evil. There is not even an even balance; the scale turning for evil is loaded. 3. Classical literature has its many familiar confessions of the innate downward drag of human nature. Indeed, never had every experiment that man could suggest for man’s elevation been more exhaustively tried, and with larger advantage of conditions for the experiment, than in Grecian and Roman society in the centuries just before Christ. Philosophy, art, government, material refinement, and cultured civilisation, had practically done all that has ever been possible to do; later ages scarcely do more than go the round of the old experiment; man had done his best for man; and the universal consent of those who know best the age of the world into which God thrust the leaven of the Gospel of Christ is that never was the failure more complete, never were the world’s “manners” more utterly and hopelessly “corrupt.” Every man who repeats the experiment upon himself comes at last to the same result, and to the same sorrowful confession (his pride may not always suffer him to make the avowal aloud), that man unaided by grace cannot keep man pure. He finds that human nature in itself has its affinities, toward evil, not good, nor God; that it has a ready assimilative power for evil; that the evil leaven soon enters, and spreads widely, whilst God’s leaven of a new life is slowly admitted, and finds resistance more probable than reception and assimilation. “The dyer’s hand is subdued to what it works in.” 4. Yet no man very readily believes in the affinity of human nature for, and its inclination toward, evil; in himself, at any rate. Or if he half admit this, he will not consent to count himself in peril. His unformulated, unspoken thought is that he, at all events, is independent of the influences of his surroundings; he can stand firm; he can keep himself from corruption. From gross and open acts of evil he perhaps may; force of character and of will, pride, shame, self-interest, and the like, may enable him to keep free from, or to break off, acts and open habits. But sin is deeper seated in his nature; its presence is more subtle in its diffusion; the susceptibility is throughout. The graver danger is from subtle and pervasive evil; sin is most dangerous where it is only an influence, an environment, always present, unceasing in its deleterious power. It is most perilous as an atmosphere producing a languor, a torpor toward good, and predisposing the enfeebled spiritual life to receive the infection of disease. It is oftener a poison in the cup than an open wound in the battle. It speaks fair, smooth things, when its “communications” are most full of corruption and deadly mischief. Man will not believe it of Man; the parent will not believe it of the “nice” child; the man will not believe it of himself, spite of many a sharp, disappointing, disheartening lesson. Paul says, “Be not deceived.” All the marvellous, fairytale records of modern science as to the assimilative powers of living things in the presence of any particular environment, have their analogies in the facts of the spiritual realm. As the surroundings such—naturally, and but for the grace of God—is the man. “As the man thinketh in his heart so is he,” no doubt. The root of all evil character is ultimately within. But it may be held in check by a holy environment. “Holy communications”—especially between the soul and its Saviour—“sanctify evil manners” into good. But more commonly, and with greater facility, “evil communications corrupt,” etc. Let no man flatter himself that he shall be any exception. The best weapon of the adversary is the “deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13). Therefore— II. Mind what company you keep— 1. No doubt the grace of God can keep Obadiah in a court where Jezebel is queen, and in a place where a Nero follows a Tiberius, a Caligula, a Claudius, “saints” may be found. But even these need to be on their strictest guard. The very physician who goes into the midst of spiritual disease needs to have a care of his own health. Only One Physician had absolute immunity from danger. [All who do “rescue” work should keep within a full spiritual vigour, a heart that “hates even the garment spotted by the flesh” (Jude 1:23).] A Christian in worldly or distinctly evil company is a red-hot ball of iron in the midst of blocks of ice. No doubt he may melt them; there is grave danger lest they chill him. 2. For the average Christian; worldliness is a more real peril than open, shocking, repellent wickedness. It is also the more ordinary liability. The surface discrepancy between Christian and non-Christian is not perhaps great; non-Christian life is in many ways affected, shaped, restrained, by the moral standard obtaining, in a general way, in a Christian land. But there is a deep chasm of separation in all their underlying principles. The “counsel of the” non-godly can never coincide with the “law of the Lord” (Psalms 1) which is “in the heart” of the Christian man. Their lives may overlap, but they revolve in different circles, struck from distinct centres. 3. E.g. the whole standard according to which persons, motives, conduct, are habitually discussed and estimated in the home, is according to man, not according to God. “God is not in all their thoughts;” they may formulate no system of morals and philosophy, but their ethics of business and their view of life in the daily talk at the table and around the fire are practically without God. The interests consulted for, and by which are regulated the planning and execution of their life-work, lie within the narrow range of the horizon of the earthly life; they know, and care to know, nothing of the readjustment of values and proportions which is inevitable as soon as life is seen running on in unbroken continuity into an eternal duration. E.g. in the education of their children, or their placing out in life, in their marriages, the soul and its interests have no consideration given to them; society interests, good prospects, natural congeniality and affection—however high and worthy the type of these may be—are all. The Christian visitor in such a home is struck, not so much by what is said or done, but rather by what he misses from the customary talk and action and judgments of the family. They are on another, a lower, plane; they are in in closest daily association with him; but they and he live in different worlds of thought and feeling and judgment. 4. He may “endure as seeing Him Who is invisible” (Hebrews 11:27). If he begin each day by getting into very real rapport with the Unseen, and if, by often intercourse with it during the progress of the hours, he keep his windows open towards it—keep the eyesight of his soul keen and clear to see it—he may pass through unharmed. But the danger for the young, of half-formed principles, or of no definite principles whatever, is that their world should contract to the narrow limits of that of those around them; that their eye should lose its keenness of vision, or that the world’s smoke and mists should besmirch their windows until they cannot see out into the Infinite, nor can the world of the Infinities, the Eternities, the Divinities, reach through to them. The danger is that the standard of judgment, the scales by which they weigh persons, character, motives, aims, should receive—by slight, but continually repeated contacts and impressions—an unhappy, ungodly adjustment. It is natural, and far easier, by little and little to fall into worldling ways of thinking and speaking and action, more than the Christian man is aware; until one day some sudden arrest of circumstance, or some more glaring, startling discrepancy between the worldly and the godly habit and standard, “pulls him up,” and reveals to him how far he has travelled, and how widely he has diverged from the love of the law of God and of the ethics of the Gospel of Christ. To the Christian man, who of necessity must spend much of his time with the people of the world, the text comes as a warning lest his spirit catch the infection of their spirit, lest with a fatal plasticity his conscience take their impress and mould. He must keep the resilience, the resistant power, the rigidity, which comes of indwelling grace. “ ‘Be not deceived’; do not be ‘liberal,’ ‘broad,’ till you become a true worldling in temper and spirit and habit and judgment. ‘Evil communications’—not least the daily talk (ὁμιλίαι); which goes on around you, in the office, in the street, in the house—‘corrupt good manners!’ ” (See Appended Note from Robertson.) III. Mind what books yon read, and what literature.— 1. In a word, mind the mental companionships you form, or allow to yourself. Openly vicious literature will scarcely come in the way of the bulk of decent, ordinary English people. If it did, the first dose would probably create nausea and moral revulsion—though, unhappily, even this may pass away with use. Here again the peril is rather from the literature which the Christian instinct does not so much condemn for what is present as for what is missing. The literature of the world, at its best, “says in its heart, No God.” 2. The Puritan code and the practice of the men and women of all the Churches which felt, and still feel, the impress of the Evangelical revival of the eighteenth century, were strict, “narrow”—for themselves and for those whose opinions and habits they could control—in the range of literature they permitted for ordinary reading. They found that to “glorify their God below and find their way to heaven” [by no means forgetting that, whilst the living stream is making its pure, bright way to the Ocean, it needs to be, and cannot help being, a joy and a blessing to all the dwellers along its banks and course] needed all their best energies and all the help they could obtain. At their best, the novel, the play, most of the poetry, of their day demanded the time and gave no help. Their intensely serious view of life was the basis of adjustment for all their standard of permission and perusal. The very newspaper was often looked at askance. The reaction is upon us, in our time, and is carrying Christian people quite far enough in the direction of freedom. All the fields of literature are not full of food-bearing, health-producing growth; yet the tendency is to throw them open to the free range of even the youngest, most inexperienced readers. And without keeping up the old strictness of prohibition, the Christian readers of to-day need to hear, “Be not deceived, evil communications,” etc. 3. In fiction, for example, the social code, the valuation of men and character, is seldom that of the New Testament; in some, widely read and favourably reviewed, it is hardly Ten Commandment morality. The masters of fiction, or the great playwrights, are not found working on distinctively Christian lines; they never have done. The relations between man and woman in (say) a masterpiece of art like Middlemarch are not according to Christ’s law. Vanity Fair is drawn by one who is himself a stall-holder in the Fair—so far as its code for character shows. The Christian of strong, “spiritual” instincts, in whom is answered the prayer of Php 1:9-11, is not at home in his mental company, as he reads. He is in continual mental and heart protest against what they say and do, and still more against their principles of action and judgment. And the danger is analogous to that of actually living in such an atmosphere and such company; the danger of adjustment little by little, of assimilation by almost imperceptible degrees—only recognisable in their total result—to the standards and practice and heart of those around him. [“Some (poets) will tune their harps to sensual pleasures, and by the enchantment of their genius will well-nigh commend their unholy themes to the imagination of saints” (Edward Irving, Div. Oracles, Oration I.).] 4. Most of the reviewing press, most of the influential literary judgment, is at its best non-Christian in its motives and its standards of appeal. The younger, the unstable, the ill-instructed Christian reader needs be on his guard, lest he “be deceived”; lest he be swept away by the strong set of the prevalent current into habits of judgment and esteem which would not be those of “life in Christ.” Beauty, masterly workmanship, in art or poetry must not excuse or glorify moral evil. To a Christian instinct art cannot be non-moral; as a fact, it is not. The master-workman of the modern world, Goethe, is a great heathen. Shakespeare, colossal in his power, embodies, like his mistress Elizabeth [see Green, History of the English People, ii. 499, “a brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child of earth and of the Renaissance”], the spirit and code, not of the Reformation, but of the Renaissance, in his attitude towards the moralities; it needs a strong, clear, healthy, spiritual tone to read him without some moral soil, and even some of the insensible mental adjustment which is the great peril. The young heart needs to read with Paul’s caution even in the ears, “Evil communications,” etc. Breadth, liberality, which cultivates “toleration,” indifference to all such aspects of literature, and appreciates and approves all equally if only power be there,—these belong to a life which lives and moves in another world than that which is circumscribed by the sacred limit: “in Christ.” The “man in Christ” needs in even his mental companionships to be on his strictest guard when he passes into the “world” beyond. It is apt to be “corrupt” and “corrupting.” [Similarly the evolutionary exposition of the facts of the natural world has so got possession of the press, emphemeral and more permanent alike; has so got current in the speech and thought of the leaders of the mind of the world to-day; has so boldly been carried through as a working explanation of the facts dealt with in mental and moral science; that it is difficult not to escape the infection of what, in its extremest interpreters, is a materialism without a God; difficult to come back to, and keep, one’s position at the Great Teacher’s feet, making His words, “My Father worketh hitherto,” the key to one’s interpretation and system of Nature. Facts are welcome, whoever discovers, reports, systematises them. The interpretation of the facts needs watching lest it “corrupt” the habitual, instinctive thought of the heart, which like Christ sees a world whose “laws” are simply God’s rules for His own ordinary, orderly action and government; whose “Force” is ultimately will force—that of His will; a world full of a personal God.] NOTES1 Corinthians 15:35.— (1) Emphasis on “the dead,—the DEAD!—the DEAD!” (2) “With what (kind of) body?” See Homiletic Analysis.1 Corinthians 15:36.—Emphasis on “thou” (so R.V.); answers (1). (John 12:24)1 Corinthians 15:37.— (2) is answered in 1 Corinthians 15:37-54. Not the body that shall be.—I.e., as the argument requires, quβ its physical constitution; “not the (kind of) body that,” etc. Bare.—I.e. “naked”; “a grain not yet clothed with that body that shall be” (Ellicott), 2 Corinthians 5:3; “the resurrection body shall be clothed with glory” (Evans).1 Corinthians 15:38.—“The Apostle … uses the argument of analogy, not to solve what he leaves a mystery, but to obviate objection. The present world furnishes abundant analogies, but no resemblances of the future resurrection. Nothing in the buried flesh germinates as the life in a seed-corn; the new life is a direct creation. ‘God giveth,’ etc. Not that the disembodied spirit will form for itself a new vehicle, but that in the resurrection the spirit will have a spiritual—psychical—organism given to it, which in the wonder of Divine power will be to it the same organ it had in time.” (Pope, Compend. of Theol., 3:408.) “A body of its own (kind);” query, any more than this, here?1 Corinthians 15:39.—There is room, then, for another kind of body than that which makes the difficulty of 1 Corinthians 15:35.1 Corinthians 15:40.—Nothing to do in this verse with the astronomical “celestial bodies.” See Homiletic Analysis (Whole Chapter).1 Corinthians 15:41.—Here, indeed, these come in, but only for a comparison in point of “glory” not of physical constitution.1 Corinthians 15:42. So.—Wide diversity between old and new, boundless possibilities of variety, in kind and in degree of glory. It.—Must not be made too emphatic, so as to carry the weight of the Identity of the body. The nearest to a nominative to the verb is “the resurrection” (1 Corinthians 15:42).1 Corinthians 15:43. Dishonour.—“Funeral pomp is but a mask biding the truth that the body carried to the grave has lost the rights of humanity. Instead of the kind attentions rendered to it a few days ago, it is left alone in the dark and silent grave, as the meanest living body would not be.” (Beet.) In power.—All “bodily” faculties intensified, perhaps with new faculties added.1 Corinthians 15:44. Natural … spiritual.—As throughout, e.g., chap. 2. If there is a body for the πνεῦμα, as in fact there is, then the presumption is also that there will be a body for the ψυχή. A body in both cases adapted (1) to its tenant, and (2) to its world and environment; and further—1 Corinthians 15:45.—Congruous with (1) The living soul, Adam, and (2) the life-giving spirit, the Last [not the Second] Adam (Genesis 2:7; John 5:21; John 6:63; John 11:25; John 14:6). Distinguish between the Old Testament historic quotation here and the New Testament prophetic supplement.1 Corinthians 15:46.—A principle, perhaps as broad as creation, holding good in, e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:47.1 Corinthians 15:47.—Note the true reading (R.V.). Of heaven.—As in the Litany: “O God the Father, of heaven,” where notice the comma.1 Corinthians 15:48.—“The earthy (Adam, or man); the heavenly (Adam, or man).” (Sing. masc.)1 Corinthians 15:49.—Romans 8:29; Philippians 3:21; 1 John 3:2; 2 Corinthians 3:18; 2 Corinthians 4:11. Notice the margin (R.V.), but prefer the text. Paul is not dealing with ethics, but with physiology (Evans).1 Corinthians 15:50. This.—Viz. what follows. Flesh and blood.—Cf. “flesh and bone,” Luke 24:39(but very little beyond the historical fact can safely be made out from that verse). Doth not.—Present tense, another (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:46) broad, general principle, fixed and enduring, as true morally as physically.1 Corinthians 15:51. Tell, rather than “show.” A mystery.—A fact hitherto kept a secret, but not necessarily inapprehensible when, as now in this case, it is disclosed.1 Corinthians 15:52.—“By a process not like the slow corruption and decay of death, but sudden, rapid, Divine” (Stanley). “In the midst of this world’s busy life, and without any previous warning, Christ will lay His hand upon the wheels of time, and they will stop at once and for ever” (Beet). Trumpet.—Cf. Exodus 19:16; Psalms 47:5; Zechariah 9:14; Isaiah 27:13. Also 1 Thessalonians 4:16; Matthew 24:31 (Revelation 8-9 :), (Stanley). Or, perhaps, “He shall sound the trumpet”1 Corinthians 15:53. Put on.—2 Corinthians 5:4; Isaiah 25:8 quoted.1 Corinthians 15:55.—Hosea 13:14 quoted, or, more correctly, forms the mental starting-point of an (imitated) outburst of triumph. Hosea suggests, Paul sees (as it were) in prophetic prevision, a day of deliverance of the race from the power of death and Hades.1 Corinthians 15:56.—As Romans 5:12-21 is a parallel in the experimental life to 1 Corinthians 15:12-19 and 1 Corinthians 15:45-49 in the physical, so Romans 7:7; Romans 8:4 is expository of this 1 Corinthians 15:56. [N.B.—This the earlier-written passage.] Sting.—Same word as goad (Acts [1 Corinthians 9:5] Acts 26:14).1 Corinthians 15:58.—Observe “vain” again, and how “in the Lord” [“in Christ”] runs through the chapter. [“We look, not as theorists, but as believers, for a future life” (Isaac Taylor).] .—1 Corinthians 15:35-58I. Two categories appear:— . The First Adam— The last Adam— The first man. The second Man. Of the earth. From heaven. Earthy. [The Lord (but note the better text).] A soul. A spirit. A living soul. A quickening Spirit. Natural. Spiritual. . His race— Bear the image of the earthy. Bear … of the Heavenly. Wear natural bodies. Wear spiritual bodies. . Their bodies are correspondingly— SownRaisedCorruptible. Incorruptible. Dishonoured. Glorified [glorious]. In weakness. In power. Natural [psychic]. Spiritual. II. The second of these is not inconceivable, for 1. Death and dissolution form no “insuperable” barrier.—“You clever objectors—wonderfully clever!—how is it when you (emphatic) sow your seed? Are its death and dissolution an ‘insuperable’ barrier to the springing of the grain you hope to reap? This does not ‘prove’ the resurrection; but it is good enough to turn the edge of your objection. A reply as good as your difficulty. A reply just of the calibre of your thought, and of yourself.” 2. “ ‘What kind of bodies?’ How do I know? How can I tell? Can He Himself tell me, until I wear one, and my spirit finds its ‘spiritual body’ a vehicle congruous to its nature, flexible to its will, an instrument fitted for its every purpose? ‘Cannot conceive of such a body?’ What of that? If you were an intelligent fish, could you understand, think you, the body, the flesh, of a bird, or of a beast? Your experience and your imagination are not the measure of the possibilities, or even of the facts. Why not one more, one new, kind of material, where there are already so many used to make bodies? Do you really sweep the field, and know all that God can invent in variety of bodily organisations? See glory differing in kind from glory—celestial from terrestrial. See glory differing in degree from glory, as between star and star. ‘Cannot conceive with what kind of body?’ Perhaps the Maker of them all can, nevertheless. Better to wait and see what reserve of resource He has by Him. Cannot conceive does not equal Cannot be.” .—1 Corinthians 15:50-54“This corruptible,” “this mortal.”—These words raise the question of The Identity of the Resurrection Body. Introduction.—The one point which is most distinctly the peculiarity of Christian teaching as to the future state is the Resurrection of the Body. The Identity the one question perpetually interesting to the great mass of hearers and readers of Christian doctrine in regard to the Resurrection. [Some oldest creeds said expressly, “Of the Flesh.” Christianity the only religion which takes serious account of the body, or does it any honour, or regards holiness as possible in connection with it.] All is pure matter of revelation. Pure question of faith: “we believe in the Resurrection of the Body.” Now that the truth has been announced, various natural analogies may be imagined and pressed into the service of it. But certainly they never suggested it; the chrysalis-butterfly fact, for example, barely gave an uncertain suggestion of another after-life for man, but not for his body. Reason never dreamed of this unaided; now that it is revealed, it puts a tax upon faith beyond what is demanded by most truths of Christianity. At the mention of it the Athenian gentlemen and scholars on Areopagus burst out laughing, and would give no serious attention to anything further. I. Wherein the identity consists.—A very difficult question to determine. 1. Study the identity of the body with which we are familiar. Spite of all incessant and manifold physical changes, every man would say that he has “the same body” to-day which he had as a boy twenty, fifty, years ago. For (1) There has been an unbroken continuity between stage and stage of its growth and change. The successive stages have overlapped; there has been what in brickwork is called “a bonding” of the successive stages; old material has always co-existed with new. At no point has the soul’s house been pulled down entirely and entirely rebuilt de novo. The cottage of boyhood has been altered and enlarged piecemeal into the mansion-sized house of manhood. Even if the material of the early stages has all disappeared, yet at no point has there ever been a distinctly “new house.” “Same house” all along. And (2) The home of the same tenant all along. The organism has been in unbroken connection with the same indwelling Man. The continuous instrument of the same immaterial part. (3) There has been a persistent form impressed upon it. Age, disease, accident, natural decay and recuperation, incessantly going on, have made great changes in size, height, etc. Yet many early marks, whether from birth or accident, have persisted through all stages. Something has remained unaltered or merely modified, which is peculiarly the man’s own. Like the man’s signature, the body has an individuality which perhaps, like it, expresses the man. Both change as the man changes, with years, and, to some extent visibly, in character. Seen most, this last, in the face. But the man has often had from the first a gait, a carriage, which has always been his own, individual and recognisable. [ (4) Analogies to these changes, and to the incessant motion and flux amongst constituent parts, whilst an identity of the whole remains unaffected, may be discovered. “New blade, new handle. Same knife?” may be trivial, and a quibble. But also: Perpetually renewed water in “the same river.” Constant change of the men in a regiment, by losses, retirements, recruiting, whilst the commanding officer remains the same, and in command of “the same regiment.” (Also the regimental “life” is continuous; the traditions, and the esprit de corps, keep up the regimental identity.) “The same Board,” “the same Body of trustees,” empowered to fill up vacancies in their number as they occur, till at last none of the original members remain.] II. Considerations which require an identity of some kind.— 1. The whole man is redeemed. The body is an integral, indispensable part of manhood. A man is not made up of Soul and Spirit, to which the body is merely one of a number of vestments,—“coats,”—natural or artificial; it is not a mere accident of our earthly state. The Redeemer of Man wore, and took with Him into glory, an entire Humanity, its body with the rest. The body has its future, because it has its place in the redemption. It is the lowliest part of the threefold human nature; it waits longest for, and will receive last, its share in the glory secured for redeemed manhood in the eternal world; but it has its claim upon the Redeemer. On the body was set the Abrahamic form of the seal of that covenant between Jehovah and His “friend,” which is the surest basis of hope for Abraham’s immortality (Matthew 22:31-32, and || s). [There is a physical reception by the body of the seals and signs of the new, the Gospel, form of the same covenant and its contents of grace; the body is baptized with the physical element of water, it eats and drinks of a real supper of bread and wine.] The resurrection of an “identic body” is a necessary part of the greater fact of the resurrection and after-life of the whole man. To “raise” the same immaterial part and to provide it with a new body, would not be the restoration of the same man, the same person, after the dissolution wrought by death and the grave. 2. Christ’s identic resurrection body.—The great, palpable, popular stumbling-block and difficulty is no doubt the physical, chemical dissolution of the corpse into its primary elements, which again enter into new combinations in other organic structures. Christ’s body “saw no corruption.” The process which had set in, in the purely natural order, with His friend Lazarus, or with David (Acts 2:29-31), was not permitted to begin. He brought out of Joseph’s tomb a body which, whatever marvellous changes in the conditions of its life took place when it was reunited to Him in His risen life, was the same undissolved thing which had been reverently, lovingly deposited there on the Friday evening. In the body’s organised existence between death and resurrection there had been for Him no such break as death makes for us. Whatever, then, identity carries, and does not carry, in the case of His body, will be the facts about the identity of the resurrection body of His people. Further— 3. The “mystery,” the hitherto hidden and unknown fact, is here (1 Corinthians 15:51), authoritatively published by the Prophet Paul, that at the Lord’s coming the believers then living will be “changed” without previous death. [Or, as the speculations of some would require us to say, without any such perceptible or extended interval between the death and the “change” of the body as creates the popular, practical difficulty in connection with the raising of the bodies of the mass of human kind.] In their case, therefore, there is no break, even as brief as in their Lord’s case, in the continuity of the union between the same man and his physical part. In bodies which they have never quitted, but which undergo some transformation unknown as yet to us, they stand forth in that eventful Easter morning of the whole Church. (2) and (3) enable, and require, us to expect that the believers who “fall asleep” in the ordinary course, and whose bodies are dissolved by death and “see corruption,” shall be put into the same condition as their brethren who are changed without dying, and with bodies like their Lord’s risen and glorified body. Whatever He and those are, without the parting of soul and body, or the physical dissolution of the body, to that they who die must be elevated or restored. In whatever sense He wears to-day “the same body” which trode the fields of Galilee or the streets of Jerusalem; in whatever sense the “changed” saints will wear “the same body” which they never for an instant lost; in that sense do we require that our Resurrection body shall be “the same body” which we wore on earth, and for a while left behind in the moment of our dying. It was part of our Self; the whole, same, redeemed self must be forthcoming, when “God brings, with Jesus, them that sleep in [through] Jesus” and are now somewhere a precious deposit in His safe keeping, “hid, with Christ, in God.” More than this we cannot with confidence assert. How much this carries with it we do not know, and have hardly sufficient experience of anything analogous to guide us even in conjecture. The meaning and mode of the “change” are quite unknown to us. Paul speaks of being “clothed upon” in 2 Corinthians 5:2, just as here he speaks of “putting on incorruption.” In Romans 8:11 he is express that “our mortal bodies”—like Christ’s mortal body—are to be quickened, as here he says “this mortal must put on.” But the mode is no clearer for all this. The fact, both of the change of some and of the resurrection of the body of most, is matter of revelation on God’s side and of faith on ours. The fact cannot be ruled out as “impossible.” “Christ is risen;” there is no intrinsic impossibility, therefore, to bar the way of belief. The connection between the second, “the last, Adam,” and the new, regenerate human race of which He is the Head, removes any intrinsic improbability; indeed it makes it probable that His people shall rise, in soul and body sharing with, conformed to, the conditions of His own risen life. III. Difficulties in the way of belief of the “identity” of the buried and the risen body.—These are to a large extent occasioned by a faulty statement of the doctrine which is demanded and established as above. In the endeavour to grasp or to imagine the mode of the body’s resurrection, and, still more, to present the fact clearly and vividly to the ignorant, the young, the new convert, or the heathen, a crude, literal restoration of the same particles, and even of the same hair, nails, bones, etc., has been insisted on. But this was only the over-elaboration of popular rhetoric and of undisciplined imagination. [As to the difficulty presented on that theory in the case of a body eaten by a cannibal, whose body also must rise again, it would be only fair to say that there would be no absolute “unthinkableness” or “impossibility,” unless on the supposition that some or all of the particles composing one body at the moment of its death were also the components of another body at the moment of its death; so that they would be wanted at the resurrection for the restoration and completion of two bodies at the same time. An eventuality against which, if He were pleased to make that one of the conditions of the resurrection, He could guard. It was a fair reply to say, “He can do whatever He wills, and whatever He says He will do.” But the underlying supposition which occasioned the objection was extreme in statement. N.B.—The cannibals of Fiji never found the “cannibal” argument an insuperable barrier to belief in a bodily resurrection. “What does God say He will do? That He can and will do.”] .—1 Corinthians 15:55-58 Triumph; Theology; Duty. I. Does that seem a descending series, with a step yet lower to 1 Corinthians 16:1, “the collection”? If it be the stone-like drop of the lark, after her soaring, singing, jubilant ascent into an upper world of light and freedom, it has nevertheless her justification; she drops to her nest, her young, her motherly duty. No surer sign of a healthy spiritual life than the simple, easy, natural transition from level to level of thought and talk. Such a life indeed lifts all up to the spiritual level. In the Great House of the soul’s Life, it does not go downstairs, from the Chapel to the Study, or to the Dining-room or the Kitchen. These, it may be, are less stately and less richly adorned than that; but the soul passes from one to the other all on the same floor. II. The connection between Triumph and a true Theology on the one side, and between a true Theology and Duty on the other, is very close, “Faith” lies very near to “The Faith.” Religion and dogma are very intimately connected. If religion be the Art of holy living, then is theology its Science. Theology is only the orderly statement of the facts and truths presupposed, whether in the hopes and joys, or in the duty and service, of religion. [Newton said he liked his Calvinism as he liked his sugar in his tea—in solution. Most men’s “ism” is to-day in solution in their teaching; and always was very much in solution in the thought of the bulk of Christian people. But Newton’s “sugar” distinctly “flavoured his tea”; it was unmistakably there, to anybody who knew the taste. Perhaps could have been extracted, weighed, exhibited in separate, orderly, crystalline form.] If, for instance, an earnest man is accustomed, as the very foundation of much of his religious life, to address himself in prayer to Christ, let him be asked and helped to express, in precise and ordered language, how he supposes that this “Christ” can hear his words and, much more, his unuttered thoughts; also, supposing that He can hear, how, and how far, he expects that Christ can help him in answer to his appeal; when he says at the end of his praying to the Father “for Christ’s sake,” what relation there is between Christ and the Father, and between Christ and himself, that “for Christ’s sake” should be a plea and a reason with God;—the answers will be a very important contribution to a Christology, whether a new one of his own or that of some other man or of some Church. Indeed, to answer Christ’s own question fully and precisely, “Whose Son is Christ?” goes down to some of the obscurest depths of Divine thought. Every saved sinner has an informal, unformulated, working “theory of the Atonement,” according to which he has laid hold of salvation; just as every preacher or Sunday-school teacher has an unformulated “theory of Inspiration,” which determines his treatment of the Word of God, and even his selection of texts. So here the shout of triumph will be thin and hollow, as the dying saint says, “O death, … thy victory?… thy sting?” if he have any misgiving whether, after all, death is not going to be the conqueror; whether, after all, he is not still “in his sins”; whether, after all, his Christ be not a mere great name of the past, the name of a man who long centuries ago yielded to death just as others do, and left His body to dissolve into dust, like other bodies. III. So a right or wrong Theology will affect Duty.—(Discussed in part under 1 Corinthians 15:32; here needs only to be added:) No doubt as matter of high-level, theoretic virtue, men “ought” to be righteous and diligent and all that is good, for the very intrinsic rightness and betterness and nobleness of Good. So the children at school “ought” to do their lessons well for the reason that it is right, and duty, and the like; prizes or no prizes, they “ought” to be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in their work. But the prizes, if illogical as a motive, and indefensible, are a very practical incentive to diligence, and a very real help to even a diligent scholar, when the lessons are hard and the play is tempting. God knows His scholars in the High School of life; and, grown men and women though they be, it will make a difference to them whether or not there are to be any marks and any rewards. He knows that average men and women will not go on year after year pitching the fruit of their labour into a moral Chat Moss, unless like George Stephenson they have the confident assurance that there is a bottom, and that by and-by there will be some solid result to show for their patient toil. They will, like the engineers of a Portland Breakwater, be content to see load after load of solid “labour” disappear beneath the surface of the ocean, if they too may hope that some day their toil will appear in solid result above the waters, none really lost. It is of the very essence of death’s “enmity” (1 Corinthians 15:26) that it cuts off abruptly, inopportunely, often disastrously, the plans and labour and hope of the man who is only “of the world,” and whose aims and desires go no further than the horizon whose radius is the thirty, forty, fifty years which may happen to be the probable remainder of his earthly sojourn. The Christian man has “hoped” that “in Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:19) death will only help forward the attainment of all his hopes and bring him a stage nearer to the fulfilment of the new and larger meaning he now sees in “Life,” besides putting him into more favourable conditions than were possible here for both growth and service. But if death is going to break off in mid-course all his plans also, and to frustrate all his hopes and purposes as it does those of the worldling; if he is going to find the first moment of eternity the first also of an eternal disillusion; or, worst of all, if Eternity is to be nothing, because he passes away into Nothing himself, and there is for him neither resurrection nor after-life,—well, then “the game is not worth the candle.” Who will “after the manner of men” fight with the beasts? Who will in ascetic gloom refuse to “eat and drink”? Why should not he take such pleasure as it is, seeing there is nothing better? Nothing at all at the end of all! Romans 7:13-24; Romans 7:7-12, are our 1 Corinthians 15:56 in rιsumι. Plant 1 Corinthians 15:56 in mind and heart; let prayer bring upon it the quickening Spirit; let experience develop and record the living germ of truth; it will grow into Romans 7:7-24. Death has no “sting” unless it borrow one from a guilty conscience. Sin finds its condemnation, and its provocation, in a positive commandment. “In Christ” death is only dying, and behind dying there is no proper death. “In Christ” the heart runs in the way of the commandment; it no longer conflicts with it, only to its own hurt and condemnation. And “labour in Christ” is the labour of Christ Himself in His member. It is really His own “labour.” How can His labour be “in vain”? 1 Corinthians 15:38. “God giveth it a body.” Introduction.—In regard to the special topic discussed in this chapter, this remark of Paul lifts the believer over the stumbling-block of the “How?” by referring him to one of the twin bases upon which the Saviour, more than a quarter of a century before, had set the doctrine of the Resurrection in His memorable discussion with the Sadducee scoffers of His day. “Ye do err,” He had said, “not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God,” i.e. His power makes it certain that He can, if He will, raise the dead. [It is not a thing incredible that God—God—should raise the dead (Acts 24:8).] And the Scriptures make it certain that He wills to do it (Matthew 22:29). All preliminary talk about “impossibility” is swept away so soon as in any real, operative sense God is taken account of; and any further question as to fact or probability is met if there is a positive declaration which is unquestionably from His mouth. But the words are suggestive of what belongs to a much wider field of discussion. To a Christian Theist it is as true of the universal natural order as of the spiritual, that “in all God is all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). I. God gave man his present body.—The little child learns to say its catechism: “Q. Who made you? A. God made me.” And all he may afterwards learn of the physical processes of nature need not take the child’s answer out of the man’s mouth. Creationism or Traducianism, apart, as far as regards the immaterial element in us, it very soon becomes matter of obvious knowledge that a man’s body is no absolutely new beginning, no thing de novo fashioned and moulded by any literal “hand” or “fingers” of God; but that, on the other hand, there are many intermediate physical links of successive or predecessive generations of parentage between any individual of the race to-day and the body of “the first Adam.” If a man’s special line of study makes him acquainted with the minuti� of the physiological processes between the primal cell and the new-born infant, if he come to know how very closely many of the earlier stages mimic or are allied to those of the starting into growth in the case of a vegetable germ; yet all his added detail of knowledge has made it no more difficult for him to say “God made me” than it is for the grown child or the man who merely sees, as far as all see, the physical organisation of the parents interposed between God the Creator and the new product of His power. What difficulty exists is to both men the same in kind. Merely to be able to follow the intervening links of the process into fuller detail, to be permitted to follow the Great Worker into the inner secrecy of His workshop, and understand better how exceedingly complex and beautiful are the methods He follows, is not to alter the nature of the question at all. It is merely breaking up the one obvious physical link into many, very many; but to see the simple fact that our parents have “given us” our body is as great or as little a difficulty, or as completely no difficulty at all, in the way of saying “God made me,” as to see the manifold, multiplied details and physical instruments of the Great Maker’s work. And so, too, if all that is claimed for what is popularly called “Evolution” were demonstrated; if the order of developed scheme and idea which it is manifestly possible to arrange out of the multiform creatures of earth’s geological and historical ages, an order leading up to, and at every stage more and more frequently suggesting, Man,—if this were demonstrably physically and historically a genealogical succession; if thus between the first living thing and his body of to-day the Christian man of science interposed an unbroken chain of physical antecedents and consequents, not even interrupted at an “Adam” of a “Genesis”;—he would still with full intelligence and reasonableness reply to his catechist, “God made me.” He again would know that his fuller acquaintance with the details of the process, and his belief that there had been no interposition of the power of God, de novo and ab extra, in the physical succession since the first living cell was endowed with Life, had made no difference in the essential shape of the question. The first modification from the simplicity of the child’s idea of a direct and immediate “making” by God to the necessary knowledge that the “making” had been mediate through human parentage, is the only modification in kind; all else is matter of completeness of understanding the mediating term. Between the Maker and the product there is more elaborate machinery; the thing is not so simply and directly “hand-made” as the little child supposed; but that is all. “God gave me my body: God made Me.” This leads further afield. II. God is active, operative, everywhere, always in His creation.—“My Father worketh hitherto,” said the Son of God, in vindication of His own beneficent Sabbath labour. “Why should not men let healing alone on the Sabbath, and neither the patients come, nor the physician attend to them if they do come? Why not? Why should not I cease such work on the Sabbath? Because my Father does not. The healing of a woman, or the setting of a bone, or the growth of a body, does not cease on the Sabbath, and in all the ‘natural processes’ which are thus ceaselessly and continuously proceeding, He is at work. They are full of God. They are God at work, Sabbath and weekday.” And the Christian takes his view of God in Nature from His Master. [He does not shut Him out of history. He does not believe that when Bible history was completed, and the lives of Bible saints were ended, God ceased to work altogether, or to work as really and effectively in the history and the lives of our times. He uses the specimen cases of the Bible, authentically opened up and expounded, to show him how to believe in, and to look for, and to see, God in his own life, or in the history of which each morning’s newspaper is the latest chapter of continuation. “Worketh hitherto.”] The mind and heart of man can never be permanently satisfied, under normal conditions, to think of the glorious kingdom of the visible universe as without a throne or a Monarch, or with only an absentee or indifferent one; it postulates a Father and Head for such a family and such a home. It wants God near. The many shades and phases of Pantheistic thought find their charm and their strength in the answer to this demand. But they overdo it, and bring Him too near, confounding and identifying Work and Worker in one undistinguishable Subsistence. The phrase, at any rate, of another school, which spoke of an Anima Mundi, a Soul of the World, was nearer the truth, imperfect as all creaturely and human analogies must be. The Christian thinker does not confound his soul with his body. He can only speak of either in negations of the other; but he knows them distinct. And he asks himself whether all this great, this vast, physical frame of things stands in any similar relation to God as his own physical part does to his thinking, feeling, willing part. The only force of which he knows anything directly and really is will force, the force of his own will; and though the midmost meeting-place and link of connection between mind and body is veiled from him under thickest darkness, yet he knows how Will in him wields, and moves, and can mould, his physical part, and through it the physical around him. And then he asks whether he can say or think anything truer or wiser, or at any rate more probable, than that the One Will wields and moulds and moves all this vast physical frame of things, and that all the “forces” which we count and calculate and measure and use are but many variations of the putting forth of the One Force, that of the Will of Him who long ago made the matter of His universe, and from that time to this has never taken His hand off the thing He made. In the case studied above, suggested by Paul, he does not conceive that he is really any farther away from God because he sees the thing “machine-made” rather than directly “hand-made.” His Father “Who worketh hitherto” designed the machine, and made it, and works it, and has His hand upon it at every intermediate point between Himself and what He produces by it. The “design argument” loses none of its force to him, if even he should think that “natural selection” or any other combination of physical forces proves to be the method by which the Designer has effected His purpose. The Design is there. The “natural” is of God as really as the “supernatural”; the “miraculous” is the special for the purpose of Revelation; the “natural” is the ordinary, orderly method by which He chooses to proceed in Creation and Providence. If the Idea of Creation gets a physical embodiment, it is because “God giveth it a body, as it hath pleased Him.” III. God gave Adam a body.—Did even the early Italian painters, of the simplest ages of faith, really believe literally in the grand, bearded, old-man-like Creator Whom they represented bending over a newly made body moulded with His literal fingers out of dust? After the days of his childhood, no simplest, most old-fashioned believer in a distinct creation of Adam’s body ever so conceived of it. They knew and believed that “no man hath seen or can see” God. Even they, believing in a direct and immediate new beginning with the body of “the first Adam,” did not seriously and literally think that if they had been present at its formation their eyes would have beheld any visible Modeller, with literal hands shaping “the dust of the earth.” If they had at all pursued the matter so far, they would at most have expected to see a body growing into shape before them, in similar fashion to that so vividly described by Huxley. “Of all the perennial miracles [Nature] offers to the student’s inspection, perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the development of a plant or of an animal from its embryo. Examine the recently laid egg of some common animal, such as a salamander or a newt. It is a minute spheroid in which the best microscope will reveal nothing but a structureless sac, enclosing a glairy fluid, holding granules in suspension. But … let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, and yet so steady and so purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal column, and moulded the contour of the body; pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the other, and fashioning flank and limb into due salamandrine proportions, in so artistic a way that, after watching the process hour by hour, one is almost involuntarily possessed with the notion, that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic, would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skilful manipulation to perfect his work.” (Huxley, Lay Sermons, 260, 261.) The Christian scientific observer believes that under the lens of his microscope he actually is beholding Creative Power and Will mysteriously meeting, touching, moulding, Matter. God is there giving the salamander a body. IV. God giveth the risen man His body.—We thus return to our starting-point. There is no real difficulty in the question, “How can the dead—the dead, the dead! do you see them?—be raised? With what (kind of) body do they come from their grave?” That they will come forth—all of them, and not only those “in Christ”—is for His disciples conclusively settled by one word of the Master. They “know this Scripture” (John 5:28-29) [where “in the graves” is in very precise and defining contrast with “the dead” of “the hour that now is” in 1 Corinthians 15:25]. “How?” What need to ask “how”? The closest students have not exhausted yet the whole range of the variety of His methods, nor seen any suggestion of a limit to many and startlingly novel possibilities of new methods, or of new exertions of the old, the one, power. As He gave the buried body, so He must, and will, give the raised-up body. Whether working on His accustomed lines or in His sovereign freedom and mastery striking out new ones for Himself, it is but the One Worker. And as there has never yet arisen a demand for which He has not made adequate provision, so for the new demand of the new life, and the new environment of the new world, He may either make a new thing altogether, or modify the old thing and the old type, “as it pleases Him.” That is all that can be said. To the intellect or the heart which does not know our God that is to say nothing. To the intellect that acknowledges Him, and to the heart that believes in and loves Him, that is enough. “God giveth” to the seeds of His human sowing “their body,” “their own,” appropriate “(kind of) body,” “spiritual bodies” for spiritual men, who are to dwell in a spiritual world, for ever one with Him who “was made a quickening Spirit.” 1 Corinthians 15:26. The Sub-final Act in the Drama of Human History. I. “The last enemy” met and subdued by— II. “The last Adam.”—Sentence of deposition was long ago passed against the usurping power. [Cf. John 12:31; couple with it the Temptation in the Wilderness; and Luke 10:18. It has struggled to keep its hold on the race; but every soul “fallen asleep,” “not seeing death,” has been a blow to its prestige, a defeat in detail. Now Death shall never seize another individual of the race; this shall no longer be a mortal stock. The other Death—the only real “Death”—shall still hold its captives, and shall hold them eternally, for there shall be no more dying hence forward. 1 Corinthians 15:31. “I die daily.” I. Physically.—From the first moment of life we begin to die. For thirty or forty years the forces which make for life and recuperation outweigh and hold in check the forces which make for waste, decay, death. But after that point the balance turns against life; life fights a losing battle. Dying daily, dying from the first, we die at last. II. Voluntarily.—For Christ’s sake Paul held life as not worth more than a day’s purchase. “Always bearing about the dying,” etc. (2 Corinthians 4:10; observe the forcible Greek word). III. Experimentally.—Galatians 6:14. What does the world matter to a crucified man hanging there in death? It can do no more for him; he cares no more for it. IV. Believingly.—In hope of a better life.—Suggested by J. L. 1 Corinthians 15:31-32. “When will you die?” I. The ignoble life says, “Tomorrow we die!”—This is the reckless temper which makes men take their full fling of riot and carouse, when the city is swept with the plague [Athens, London]; or when the enemy is at the gate [Babylon (Daniel 5), Jerusalem beleaguered by the Assyrians (the original of this quotation, Isaiah 22:13)]; the carouse and gambling in the condemned cell on the morning of the execution. “We die to-morrow; so ‘go it’ to-day!” Or at best the temper which adjourns unpleasant things till “to-morrow.” The characteristic word of the Spaniard is Man̄ ?ana, “to-morrow.” The “natural” heart in man says “To-morrow” in regard to the claims of Christ (Acts 24:25), to difficult duties, to preparation for death. It shirks the irksome, the serious, the religious. “We must die; then let it be to-morrow.” II. The noble life says, “I die daily—to-day.—The nobler type, even in regard to natural character and to secular matters, faces at once the un-pleasing, the difficult, the obligatory; to “shunt” things into to-morrow’s “siding” is no manly discharge of today’s life-work. There are Christian “shufflers” as well as secular; or “happy-go-lucky” souls, who never fully face the Cross in their religious life. Souls like Paul—and he is like the Master—“take up their cross daily.” When the hardest, sorest trial to nature is thus met and dealt with, character has then gained in manliness and strength. There is a subtle paralysis in having a vague terror in the background, or an unfulfilled, outstanding obligation hanging over one’s head. How many lives are noble because of a daily crucifixion of self and of all evil! None but their Crucified Lord knows how keen is the anguish as they hang upon the daily Cross within, for His sake. Themselves driving in the nails, waking every morning to the Cross they find prepared for them, which they accepted long ago. “Mortify your members,” etc. (Colossians 3:5). [Also observe how Paul almost ventures to parallel with that of Christ his own daily dying in its effects to others. “Bearing about … the dying … in order that the life … in you.”] 1 Corinthians 15:32. “What advantageth, it met?” I. Seeing that the dead do rise, then what advantageth it? Principally there is a future life for me. For this stands or falls with the resurrection of the dead. So then, as Dean Alford said, in a letter printed in his Life: “When we have one moment said ‘Good night!’ here, the next we shall be met with the welcome, ‘Good morning!’ ” Then (as 1 Corinthians 15:58) I do not labour or suffer with the paralysing fear that all my labour is “putting money into a bag with holes,” “grinding the wind,” “ploughing upon the rock,” or whatever be the illustration of useless, fruitless labour. II. 1. If the dead do not rise [though for the moment, in “most miserable,” and “Let us eat and drink,” Paul may adopt the tone, and speak with the verdict, of mere natural men, careless or desperate, yet even he would say, “Profitable for the life that now is”], if virtue is better than vice, benevolence than selfishness, truth than falsehood, then there is yet, as even a few noble heathen felt, still an advantage. 2. But this will not stand the “hard wear” of the world, of the poor, or tempted, or evil-disposed. A man soon sinks below the level where there is any advantage in being righteous for its own sake. He may easily sink low enough to escape the scourge of conscience, and to enjoy the “eating and drinking” of the sensuous, sensual life. 3. Yet if our faith be a delusion, it is one that serves well the purposes of life. Faith in God and Immortality and a Saviour has wrought, as nothing else has done, for thousands whom nothing else would have touched, peace of conscience, righteousness of life, confidence in face of the future, victory over fear of death. III. Conclusion.— 1. “Try our way, sinner!” 2. “Try your way, sinner? No. Listen to another ‘What advantageth?’ (Luke 9:25).” [Loyola won Xavier, the teacher of philosophy at Paris, by an incessant repetition of his question, “What shall it profit a mam?” etc. Threw himself into his every pursuit; into disputations, into amusements; accommodated himself to every merriest mood; went with him for long walks; and every conversation led up to the refrain, “What shall it profit?” etc. Xavier lost his money and his pupils by his self-indulgence and folly. Loyola regained for him pupils and popularity, and came back amidst all the applause and excitement with his burden, “What shall it profit?” Again Xavier squandered all. Loyola begged for him, and brought him a purse, and again pressed his question, “What shall it profit a man?” Read this fully, and the account of Xavier’s death on the shores of China, in Stephen, Eccles. Biogr. “If the dead rise not,” what did it all advantage Xavier?] NOTES1 Corinthians 16:1. The collection.—Very fully dealt with in 2 Corinthians 8, 9. Traceable thus; earlier, in Galatians 2:10, Paul’s original pledge that he would “remember the poor,” which he had already led the way in doing (Acts 15:29); Paul “gives order” to the Galatian Church, (here) and now to the Corinthian; he “boasts” of the beginning made at Corinth to the Thessalonians and Philippians and Berœans (2 Corinthians 9:2); to be completed at Corinth before his delayed visit (ib. 1 Corinthians 16:3-5; here, 1 Corinthians 16:2); the collection made, or in the making, in Macedonia and Corinth, is, when Romans is being written, nearly ready to be taken up to Jerusalem, and (perhaps) is mentioned, as an indirect, suggestive appeal to the Romans for assistance (Romans 15:26). It duly reached Jerusalem ([Acts 21:19], Acts 24:17). Evidently a thing already known of at Corinth. The saints.—From Romans 15:26, evidently at Jerusalem. The community of goods (Acts 2:44; Acts 4:32) had not caused, but had attempted for a time to palliate, a chronic poverty at Jerusalem; aggravated probably in the case of Christians by the loss of home and friends and livelihood for Christ’s sake, and by the famine of Act 11:28-30. Gave order.—Acts 18:23. Notice “Churches,” not “Church in Galatia.”1 Corinthians 16:2. Gatherings.—“Collectings,” as in 1 Corinthians 16:1. When I come.—To delay Paul, or divert their attention from more important things at his visit. Notice a suggestion here that “the first day of the week” is becoming a day in some way emphasised by Christians. Cf: John 20:26; Acts 20:7; perhaps Revelation 1:10 also; further it is urged, as, e.g., by Bishop Bramhail: “That the Day of Pentecost fell upon a Sunday is undeniable; because the “Resurrection of Christ was upon a Sunday, and Pentecost was the fiftieth day from the Resurrection.”1 Corinthians 16:3.—Co-delegates of Paul, chosen by other Churches (2 Corinthians 8:19; 2 Corinthians 8:23). Letters.—Such as Paul did not need (2 Corinthians 8:4).1 Corinthians 16:4. Meet.—If the collection raised was so large as to make it fitting, or desirable, that an apostle should escort it, or be its “convoy.” .—1 Corinthians 16:1-4“Concerning the collection.”I. Note the place and the manner of the introduction of the topic.—This wonderful letter is drawing to a close. Might have believed chap. 13 an unsurpassable climax of interest and beauty but that chap. 15 has followed, surpassing it at least in the interest of its amazing disclosures of the future. “Chap. 15 is certainly the climax.” Yes; but this “Now concerning the collection” is not an anticlimax. Paul certainly did not feel it so; indeed, rhetorical form in his letters can, hardly more than in his preaching (1 Corinthians 2:1), have been any object of endeavour or of thought to him. Chap. 15 was no “climax” to him. The climactic effect and magnitude of the chapter is in the matter of the chapter. One can hardly conceive of him as, so to speak, taking breath after the long climb to the heights of chap. 15, and pausing to review complacently the long way up and to take in the height to which he and his readers have attained, before dropping to another, lower, commonplace level of money matters and route arrangements and personal talk. Can hardly suppose that he felt nothing of the different magnitude of the topic now to be dealt with; yet clearly he passes from the Resurrection to the Collection with no sense of any impropriety, or incongruity, or unworthiness of sequence. There is no incongruity, nothing unworthy; both are equally parts of Paul’s message to Corinth, or rather of the Spirit’s message by Paul,—equally, if not of equal importance. The passage from the one to the other is therefore made with no sense of shock; the thought and heart run upon the new lines with perfect smoothness, with the smoothness of entire naturalness, the naturalness of a man to whom any smallest topic connected with his Lord, and His people, and His work, is as really holy ground for thought and talk as any largest and most important topic. Nothing which affects or belongs to Christ or His Church is on a “low level.” The whole level is high, though not equally high. “Up” or “down,” “higher” or “lower,” in any rightful occupations of a Christian man’s time, or thought, or tongue, are not so much ascents to some mountain-top and descents to the plain at the base, as variations of level upon the surface of a broad tableland, where all, even the “lower,” are high together. Collection or Resurrection, women’s veils or the glory of Charity, all are topics of one and the same “higher life.” Nothing is finer than the conversation in the family circle of a Christian home, where every life is “in Christ,” where everything is judged as by those “in Christ,” where nothing is admitted—and it leaves a wide range of topics and pursuits—which cannot find a place within the holy circle traced by the words “in Christ”; the talk passes “from grave to gay,” from earnest to hearty fun, from politics to religion, from religion to anything, with the most perfect naturalness and simplicity. All is part of one whole life, whose centre and view-point is located by the side of Christ. The merriment is made holy, and guarded in its outbursts by the sure instinct of a holy heart; the transition from topic to topic is controlled by the supreme direction of all the thought and heart to the glory of Christ. The man in Christ is as really “marching through Immanuel’s ground” in this chap. 16, as when he was in chap. 13 or chap. 15. II. Note the characteristics of the collection and its management.— 1. Personal gifts are its support. “Every one of you.” No slipping out from doing much or doing anything, because “the whole Church is doing so liberally.” No man has been left out of God’s blessings; no man may be left out of the Church’s giving. The “Unspeakable Gift” was given to him in his poverty; his best gift to the poverty of Jerusalem fellow-Christians is not too large an acknowledgment. Its value will largely be in that it is his own gift, with his own gratitude and thought put into it. The gift has no value except as it means the man. And so we have— 2. His personal thought. “In store.”—Then it is no mere spasm of benevolence; it has been provided for and arranged with purpose. As in Ephesians 4:28, to have something to give in charity and to God is a distinct motive and object in the Christian life. [A remarkable passage. Some Ephesian Christians had been thieves; of such material does Christ make “saints” and build up His Church. Now every Ephesian rogue must be an honest man, if he become a Christian. What motive shall be urged to induce him to take to regular ways, and “to labour, working with his hands the thing that is good”? The dignity of labour? The “better policy” of honesty? The peaceful conscience of the honest man? The misery of the thief? And so on. No. Paul urges this: “Let him work, that he may have something to give away to him that needeth.” So then ask, Why should a Christian work to-day? To keep up the home? Yes. To educate the children? Yes. To leave them enough to exempt them, not from the need of real work, but from the paralysing pinch of means so narrow as to leave no margin for contingencies? Yes, perhaps. To have the yearly holiday and an occasional day of recreation? Good objects all. To provide against sickness and old age? Yes. But this also is to be put in as an object co-ordinate in importance with the rest, to have “a store” from which there may always be something to give when “need” of any kind demands it.] The “store” meant steady, thoughtful, hearty preparation to give. As between man and man, a gift brought by the wealthy man who has impulsively walked into the first shop he came to, and has bought the first likely or unlikely thing which caught his eye, “no matter about the price,” is worth nothing in comparison with the far humbler gift which has meant a poor but grateful heart, which has considered what will be pleasing or suitable or useful to the receiver, and has secured or made it, with personal trouble and perhaps work or sacrifice. The planning how to have a “store” makes the gift one acceptable to God. The most mercenary gift, bestowed with a self-interested purpose, does the same material service to the collection, as Paul gathers and forwards it. But in the subscription lists kept by the Lord Himself, the gift is differently appraised according as it is the mere haphazard, impulsive gift of a hasty, accidentally stirred, good nature, or as it is the carefully treasured “store,” got ready for the claim of Christ and His work or His poor, after quiet, conscientious weighing of all other claims and their rightful adjustment to such other and to this. The smaller gift out of a prepared and devoted “store,” is better than a far larger one which is a mere chance “dip” into whatever one may happen to have within reach and available. The man and his personal thought are in it. The worth is in these. And the gift which means a deliberate “sacrifice,” a distinct deferring of something of one’s own, that the claim of God may be met, is the most precious of all. Moreover, it is stored for a special object. A good giver thinks about the destination of his gift, and is interested in the “Jerusalem saints.” Also it is— 3. A thank-offering.—Because “the Lord [or God] hath prospered him.” God has enabled him to get; God has enabled him to give; gratitude demands that he should give. And this by no means as a satisfaction in full of God’s dues, leaving him free to do as he pleases with all the rest. “Tithe” or “firstfruits,” whatever be the system or scale of giving, the part of time, or money, or energy first given to God, does not mean that, e.g., “Sunday is God’s; the rest of the week is now my own.” Rather the firstfruits, the “Corban,” means that we gratefully offer a “sample,” where all is God’s own; and that we purpose thankfully to employ what He arranges we shall keep and use, only as those who are dealing with what is His. The gift is a thank-offering, the first handful, the earliest sheaf, of the last week’s harvest He has privileged and aided us to gather in. And not only “because,” but “as,”—for 4. The “store” is accumulated on system; there is a principle governing the manner of accumulating. The God-given “prosperity” not only supplies the motive, but it also fixes the measure, of the gift. Two ways then present themselves of working this “sliding scale.” First: “The Lord is running me shorter; I must cut down my gifts”; and this is done with a promptitude not always shown when the tide of prosperity turns in our favour,—is so turned by God. Second: “The Lord has not seen fit to give me as much this week, or this year. But He has been very good. I must trust Him a little longer before revising my gifts downwards. I will give the old sum this time, once more; I may never have the power to do it again.” Such givers are not imagination, monsters of goodness created by parsons’ fancy; but are happily found in all the Churches; often quiet, unostentatious people, in whose quiet life such trustful, grateful excelling of the rigid proportion is the one piece of romantic and heroic. The storing is systematic, not spasmodic or emotion-born, a great “spurt” of unmeasured bounty, when some Paul “comes” and urges and persuades a big “gathering.” 5. At a regular date and after a regular interval. “On the first day of the week.”—Obviously all these details of injunction to Galatia and Corinth are not so much definite prescription to us to-day, as particular instances, historic examples, which carry a principle. The Sunday morning breakfast table, or the morning service on the first day of the week in the accustomed sanctuary, may be the best time and place for the giving. No day more suitable; not many so suitable. But, as under 4, no “tenth” or any other particular proportion is binding, whilst the proportion should increase faster than even the prosperity increases; so here no day, no particular interval, is matter of obligation. The regularity of the bounty is the important thing; and also that, whether literally joined to the “first day” and its worship, the giving should be made “worship” by its direct, grateful devotion to Christ, in Whom God’s good mercy and bounty have most clearly shone forth. III. The prudent, business-like administration of this relief fund for Jerusalem.—(Very fully dealt with under 2 Corinthians 9) What is carefully, thoughtfully collected must be righteously devoted to its proper object; pains taken to secure that it reaches its destination; [not like some fine rivers which lose themselves in an absorbent desert-sand before they can reach their goal, the sea;] administered by trusty hands and wise hearts. NOTES1 Corinthians 16:5.—This arrangement set aside an earlier plan (2 Corinthians 1:16) to come direct to Corinth from Ephesus by ship, and thence to go to Macedonia. Now he will come to Corinth viâ Macedonia. This change of plan now announced occasioned the misconception and misrepresentation of 2 Corinthians 1:17, etc. The true reason was 2 Corinthians 1:23.1 Corinthians 16:5-6.—“I (only) pass through (not stay in) Macedonia; I shall perhaps stay, and perhaps even winter with you.” You.—Emphatic: “I want that to be your help to me: I want to have you do it.”1 Corinthians 16:7. By the way.—I.e. merely as passing through Corinth; Corinth should be the “objective” of his journey “now,” as it was not in the earlier plan. No sure argument to be based on this “now” as if it meant that he had seen them en passant on some (unrecorded) visit, between has first, long one in Acts 18 and this proposed one.1 Corinthians 16:8.—Then he is writing in Ephesus; probably in the Spring [Passover is perhaps about due, or just being celebrated, 1 Corinthians 5:7 (where see)]; by Pentecost navigation would be perfectly open.1 Corinthians 16:9. Door.—Colossians 4:3; 2 Corinthians 2:12 (at Troas); Acts 14:27; Revelation 3:8, are worth comparison. “An opportunity great and already beginning to show fruit,” or “calling for effective utilisation.” Yet “many adversaries,” whose opposition culminated in the riot of Demetrius (Acts 19). Note, these are a motive to Paul not to fly, but to stay.1 Corinthians 16:10. If Timothy come.—Read Acts 19:21-22. But had he not been “sent specially, and with definite instruction?… The Apostle felt it quite possible that his messenger’s [who was sent viâ Macedonia] arrival might be delayed, and that, as appears really to have been the case, he might not at that time reach them at all. Timothy was … still in Macedonia when the Apostle wrote … 2 Corinthians 1:1” (Ellicott). Without fear.—Some years after this he was still a young man (1 Timothy 4:12). Ellicott protests a little against the usual inference from these passages, and from 2 Timothy 1:6-7; 2 Timothy 2:1, as being very precarious indeed, viz. that Timothy was gentle, or even timid. For more of Timothy, see Philippians 2:20; Philippians 2:22. The Lord.—Expounded as “of Christ” (Philippians 2:30).1 Corinthians 16:11. Despise him.—Timothy is to see that he on his part does nothing which shall lead them to do so (1 Timothy 4:12). Stronger word here than there. The brethren.—Viz. those travelling with the money raised for the Relief Fund, and named or indicated in 2 Corinthians 8:18; 2 Corinthians 8:22-23 (Stanley). Or only his companion Erastus, with perhaps others (Acts 19:22). I expect him.—I.e. on the supposition that he did reach Corinth.1 Corinthians 16:12.—Stanley continues his reading of 1 Corinthians 16:11 by supposing that Titus only became the head of the mission after Apollos had excused himself from going; perhaps lest the self-styled, “Apollos” party should try to exploit him, to their advantage over their rivals. Apollos seems to be back again at Ephesus, after Acts 19:1. See how happy the relations between him and Paul. The “will” is surely that of Apollos; not of God!1 Corinthians 16:13-14.—“The whole duty of the Corinthian convert [summed up] in the trying times and amid the varied temptations in which this Epistle would find him” (Ellicott). (See homiletic treatment below.) .—1 Corinthians 16:5-14 Three Contrasts. A. “I will,” … “I do” (1 Corinthians 16:5), “I will not” (1 Corinthians 16:7)—“It may be” (1 Corinthians 16:6), “I trust,” “If the Lord permit” (1 Corinthians 16:7). B. Timothy—Apollos (1 Corinthians 16:10-12). C. “Be strong”—“All … with charity” (1 Corinthians 16:13-14). A. A Christian man’s purposing. I. Two minds, two wills, are working together in the ordering of Paul’s life.—A deep, a bottomless, problem of philosophy how this can be. In practice, the devout heart makes no difficulty. The difference between Bible histories and the history of our own times, or our own lives, is not that God is found more actively interposing in them than in ours, but that in them we are taken behind the scenes, so to speak, and permitted to see—where we usually must believe—Him at work. The Bible characters and histories are, as it were, dissected examples, that we may learn how to think of the ordinary examples, where the beating heart and the complex machinery are all hidden. We are to read them, and to learn how to look for, and to see, God in the newspaper, in the national, the personal, records of to-day. Bible stories, Bible lives, are by no means full of miracle. They are full of God; but not more full of God than are ours. In the Bible we see, in the case of men and in the case of nations, how God and man work together in weaving history on the loom of Time. If we look at the side on which man works at the pattern, it all seems his own, and he seems to work quite after his own mind and will. If we turn the fabric, as we always do in Scripture narrative, and look at the side where God is working upon His own pattern, we see the same events and incidents “showing through.” Every one is being woven into God’s own design; but they have a different colour and character. How man can work in perfect freedom, and yet God’s pattern be also wrought, is a problem which the Bible only “solves,” so far as is needful for practical purposes, by showing us in a few specimen cases both sides of the work. Paul brings the will and purpose of Christ still closer to his own when he writes: “I trust in the Lord,”—i.e. as a man whose whole life and its hopes and plans are not at all independent, but all of them “in the Lord,” I trust,—“that I myself shall come … shortly” (Philippians 2:24). Here Paul’s plans are not only subject to, but full of, “the Lord” Christ’s “permission.” All is Paul; all is Christ. II. These facts of revelation and experience emerge: 1. Man proposes, God disposes. If Paul’s Master do not arrange for his short stay at Corinth, then, as he once found in those very regions, Paul plans and tries for an opening in vain (Acts 16:6-8). There is no reason why Paul should not “propose,” no reason why he should not argue that the mind of his Master was that he should “remain at Ephesus until Pentecost,” drawing his inference from the very facts, that the Lord had “opened a door” which claimed to be entered, and that there were “many adversaries” being stirred up for the Gospel, whose opposition “needed” that Paul, the captain of the host, should himself be in that part of the fight. Men are most frequently left to learn the plan of God from such circumstances as these. But all needs God. [If, when Benaiah says “Amen,” the Lord God of Israel do not say “Amen” too, David appoints Solomon to be king in vain (1 Kings 1:36). Man’s “Amen” is “May it be so”; God’s “Amen” is “It shall be so.”] Paul’s plans only succeed when they fall in with Christ’s plan. Men strive against God’s purposes in vain; without God they strive for their own plan in vain. “Men are architects of their own fortune,” and they are not. The plans of human builders must “pass His office.” If in wilfulness men persist, God willing or unwilling, they find that their edifice has no sure foundation; they can mix no cement for their work which will not crumble into utter weakness. The top stone can never be lifted into its place. If man’s will will not take God into its counsels, yet it cannot shut Him out of its work. That work will rise as He “permits,” and as far as He permits; and when He wills, the whole fabric of man’s plan will collapse into utter ruin. [And often the greatest mercy of a man’s life that it does!] Napoleon’s fall dated from the day when, on his way to Moscow, he turned away from the faithful remonstrance of good Queen Louise of Prussia with his bold defiance of God: “Madam, I propose and I dispose!” 2. Man should propose.—As above, no reason why Paul should not make the wisest arrangements, and draw the wisest conclusions, he was able. No man need say, “Whatever I do, God’s plan will be carried out; I will, I need, I can, do nothing.” Human effort is not so to be paralysed; the noblest natures have their own logic, which sweeps away such Turk-like, indolence-breeding fatalism. They often cannot give or get demonstration; they often cannot detect the fallacy of the fatalistic reasoning; but the nobler the man, the more certainly he will start up and say, “I must plan; God made me to plan. God help me! Yet He has also made me to help myself; I may hope that He will.” Prayerfully, submissively planned work for Christ may look for His blessing of success. [Remark Proverbs 16:3, “Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established.” I.e. what men aimed at in their work shall be surely accomplished, even though perhaps by the frustrating of their own “works” altogether.] Christ will “permit” Paul’s plans; He will guide Paul in planning, so that his plans fall in with, and become part of, Christ’s larger plan and government of His Church and of the world. 3. In humble dependence upon God.—The humility will save from all fretting and chafing when Paul’s own plans are “revised” away altogether by the Lord’s superior will; and, still more, if it even be something set aside which we thought essential, humility will not simply bow to the inevitable, but will acquiesce in, and embrace, the Higher Will. The dependence will give hope and heart, when planning difficult tasks. Not left alone in either our purposes or our execution of them. “Thou art not only to perform thy part,But also mine; as when the league was writ,Thou didst at once Thyself inditeAnd hold my hand, while I did write.”—George Herbert. B. Timothy and Apollos.—[Much good material in Dean Howson’s Scenes from the Life of St. Paul, chaps. 7, 8, “The Companions of St. Paul.” I. Two types of worker and of character; “of worker” because “of character.”—As to Timothy, Howson sums up thus: “All this reveals to us a life of incessant activity and toil, and a character worthy of respect and affection. Not, indeed, that we need suppose that Timotheus was destitute of defects. From the repeated and emphatic injunctions to courage (1 Timothy 1:18; 1 Timothy 3:15; 1 Timothy 4:14; 1 Timothy 5:21; 1 Timothy 6:12), it seems not unlikely that there was something of timidity in his disposition [but see Critical Notes on 1 Corinthians 16:10], caused, not improbably, in some degree by his delicate health; and it is no unreasonable fancy which ascribes to him a certain softness of character, and, so to speak, a ‘feminine piety.’ Nor is it likely that this would be any hindrance to the continued and deep attachment which evidently subsisted between him and St. Paul; but rather the contrary. Even in common human friendship the stronger character often finds its consolation in drawing the weaker character close to itself.” In contrast with all this,—which must not be overpressed to Timothy’s disadvantage; he is a fine fellow,—Apollos does here seem to stand forth an example of something more “masculine.” Timothy needs that Paul should throw around his youth and his timidity the strong defence of his own plea for all consideration for him at Corinth; Apollos is a man parallel with Paul, whose judgment and will match themselves against the wish of Paul; whereas Paul’s wish is command enough for Timothy, whom he sends. Apollos has a mind of his own, and prefers his own time. Not, however, in the slightest sense as displaying that “independence” which is only pride goading on weakness to assert itself, or from anything but absolute harmony of mind and soul with Paul. The “refusal” to go argues a thorough loyalty to Paul on the part of Apollos. In Paul’s absence he had, quite innocently, given a name to a party antagonistic to Paul. For Paul’s sake, and for his own fair name’s sake, he would stand clear from these men, who, without shadow of warrant, used his name as the badge of their party. His presence at Corinth “at this time” seemed to him not advisable; the factious party should have no semblance, or show of sanction, such as might be, wrongfully, based upon his presence in Corinth just now. Under the circumstances Paul, in desiring to send him again to Corinth, shows how utterly without jealousy Paul was, and how full of generous trust in Apollos himself; whilst Apollos’ wish to be excused just now “shows a prudence and self-restraint and delicate consideration for” Paul which argues well for Apollos’ character. There is prudence in this “refusal” to set foot in Corinth just at this juncture. Altogether the suggestions of the few incidental remarks we may gather up as to Apollos, show us a very fine man, around whose name it is a great marvel that so few ecclesiastical legends have collected. [That he should be suggested as the writer of the Hebrews rests upon no surer foundation than this: The author’s turn of thought, and some occasional grammatical forms, as well as a somewhat rhetorical form about the letter, are said to be characteristically “Alexandrian,” and, of all Paul’s “school” of disciples, Apollos is the one man we happen to know who, coming from Alexandria, might be supposed to be Alexandrian in thought and style, “eloquent” as he was, and “mighty in the Scriptures.”] The practical suggestion is that Christ has use for every type of man and of mind in His Church. “Dependent ones” like Timothy, young and perhaps shrinking from conflict and friction, are not by any means useless. They win stronger hearts for themselves and then for their Master. There are many forms of labour, and many styles of “success.” The workers of other types, and on other lines, need to be as broad as Paul would have the Corinthians to be in their judgment of Timothy: “He worketh the work of the Lord, as I also do.” The men of stronger type find it difficult to appreciate such natures as need, like clinging plants, the strong support of a Paul, or his sheltering, appealing love; difficult not to “despise” them, as “poor creatures,” “unmanly,” and the like. They laugh at the “fear” which their own rough handling and rough judging cause, and are apt to crush and kill a tender spirit, intending no harm. The Timothys, when put to it, can be entrusted with difficult and responsible work at Ephesus or elsewhere (1 Timothy 1:3); and acquit themselves well by the grace of God “enabling them” (ib. 1 Corinthians 16:12), as He “enables” the Pauls, to hold their own and do their Master’s work, though they must handle older, “grave,” men (ib. 1 Corinthians 3:1-11), and even “unreasonable and wicked,” or “blasphemously” heretical ones (2 Thessalonians 3:2; 1 Timothy 1:19-20). The very faculty of winning such tender affection as that which Timothy won and kept from Paul (2 Timothy 4:9-13; 2 Timothy 4:21) is a very valuable gift to the Christian worker, and opens hearts, and opens doors, where the Paul and the Apollos may not, or not so readily, enter. No shape or temper of tool comes amiss to the hand of the Divine Worker. II. Paul revealed in his friendships.— 1. How broad his sympathies and his nature, to be able to attach to himself, and to understand and work with, and love, such a diversified group of friends as those we see round him in the Acts and Epistles. He must himself have been a many-sided man, offering many points of attachment, that such different styles of men always found in him a side where they could take hold and “catch on.” [May it be reverently suggested that the polygon of character, with these many sides, the more in the nobler and larger natures and lives, grows to the perfect circle—the polygon of an infinite number of sides—in the One Friend, in whom all men find a place, a side, where they touch and can grasp and can hold?] Men of such pronounced character as Paul sometimes pay the penalty of their very strength, in an utter incapacity to read, or work with, or care for, or be just to, any type but what approaches their own; and in consequence they have few friendships, though these are close and strong, if sometimes undemonstrative, and their life is spent in an isolation of greatness and strength. Paul could be strong enough, and could speak strongly enough (e.g. 1 Corinthians 16:22); he appreciated strength highly (e.g. 1 Corinthians 16:13); but he won to himself Lydias and Marys (Romans 16:6) and matrons like Rufus’s mother (ib. 1 Corinthians 16:13), and clinging natures like Timothy, and strong men like Apollos and Titus. [How like the rugged, yet so lovable Luther!] 2. A man’s friendships bring out his characteristics.—He is put to the test by his friendships. See whom a man chooses as his friends, see how he keeps them; you see a long way into the man. As we have found, a man is not at all of necessity simply mirrored and reproduced in his friendships; but he is revealed by them. To himself and to others they are a touchstone of character. See, then, how this foremost apostle is tenderly considerate for a young minister who needs encouragement, who should indeed be respected by himself, and by others, as a fellow-worker; who shall not, if he can help it, be treated with anything but respect. An old minister and his young colleague. See, as between him and Apollos, how utterly, apostle though he is, he holds aloof from anything like dictation. He claims no right to move men about in the field like so many pieces on a chess-board. He might perhaps have found Timothy acquiescent, if he had attempted to do so; Apollos would, perhaps, have resented it. As a fact, he has no thought of it with either of them. Timothy is “his son” in the Gospel; but in the work they are equals before their common Master. Paul was a wise master-builder before Apollos began to learn from Aquila and Priscilla the rudiments of the Christian “trade”; yet he respects, and bows to, the judgment and will of Apollos, and his own “great desire” is waived. How smoothly the work of God progresses when the workers, all round, are of this temper and style! C. Strength and love.—(Cf. under 1 Corinthians 11:11, “The Man” and “the Woman.”) I. Complementary graces.— 1. The verses might almost stand as a summary of the suggestions of B. Say to Timothy, “Watch; … stand fast; … be strong.” Say, perhaps to Apollos, certainly to Corinth, “All things … with charity.” A good rule is given earlier in the letter: “All … decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40). This is as much better, larger, higher, as “love” is higher than “order.” Order good; but love will secure, if its working be perfect, all that is really of worth in “order”; the “order” of “love” is natural, necessary, inevitable, and sure. Strength, too, is good; but it needs clothing with love. Speaking architecturally, strength finds the construction in the Church building, love the ornament. Ornament without strength is collapse; “ornament your construction” is perfect art. Strong men! build lovingly; work lovingly; save men lovingly, if you can. [There is an evangelism that is hard. There is benevolence, aid to sickness and poverty, which is unsympathetic, mechanical, hard, and that unintentionally hurts where it means to help.] Loving men! be strong, “be men” (1 Corinthians 16:13, literally), be watchful. 1 Corinthians 16:13 is a soldierly verse, a campaigning verse, a verse for warriors. 1 Corinthians 16:14 would Christianise the spirit of Wordsworth’s lines:— “Who, doomed to go in company with PainAnd Fear and Bloodshed, miserable train!Turns his necessity to glorious gain;In face of these doth exercise a powerWhich is our human nature’s highest dower;Contests them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves,Of their bad influence, and their good receives;By objects, which might force the soul to abateHer feeling, rendered more compassionate;Is placable—because occasions riseSo often that demand such sacrifice;… more able to endure,As more exposed to suffering and distress;Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.”—The Happy Warrior. 2. The controversial conflicts of the Church need that the fighting be done “with charity,” and, after the fight, nothing but “charity,” though both sides have “quitted themselves like men” against each other, “standing fast in the faith” as they each have apprehended it, “knowing,” all of them (together), only “in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9). But the very “charity” must be ready to fight (cf. 1 Corinthians 16:22); it must not be so “liberal” as to believe that “nothing is worth disputing about.” There are vital issues raised, from time to time; there have been “decisive battles in the history of the” kingdom of Christ; when love without strength would easily have become treasonable indifference. II. Complementary counsels (1 Corinthians 16:13).— 1. “Watch,” “stand fast,” when there seems no fighting, and even no foe in sight. In the midst of the conflict, in the presence of the foe, “be strong,” “play the man.” 2. “Watchful; steadfast; strong;” a complete programme for the Christian soldier; [add “loving,” and it is a complete programme for the Christian life]. 3. Watchful; there are many foes; the soldier’s peril is to fall asleep; all the camp are on sentry duty; every man, and not official sentries only, is told off to give the alarm of treason, or of subtle or open attack. Steadfast; as appreciating the significance of “The Faith,” the value of that Gospel for a lost world, which is its heart and burden and main content; as yourselves believers of strong faith in “The Faith” [which is a thing believed and only known or understood by believers. Faith is a condition (sine quâ non), without which knowledge is necessarily impossible]. Standing fast in days when, as on a memorable Sunday, June 18th, 1815, a line of British squares could do nothing but doggedly hold their ground through the long hours of waiting for Blücher’s new help. As Napoleon said of them, “How splendidly they fight; they don’t know that they are really beaten!”; so the “steadfast” Christian soldiers have many a time tenaciously held to a “Faith” which had been discredited by some of its very defenders [“not wise, or worth while, to attempt to sustain that old position”]; themselves have been forsaken by treason or fear; by all rule and reason definitely pronounced “beaten” in the judgment of the assailants; yet doggedly have “unreasonably” kept to their substantial position; until their tenacity has been vindicated and crowned by unexpected reinforcement raised up by their Great Lord, who is Himself “The Faith” and “The Truth”; unlooked-for help has many a time made the long struggle end in victory. All of which has its echoes and analogies in the struggle of the personal life to maintain its ground, e.g., in the workshop, full of sceptical and scoffing workmen, or in the school dormitory, full of teasing, mocking, or angry fellow-students. Strong, whether in watching or fighting; in experience and purpose; and (not least) strong because busy (1 Corinthians 15:58). 4. Watchful against subtle danger; steadfast against persistent attack; manly against “wise” assault; strong against many-sided strength of evil. 1 Corinthians 16:9. An Opened Door. I. Figure obvious enough in meaning.—Very curious accident that the phrase and the figure are always connected with this same Proconsular Asia. 1. In Revelation 3:8 “an open door” is “set before” the Philadelphian Church. Persecution, poverty—whatever has shut up Philadelphian Church into a narrow field of life, are removed. There is escape from confinement in the figure. Whatever has shut them out from access to their heathen neighbourhood around is removed. There is entrance into a new sphere. Circumstances now favour. They are to go in and take possession, in His name Who has opened the door. 2. On Paul’s second missionary journey, it is said (Acts 16:6-12) that, having passed through the central tableland of Galatia, and having come down to the coast, somewhat north of this Ephesus, he wished to open his commission in this Roman “Asia.” The Director of his course, however—the Holy Spirit—in some way forbade him. That door was shut. He turned away north-east, and “assayed to go into Bithynia.” But no! “The Spirit suffered him not.” The door is closed in that direction also. His path into new fields of labour lay another way, and he turned aside to Troas and waited. Then the way became clear. The door, the way, opened into Macedonia; into a Europe waiting for the Gospel. II. In all such cases of providential leading it is to be remembered that the closed door is as really a part of God’s leading as the opened one.— 1. It is a real temptation—though there is an honourable side to the feeling—to a soul full of devotion to Christ, eager to put the fervour of devotion into concrete shape in some new activity in His cause; full also of sympathy and compassion for the souls and bodies of men and women for whom as yet Christ seems to have died in vain, and with a holy inventiveness and organising gift, ever fertile in new plans for doing something fresh for these souls and for Christ; to chafe when these plans are again and again put aside by insuperable difficulties, or when circumstances repeatedly make a hopeful commencement hopelessly abortive in its conclusion. To stand and see work that wants doing, souls that want saving, a world that needs Christ’s Gospel, and to be powerless to do anything; [to stand upon the shore and see the poor fellows drop off, one after another, from the frozen rigging of the wrecked vessel into the surging waves; no open door of escape for them, and no open door of help for those who stand and watch, because there is no boat or rescue apparatus; to stand in powerless idleness and watch the burning house; or the like illustration;] is a sharp trial to an eager, devoted, capable Christian worker. No doubt many an obstacle may be removed which at first seems insuperable. Prayer, tact, patience, work, will generally open a door. But not always. Asia and Bithynia are closed even to the eager heart of a Paul. For that journey. Now “Asia,” Ephesus, is open. Then Philippi, Berœa, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth,—all needed him first. Christ had a larger plan of campaign than even Paul saw in Acts 16. The closed door was just then the will of Paul’s Lord. 2. To grasp this will keep the spirit of the eager, devoted worker in peace.—Look at Philippians 1:12-18; Philippians 1:21. To a man like Paul, for years the forefront evangelist of the Christian Church, and of a zeal burning, as steadily as intensely, beyond that of most, it must have been no small trial to have been, for two years at least, in confinement in Rome, “reduced to” writing letters to friends and Churches, to conversation and discussion with “callers” and inquirers; to know, moreover, that the closing of the door upon himself was being eagerly made the opportunity of teachers who “preached Christ” indeed, but in a presentation which was not “his Gospel” (2 Timothy 2:8; Romans 2:16), and which he regarded as “the word of God adulterated” (2 Corinthians 2:17); to remember also that this eager and quickened activity of theirs was in a large degree prompted by no kindly feeling towards himself, but rather was triumphing in having a clear field with him out of the way [every “dog” (1 Corinthians 3:2) of them hoping that his bark would irritate the caged lion, behind his closed door]. Yet he is not irritated. If the door close for him, and open for them,—well, any way men are hearing of Christ who would not otherwise hear of Him at all. “I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice!” And as to any personal irritation, where should that come in? “To me to live is—not Paul but—Christ.” Paul is kept patient within a closed door. 3. There are closed doors in the personal life.—Most perplexing to the understanding; most trying to faith. Every step of the path has been committed to God’s guiding wisdom and love; not a step without prayerful “consultation” with the Father. The way seems to clear. Door after door opens until—one stands closed. Indeed, it looks as if there were no door at all, to be closed or opened. The way that seemed so clear has ended in an impasse, a cul de sac. There appears nothing to be done except to retrace some steps, or many, and try down some other path. But what then of all the lost time? What of all the “lost” prayer? What of all the way that seemed so clearly opened up to the last point? The full answer can many a time never be given; but the triumph of faith is to hold doggedly to the conviction that God even in such a case has made no false move nor permitted a false start, but rather that He has some larger plan into which this journey down a by-lane that leads to nowhere, enters as a needful and wise detail. [We were perhaps “shunted on to a siding” whilst danger passed, or whilst some arrangements for our after-journey were being made, on what is after all the main line of His system for our life.] The closed door has many and many-sided purposes in God’s plan, and in men’s training. Sometimes the development of the after-path justifies the doggedly tenacious faith which, by grace, “would not” doubt. Men see and praise God by-and-by for many a closed door. III. The open door is: 1. A mercy to be thankful for; 2. A call to be responded to; 3. A responsibility to be assumed in Divine strength. 1. A mercy not only to the world or to the neighbourhood waiting to be evangelised, sitting in darkness and hunger waiting for the Light and the Bread, but also to the Church itself and its workers, for the sake of the effect upon their own life. No greater calamity could happen to a Church, or to a worker, than that they should settle down into easy contentment with what has been already accomplished, not attempting to do more than retain ground already—perhaps by a more eager generation in the past—won and cultivated. Such satisfaction is next door to stagnation. Such stagnation is next door to death. Let a Church, or the individual, lose the spirit of enterprise, the élan which carries them forward, exploring for new “opened doors”; let (per impossibile) the Head of the Church open none, or entrust them with none; the end of that Church would not be far off. O. W. Holmes lays his hand on a true trait of genius,—“it is always breaking out in fresh places.” The Church could have no greater calamity happening to it than that it should have no inner impulse with a sanctified “genius” to break out in fresh places, or should be condemned to beat in vain against closed doors in every direction. For not only are the habit and spirit of enterprise kept alive by open doors, but hope. It is easy, fatally easy, for Israel with an evil contentment to build its own city, under the very walls of a Jerusalem held by Jebusites into whose fastness there seemed no open door, and which seemed to leave no hope of its being captured for God. An open door keeps alive that hopefulness of spirit without which no great things will ever be accomplished for the work of God. Quite obvious to add that the Church which has been praying and waiting for an opened door, praises its Great Head with all fulness of thanksgiving, when at last, and perhaps suddenly, “the door is opened.” 2. A call to enter.— (1) “Know ye that Ramoth in Gilead is ours, and we be still and take it not out of the hand of Syria?” Ahab’s spirit of enterprise may be serviceably pondered. “Ephesus is ours! Ephesus is Christ’s! It is in the hands of His enemies! The door is opened! The opening is a call!” Some morning the ice, which for weary months has shut in as with the grip of death the vessel of the Arctic explorers, is seen to be stirring and heaving and splitting with the swell of a warmer current or the first touch of the returning summer. How in an instant orders are given to make ready to push into the opening channel through the enclosing ice-floes! The occupations, work or play, which have beguiled the long weeks and the continuous night of the Arctic winter, are thrust aside. The opened door through the ice is a call. [Queen Elizabeth once kept Raleigh dallying about her at Greenwich, until one morning the wind, for which in part he had been waiting, to carry him out of the Thames turned down stream. The Queen would have kept him for another day. “Madam, the breeze commands me away!” The opened, door into the wide sea and the wide world, was an imperative call to set sail and go.] (2) Christ calls by opened doors. It is the most frequent fashion in which to-day His voice is made to reach His Church. It is not to be denied that special guidance is sometimes directly given, by the visions of “men of Macedonia,” for example. The success has now and again vindicated the leading of a dream that showed “an open door.” Some who have lived in special nearness to God, and in close touch with His Spirit’s least intimations, have proved to be rightly guided by strong impressions that doors were opening. [Paul’s experiences in Acts 16:6-8 would be more definite and decisive than these.] But, ordinarily, the sanctified good sense and the consecrated judgment must co-operate with the look of circumstances, to discover the will and way of Christ. And “the door” which commends itself as “opened” to the sound, sanctified judgment; the circumstances which look so promising and so probably right;—in these the Lord of the Church will ordinarily indicate His will, and through these utter His “call.” [When Saul left Samuel, three special foreannounced signs should be given him, tokens to assure him that so far he was in the way of God for his life. But after that, no more signs, no more special, miraculously announced tokens for guidance. His own sense and the opening of events were to be his guidance: “Do thou as occasion serveth thee; for God is with thee” (1 Samuel 10:7).] “Occasion,” as Samuel called it; the “opened door,” as Paul calls it,—these are generally the voice and call of God. 3. A responsibility to be assumed.— (1) From the “opened door” at Ephesus, Paul could not, dared not, turn away, even to push forward to Corinth or Jerusalem. He was urgently wanted there, no doubt, but he was wanted at Ephesus. It was at Ephesus where “the door was opened.” Ephesus was his immediate responsibility. “To do one thing at a time” is an old and true recipe for accomplishing great things, great at least in amount, in a busy life. To attempt one, whilst harassed by the “claims” of two or a dozen others, is ruin to all steady application, or thoroughness of labour, or peace of heart; and without these the thing in hand is only half done or ill done. Do “open doors,” do the claims of opportunities, in the deepest truth of the matter, ever compete? To the man who is going forward, doing “what his hand finds to do,” the nearest first, then the next, and the next, do claims ever really “clash”? The Christian man, or the Church, is responsible only for the door opened (as Paul says) “to me”; the door which is next him. No need to be harassed, diverted, divided, flurried, distressed, about other open doors, however urgently clamorous may seem their claims. The Lord “who openeth” (Revelation 3:7) “doors” will care for those. The man, the Church, for whom each of these is opened, is standing near it, with the same responsibility for entering through his own. (2) This responsibility for one’s own “door” is to be remembered. Thankful that one need only be concerned with that, yet mindful that one ought to be concerned with that. The worker, the work, the door between them closed; then, the door opens. Paul’s argument with himself was, “assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us, for to preach the Gospel unto them” (Acts 16:10). And we might emphasise “us”; “us, and no other workers.” There is an argument, a call, a responsibility, upon the man before whom “the door opens.” He may not shirk it in indolence, or fear; nor may he in a diffidence of himself which logically would issue in charging the Lord of the Workers with having chosen the wrong man, or, at least, not the best, seek to find somebody “better fitted than” himself to enter in and do the work. He has it to do. He can do it; he can be “made able” (2 Corinthians 3:6). (3) In dependence upon Divine equipment and aid. There is fighting to be done inside the door: “Many adversaries.” [Yet “shall such a man as” Paul “flee”? (Nehemiah 6:11). No; indeed, it is to him an added reason for staying longer at Ephesus. The captain must be found where the fight is thickest. He has had his taste of it already, like a man “fighting wild beasts” in the arena (1 Corinthians 15:32).] All entering in to open doors is with something of difficulty, something of danger. Jabez asks that his “coast” may be “enlarged”; but enlargement to an early settler in Canaan in his days meant dispossessing Canaanite occupiers by war. “Oh that Thou wouldst keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me!” (1 Chronicles 4:10). Never yet was an opportunity utilised without hard work. And the best workers best know their own insufficiency. Look within, and who will enter an opened door? Look up, and who may not? “Let us go up at once, and possess, … for we are well able; … the Lord is with us; fear them not” (Numbers 13:30; Numbers 14:9). “But who goeth a warfare,” or entereth an open door, “at his own charges?” (1 Corinthians 9:7). The call puts responsibility upon the man; but it gives him a claim upon God. He Who calls, and Who opens the door, knows Who must “find the wherewithal,” if the opening is to be entered and the work to be taken in hand. He knows that He will need to “see the workers through” with it. It is upon that understanding, upon that assumption, that He calls by the “opened door.” He calls those “who have no might,” absolutely none at all of their own, that in them He may, as He must, “increase strength” and wisdom (Isaiah 40:29). “Suppose I enter the door, what next? And if the work develop upon my hands, what then? Perhaps I may break down, or may be so placed that I really am at the end of my resources, and at my wits’ end; how then?” “Go in at the open door. Leave the rest. Be thankful for the pioneer’s honour put upon you. Let the Master supply all the need of the ‘next’ and the ‘then.’ ” 1 Corinthians 16:9. A Great Door and Effectual; Many Adversaries.—[Many occasions in the personal life of the Christian man when these words rush into his memory as exactly descriptive of his case and its conditions. No mere “happy adaptation” of language this; a real, closely connected analogy. The extension and establishment of the kingdom of God within the individual run on lines perfectly parallel with those which are its characteristics in the case of the world. In the Johannean (and Pauline) sense, there is a little “world” within the man which is part of that larger “world” outside, which has its “Prince” (John 16:11), etc., who, whether within or without, is to be “judged and cast out” by the holy encroachment of the power of the kingdom of light. In both campaigns, in both fields,—the world-wide and racial, or the narrower and individual,—there are crises of opportunity for advance and growth and victory and extension, “opened doors,” to enter into which, however, means the arousing and the opposition of “many adversaries.” Every Christian understands how, beneath the happy appropriateness of the language to his case, there is a real analogy, a real unity, of fact. Taking them in the personal, narrower application, let it remind of the “opened doors” of removed hindrance, of favouring circumstances, of inviting opportunity, for occupying some new ground in the heritage of God’s new Israel, holiness.] I. The privilege of being brought up to an opened door.— 1. Recall days when, with all the suddenness of a revelation, or the opening of a door in a blank wall, and with unusual depth of impression, the desirability, and necessity, of higher religious attainment, of closer walk with God, stand clear before the vision of the heart. Like Moses, led up to where the whole Canaan of God’s “rest for His people” (Hebrews 3, 4) lay spread out attractively before the eyes, possibilities of blessing and holiness stretching away in “length and breadth” (Ephesians 3:18), as never before seen; unlike Moses, led up to see a land waiting for conquest and occupation. Or it is rather the “opened door” of the “banqueting house” (Son 2:4), on whose table are spread in tempting array the “feast of fat things,” etc. (Isaiah 25:6), for the children of God’s family; the Christian is led up to the threshold and is bidden enter and sit down and “taste as well as see” (Psalms 34:8). At such times the very presence of sinful tempers and inclinations becomes unusually painful; themselves become unusually hateful; the standard higher than ever; holiness, full and perfect, more desirable than ever. 2. A privilege; for no man seeks more grace with any heartiness or hope, merely because he ought; driven to an “opened door” by a sense of duty. He who is led up to it by a quickened desire, is not far from entrance and possession of what lies within. God is in the quickening of desire; the quickening is therefore a pledge of further blessing. A privilege, and a mercy, remembering how often, led thus far, the soul has turned away from the door and the feast in half indifference, saying great things of the feast and of the bounty of the Provider, but not caring enough about it to enter and partake; till the quickened desire, imperfect as it was, died away. A mercy, remembering how eagerly other things are pursued, other open doors are entered, until Divine things, thus dishonoured and disregarded, are crowded out of thought and heart. It is favour worthy of His love when by an “opened door” attention is again arrested, desire revived, hope excited. 3. No greater calamity could occur than a fatal satisfaction with present religious position and status; no sorer curse from the “grieved” Spirit of God than that the heart should be suffered to lower the standard into adjustment to the facts, or should never catch sight of a larger life inviting the soul through the “opened door.” II. The responsibility for entering thus created.— 1. Privilege and responsibility always go together. To accept the privilege means to accept and fulfil all that belongs to it. Fulfil no conditions, discharge no responsibility, forfeit all privilege! “A man will not work? Then neither shall he eat!” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). (As true of the secular life as of the spiritual.) Do nothing for God; get nothing from God! But the responsibility may be faced cheerfully. Three things always linked together: a promise; a call to seek for its fulfilment; a further promise of grace to obey the call. The door shall always be an “effectual door” to the man who endeavours to enter. 2. There is the responsibility of an indebtedness to Christ. When you have been contriving and saving and denying yourself, and giving time and labour and money to procure a present for one you love; if it is received with profusely worded, but evidently formal, thanks, if it is never used, but put away, only to be now and then decently taken out and ‘admired’ and your ‘great kindness’ again extolled; do you like it? What did it cost Christ to secure for you the possibilities which offer themselves through the “door” which “opened” so suddenly, so invitingly, as you were reading, or meditating, or were on your knees? Ought you not to enter? 3. If, then, the Spirit of God shows some new and higher standard of Christian living, spreads out some new breadth of Christian privilege, bringing it near, laying its desirableness upon the heart, filling with desire for it; that is “an opened door” into which it is a duty and responsibility to enter and labour, or fight, or enjoy. “If ye know …, happy … if ye do” (John 13:17). Heavy the responsibility of all new knowledge, if ye “do” not! Indeed, heavy the condemnation of “an opened door” refused; the blood ceases to cleanse from guilt, if we walk not in all the light—much or little—that we have (1 John 1:7). III. Many adversaries.— 1. The Self desires, and does not desire, to enter. [Said “Rabbi” Duncan: “When C. Malan said to me, on a never-to-be-forgotten day, ‘You have got God’s word in your mouth,’ I felt as if a flash of spiritual electricity had then passed through me. But the old nature asserted itself right in the face of that word, and refused for a while to receive the death-wound.… Now that must not be an infrequent experience. The shock when all that is within rises up and refuses to be slain by the only bloodless Conqueror, till at length the soul yields, and dies that it may live.… I was conscious of a revulsion against my renovation” (Colloquia Peripatetica, 77). The form of illustration is different, but the truth is the same, viz.] the man’s indolent, easy-going, self-loving, sin-loving, man-fearing self is the first great “adversary” and hindrance to his entering Christ’s “opened door.” 2. Sometimes there are conditions to be fulfilled which seem arrayed as “adversaries,” because the indolent, or reluctant, or unbelieving heart makes them difficulties. God can only forgive, ready as He is (Nehemiah 9:17), upon conditions; man’s heart is not ready to fulfil the conditions. The “opened door” is, in God’s desire and intention, to be entered at once; but, on man’s part, much must often be done, something laid aside or given up; and the natural heart creates a difficulty, makes itself an “adversary.” 3. The adversaries will sometimes be literal human opponents. To enter into, and possess, and exhibit the living enjoyment of, a larger, broader, brighter, undoubting, victorious Christian life, will arouse to scorn or displeasure or harassing controversy many average or minimum Christians, of whom such a life is by its inevitable comparison an implicit condemnation. The Great Adversary of the kingdom of God will not willingly see, not only a soul escaping into liberty through “an opened, door,” but a soul passing into a larger liberty and fulness of life through “an opened door” of opportunity and promise and hope. NOTES1 Corinthians 16:15.—Postscript-like personal matters begin here. Achaia.—This corrects the wrong reading in Romans 16:5. Stephanas’ household.—See 1 Corinthians 1:16. What a family picture! “Addicted to,” etc. Stanley (apparently alone) thinks the Stephanas of 1 Corinthians 16:17 the slave of this one, who had taken his master’s name, by a not unusual custom; Fortunatus and Achaicus being his fellow-slaves.1 Corinthians 16:17.—No blame to the Corinthians in “lacking on your part”; they could not, so far away and without opportunity to visit Paul, do what these had done, viz. 1 Corinthians 16:18 (Philippians 2:30; Philippians 4:10 sqq.).1 Corinthians 16:19. Church in … house.—Cf. 1 Corinthians 1:2; 1 Corinthians 16:1; Romans 16:5. See other cases, Colossians 4:15; Philemon 1:2. Observe “salute you much.” They had lived in Corinth (Acts 18:2); but are at Ephesus by Acts 19:26.1 Corinthians 16:20. A holy kiss.—Romans 16:16; 2 Corinthians 13:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26. “The common form of affectionate Eastern salutation, transferred to the forms of the Christian society, and hence the epithet of holy. The practice continued in Christian assemblies chiefly at the celebration of the Eucharist. The Apostolical Constitutions and the Canons of Laodicea enjoin that before the Communion the clergy are to kiss the bishop, the men amongst the laity each other, and so the women. On Good Friday it was omitted, in commemoration of the kiss of Judas.… It is still continued in the Coptic Church. Every member of the congregation there kisses and is kissed by the priest. In the Western Church it was finally laid aside in the thirteenth century.” (Stanley.)1 Corinthians 16:21.—The authenticating autograph, 1 Corinthians 16:21-24. So 2 Thessalonians 3:17. What shall it be? What shall he write? What is worthy of his own hand, after all this dictating to an amanuensis? “If any man,” etc. (1 Corinthians 16:22). Note the, shorter reading and punctuation. Maran atha.—“Syriac,” so-called. “The Lord … has? or will?… come.” “Cometh,” best. Very recently M. Halιvy divides it “Marana tha,” and translates “Our Lord, come!” And in this is supported by (the Syrian) Archbishop David, of Damascus (Expos., 1889, p. 240). Quite a separate word from the word “Anathema,” N.B. “His grace;” “my love.” .—1 Corinthians 16:15-24 Friends and Foes. I. Friends— 1. Even in Ephesus, and because in Ephesus, where there are “many adversaries.” A day came when Paul, like his Master before His judge, stood friendless, “when no man stood by him,” not a Christian in all Rome daring to show himself as a friend of Paul in court that day (2 Timothy 4:10). Yet he was not forsaken: “The Lord stood by me, and strengthened … and delivered.” That is the supreme strength and support of a Christian man. But next to that is the “refreshing of spirit” when, to a hard-worked toiler in a dangerous post in Ephesus, some Stephanas or Fortunatus or Achaicus “comes,” bringing letters and tidings and supplies. Others brought ill news and disquieting (1 Corinthians 1:11, where, however, see note). Paul’s Master is careful that His servant shall not have all disquiet; these bring “supplies.” It is good to see a loyal Corinthian face again! [See another instance of God’s loving consideration, by way of alleviation and compensation (Philippians 2:27), “lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow.”] What worker for Christ does not recall many such instances, where the coming of friends has been as “cold water to a thirsty soul,” or as a “draught from a brook by the wayside” (Psalms 110:7); a supply and comfort which was only typical of many another up-springing well of comfort in a very desert of isolated experience or labour. The highest service that friendship can be made to render, next to that of leading a soul to seek the Highest Friendship of all. 2. A new brotherhood is springing up.—“Greetings” fly across the Ζgean between Ephesus and Corinth. There are “Churches in Asia” who join hands across the water with a Church in Corinth. Aquila and Priscilla have a “Church in their house” [as afterward they had in Rome (1 Corinthians 16:5)], which greets Corinth. Paul “greets” Corinth,—Corinth and not merely the party “of Paul.” Corinthian is to greet Corinthian “with a holy kiss,” though one may be a rich man and the other a slave. A new love has been born into the world, which forgets that Aquila is a Pontian Jew and Apollos an Alexandrian Greek, and that Stephanas and his friends are Corinthians. “See how these Christians love another!” See how this Paul loves the Timothy who is “his son in the faith.” See how he loves this Stephanas and his household. They were his “firstfruits”; in them he first tasted the joy of harvest in the field of “Achaia.” Christian and Christian, minister and convert, are the closest “kin.” 3. This new brotherhood is an organised thing.—The friends, the brethren, form themselves into Churches, “in a house,” “in Asia.” Of such units of construction “The Church” is being built up; and each unit in its essential feature is a miniature of the Whole; it is “a Church” as really as is the whole. Precedence and sequence are beginning to show, as in all human social life. Some are to “submit” to others, but it is only for their worth’s sake and their work’s sake. And their precedence is in service. Beyond most they “set themselves to minister to the saints” (R.V.). [“Whosoever would be chief among you, let him be your servant” (Matthew 20:27).] In the Church there should never have been office or precedence which did not mean serviceableness to the welfare of the whole; there should never have been an official whose honour was not rooted in this: “He helpeth with us, and laboureth.” There should have been no fainιants amongst the Church’s exalted names. “Working helpers” should be “acknowledged,” and if needful “submitted to.” And in the long-run recognition and deference do come naturally to worth and work. II. Foes.—There is but one foe: “he who does not love the Lord Jesus Christ.” Not love Him? Think slowly over His Name and full style: “Jesus”—“Lord”—“Christ.” Why in His very name Jew, Gentile, Man, have their share and place. Not love Him? The embodiment of all moral Beauty, Truth, Goodness; the True, the Beautiful, the Good, after which the philosophers sought, and of whose interrelations they disputed in endless discussion—they meet in Him; the simplest Christian is no seeker merely, he has “Heureka!” in his mouth, since he got to know “the Lord Jesus Christ”! Not love Him? Who has loved us to the death; Who for our sakes became poor with a “Great Renunciation” which is, according to any human standard, by any human calculus, quite an incommensurable quantity. Not love Him? What is the matter with the heart that does not love Him? Is it blind, or deaf, or dead? Can it not see, or know, or love Him? The unloving heart perhaps admires, and says, or sings, or writes, fine words about the Teacher of Nazareth; it may gather up its skirts, with a shrinking that is a reminder from former days of a real faith, or which is only an ζsthetic shrinking from “bad form,” when some daring, outspoken man calls “Jesus” plainly “accursed,” (1 Corinthians 12:3); but Paul has no softer, lesser word for the loveless heart itself. Not love Him? “Anathema” the loveless one! That seems “unjust”? “You cannot command love?” Certainly; but it can be awakened or suppressed, cultivated or killed, by the man himself. He will cultivate or let it die, as toward Christ, according to the whole moral attitude he takes up. “Mere indifference” to Christ reveals an inner world of moral alienation, and at least a possibility of the very fiercest aversion. Between the man, almost demoniac, who screams, “Jesus is Anathema! Jesus is Anathema!” and the man who perhaps would shrink from saying it outright, but who really feels no interest in, and cares nothing for, Christ, the difference is rather one of possibility, of opportunity, of occasion, of provocation. Press Christ and His claims upon the “merely indifferent” man, and you either lead to submission, trust, love, or you provoke anger at yourself, and dislike, antagonism, hatred to Him. There is no being neutral in the presence of Christ and His claim. “For judgment he is come into this world;” He is the test of character, the Revealer of hearts, making a swift, sharp discrimination between friends and foes (John 9:39). There is no trace of a permission to put mere sincerity in the place of correct faith, of separating a man’s religion from a correct theology on this topic. No man can help taking sides for or against Him; for better or for worse no man can remain the man he was before, after once being really, clearly, intelligently confronted with Christ. To say nothing of His personal “character”; He makes—as is often urged by Christian controversialists—such claims for Himself; He assumes, as with perfect, simple right, such a position in regard both to God and men; He makes such assertions about Himself as are tanta mount to a claim to be, and to be honoured and accepted as, Divine in the highest, the exact, sense. Presuming His sanity, He leaves no alternative: either He is a blasphemer, and justly “Anathema,” or Divine and at once and forthwith to be “honoured even as men honour the Father.” “He that is not with Me is against Me.” Not to be His friend is to be a foe, and necessarily “under the ban.” And He “cometh”! III. Paul’s outburst of feeling.—These last verses (chap. 16) have been, as it were, gradually “subsiding” from the often highly wrought interest and feeling of the body of the letter. The thought and tone have accompanied each other, as with the settling of a bird alighting, not suddenly, but in a series of gentle curves, each of which, though rising, ends at a level a little lower than it began, till one expects a quiet gliding in the last to the level ground. But instead there is this sudden dash upward; a volcanic, eruptive outburst of feeling. “Let all be in charity,” Paul had just said (1 Corinthians 16:14). What then is this? It is the Intolerance of Love. [Often pointed out that the “Apostle of love,” John, when a young man, was “Boanerges,” who would have called down fire upon the Samaritan village that would give no hospitality to Christ (Luke 9:54); and that the Boanerges temper is not extinct in the old man of ripest love and piety (1 John 4:3; 2 John 1:10). In each case it is to be observed how with John, as with Paul, it is the very intensity of conviction, and of devotion to Christ, which called out the fiery denunciation.] A man cannot be a lukewarm enemy, nor a lukewarm friend, of Jesus Christ. It is the “Intolerance of the Gospel” [title of a good sermon by A. Vinet], and throws much light upon the difficult question of the imprecatory psalms. At least it cannot be said without much qualification that they are wholly of an “Old Testament spirit,” in strong antithesis to that of the New. [Look, e.g., at 2 Timothy 4:14, “Lord … reward him according to his deeds!” (N.B. reading); Galatians 5:10, “Shall bear his burden”; 1 Corinthians 5:12, “Circumcision? I would there were an excision; a clean excision of these men from the body of Christ”; hear Stephen denounce the Sanhedrin (Acts 7:51-52), or Paul Bar-jesus (Acts 13:10-11); hear Christ Himself denounce the Pharisees, “Fill ye up the measure of your fathers!” (Matthew 23:32); hear John, “I do not say that he shall pray for it,”—as though he had been brought into such a perfect accord with God’s own abhorrence of sin, such a perfect acceptance of the righteousness of the heaviest judgment of God upon it, that he anticipates the day when the saved and the heavenly host shall together stand in holy aloofness from the condemned Harlot-evil of the universe, and, over the very judgments of God, shall solemnly sing an exultant “Alleluia!” (Revelation 19:1-5).] The New Testament cannot tolerate indifference to Christ or the Truth. No Christian man can leave it an open question whether his Master be “Jesus of Nazareth” or “Our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is no question of exactly agreeing about the doctrinal phraseology of a creed; but of a love to the personal Christ, which has sometimes co-existed with an imperfect creed about Him. [E.g. Dr. Adam Clarke denied the eternity a parte ante of His Sonship.] It is not the intellectual rightness of the man which is in issue, but the moral state of the man’s heart. The Godhead of Christ is a test question indeed, as men must apply tests; the moral attitude toward Christ, be He what He may, is the deeper thing which stirs Paul’s heart. “He may not accept, or totidem verbis repeat, my Christology; but does he love my Christ? If not, let him be Anathema.” If we are not so outspoken, or so confident in our condemnation, we should inquire whether our devotion to Christ is less intense; whether our convictions are as deep as Paul’s; whether truth is of as much certainty and importance to us. Loyalty to Christ may sometimes need to override all considerations of conventional courtesy and “charity” and liberality. (See also Separate Homily under 1 Corinthians 16:22.) The Benediction. The “bird” does “alight,” and very quietly! The outburst of 1 Corinthians 16:22 is quite compatible with a perfect peace and self-control within Paul’s soul. He passes as easily from it to these words of tender farewell, as he did from the Resurrection to the Collection (above). “His grace, my first and greatest wish for you at Corinth. My love, less, but not less real, with you also; and I wish it not with the mere good feeling of a benevolent heart; I wish it ‘in Christ Jesus’ ” Paul’s heart is full of Christ’s heart; to him “to live,” and so to greet his Churches, “is Christ.” 1 Corinthians 16:22, connected with 2 Corinthians 1:20; 2 Corinthians 8:9; 2 Corinthians 9:15, may be made the occasion of a sermon on Undesigned Illustrations of “To me to live is Christ.” I. (2 Corinthians 1:20.) Paul had not kept to the route announced in the First Epistle—to Macedonia viβ Corinth. He had gone by the direct, shorter road, viβ Troas. The factious party seized upon this change of route. Said they to the loyal ones: “See this Paul of yours! What dependence on his word? He promises and fails; says he will come and does not.” Others, with more malice: “He wrote a very bold letter, and was going to follow it up with a visit; but your valorous apostle dares not come to Corinth.” This chapter very largely his indignant protest, his defence of his character and conduct. He appeals to his conscience whether all his conduct amongst them was not “in simplicity and godly sincerity.” He calls the True God to witness that he was never amongst them a “Yes and No” man, saying and unsaying in a breath, affirming one day, the next denying what he had affirmed, wavering in his own mind between “Yea” and “Nay.” If he had changed his plan, it was for good and sufficient reasons. But this vindicating of himself was uncongenial work. To him to live was not Paul, but Christ. His character as a man is to him only a matter of importance as it affected his character as a preacher of Christ’s Gospel. Every word in his preaching was “Yea.” He was no man to preach doubts or hints of doubt, or to give to his readers opinions crudely formed or loosely held. And then his thought by instinct rises to and rests in his Lord, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; Himself the great Promise and the great Ratification of all promises besides. This grand outburst in the midst of all this personal vindication, is a digression, a parenthesis; but he cannot help putting it in. Self-vindication is irksome. Christ exaltation is ever welcome. A word of it relieves him before he resumes the personal talk. To him “to live is Christ.” II. (2 Corinthians 8:9.) Paul puts the Corinthians on their mettle, and tries to shame them into diligence. He has been telling all the Churches, up and down: “Achaia was ready a year ago.” With their zeal he has been calling out the zeal and generosity of many. He begs that they will not shame his boasting when the Macedonian (and other) delegates come with him to Corinth. Macedonia is a model to them, giving even “beyond their power.” Surely Corinth will not be behindhand. And with appeals to such motives many would have stopped. Not so this man; to him “to live is Christ,” and to him the motive to plead is, “Ye know the grace,” etc. In the next verse he is back again to the Fund. But the parenthetic insertion is significant as to this man’s habit of heart. He gladly escapes away from the Fund and laggard Church benevolence into a world of everlasting, world-concerning truth, and to his best-loved theme—his Lord who became a beggar to make him eternally rich. III. (2 Corinthians 9:15.) With startling abruptness he breaks out: “Thanks be unto God,” etc. The chapter has been full of small details about the Fund, and his plans, and the movements of Titus. What has this outburst to do with the collection? Nothing. Everything. He sits dictating his letter. In the pauses, whilst the writer is doing his part, Paul’s mind goes off upon a well-known path. Every thought of this benevolence of saints to saints is pregnant to him with suggestion of a greater benevolence. He cannot think of these gifts of Church to Church without his thoughts flying off to the ever-welcome topic, God’s Gift to sinners. There is bounty! There is the root and the rule of all kindness between Christian and Christian! And as the amanuensis is finishing the last words dictated, his friend and teacher breaks out, “Thanks be to God for,” etc. For twenty years he had been studying Christ from all sides: the love that did not spare even Him; the grace of the Son which resigned such native dignity and glory; the misery, here and hereafter, of an unredeemed world; the eternally growing blessing flowing from the work of Christ. The twenty years of pondering express their result in one word; they are condensed into this “irrelevant,” parenthetic cry: “Unspeakable! Unspeakable! God’s unspeakable Gift! Thank God for Christ!” IV. (Here 1 Corinthians 16:22.) He is in Ephesus, getting his letter off. He takes pen in hand to add the authenticating autograph sentence. Usually it is a benediction. In this letter all sorts of topics have been discussed: the resurrection and the collection, the Lord’s Supper and the women’s hair,—grand themes of eternal importance, and mere regulations no longer concerning men except in the underlying principles of which they are particular, passing embodiments. And now the letter is finished. What shall he add “with his own hand”? What he does add is: “If any man … Anathema!” There is apparently nothing to suggest it. But Christ never needs “suggesting” to Paul. To him “to live is Christ.” Within him is a heart of burning love for Christ. The fire breaks out here with eruptive force, but it is always burning. He loves Christ. Who would not? Not love Christ! Not love the Christ he loves! “Accursed be the man who does not love my Christ!” It is the intolerance of devoted love. This spontaneous, irrelevant, fierce exclamation is consummate proof that this man, Paul, has only one love, one thought, one object in life. To him to live is Christ, CHRIST, CHRIST!—H. J. F. From article in “Homiletical Magazine,” Jan. 1883 (condensed).