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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:00:43 GMT -5
13. The Corinthians believed they were building upon the foundation of Christ with “gold, silver and precious stones.” They clearly didn’t view their factional allegiances as sinful and destructive; in fact, the context indicates that they were proud of them, as indeed they took great pride in themselves and their perceived spiritual wisdom and maturity (cf. 3:21 with 4:1-7, 5:1-2). It is quite likely that the Corinthians regarded their factions as showing the depth of their commitment to the Lord and His cause. The very reason they rallied around a particular individual was that they saw that person as more faithful to Christ, more mature, more gifted, or more effective in the work of the gospel. Even as they were convinced of their mature insight and understanding, the Corinthians were undoubtedly confident of the reward that awaited them on the day when God will bring all things to light. How shocking it must have been to have Paul insist that they (at least many among them) were actually guilty of working toward the ruination of God’s Church and that, far from rewarding them, God was going to bring them to ruin (3:17). For some, nothing but their bare salvation would survive His assaying fire. It was bad enough that these individuals foolishly judged themselves wise, but they also assessed their own actions and labors with that same foolish mind. As a matter of course wise minds bring forth wise actions; so the natural judgment that led the Corinthians to ascribe to themselves the former also deceived them regarding the latter. a. Paul understood that the Corinthian factions were symptomatic rather than problematic; the underlying cause of their divisions was their failure to think and judge with the mind of Christ. Thus he summarized his treatment of the issue by turning again to the antithesis between divine and natural wisdom, this time in order to apply his instruction directly to the Corinthians with a series of pointed exhortations (3:18-4:5). - The wisdom of the world is foolishness in God’s esteem, even as God’s wisdom is foolish to the natural mind. Therefore, the Christian who has judged himself wise based on the perspectives and faculties of reasoning and judgment that characterize the natural man must recognize that he has deceived himself. The one who so judges himself wise is actually a fool. - But precisely because divine and human wisdom are antithetical, the Christian who would actually be wise – that is, think and judge with the mind of Christ through the leading of His Spirit – must be willing to become a fool in the assessment of natural wisdom. To the natural mind, the remedy for the Corinthians’ factions was clear: they simply needed to denounce and dismantle them. Paul, however, discerned that their factions were merely one manifestation of the principle of division that governed their thinking. Resolving their divisions depended upon addressing the real problem, and that meant dealing with their self-deception: They needed to recognize and then reject the folly of what their natural minds regarded to be wisdom and embrace the apparent foolishness of what is wisdom indeed (3:18). 73 b. For all its appearances, natural wisdom is actually foolishness, and Paul indicated two ways in which that is the case: 1) The first is the more obvious of the two, and that is that natural wisdom misperceives and misjudges truth. In particular, it misjudges the wisdom of God in Christ so that it is ultimately unable to comprehend the things of the Spirit of God (ref. 1:18-24, 2:6-14, 3:1-2). Natural wisdom allows for learning theological and doctrinal data, but it falls short of truly grasping the divine wisdom that is the glory of the triune God in the face of Jesus Christ. In Paul’s thinking, the essential distinction between “milk” and “meat” is not in the content ingested, but in the capacity of the person to digest it with insight and understanding. His own experience had taught him that a person can be a Bible scholar and yet be ignorant of its truth. 2) The second way in which natural wisdom is foolishness is highlighted in the present passage: It is foolish because it operates out of the natural human presumption of personal independence which ultimately supplants God with the primacy of self (3:19-20). The natural mind doesn’t necessarily seek liberation from God altogether, but it does insist upon personal identity and significance independent of God. The natural mind conceives and interacts with reality in terms of me and not me; in regard to personal relationships, it operates according to the paradigm of me and you, and this is as true of its interaction with God as with other men. For that reason, natural wisdom is truly natural: It reflects man as he is in himself – as he thinks from within his own mind as it operates apart from the truth as it is in Christ. Such a person may be eminently religious and theologically informed, but he subjects divine truth to the perspectives, premises and convictions of his own natural mind. He may believe he’s hearing the voice of divine wisdom, but he’s really only hearing his own. So it was with the Corinthians: While they believed they were submitted to God and were serving the cause of His gospel, they had in fact subjected God to themselves. True, they were giving their allegiance to men other than themselves, but that action itself reflected an autonomous, willful and proud spirit by which they felt justified in setting one of Christ’s servants over against another. In stark contrast to Paul who submitted all things to the Lord’s examination and judgment, many at Corinth insisted on taking the prerogative of passing judgment (ref. 4:3-5). c. These considerations show why Paul referred to the “wisdom of this world” (3:19, cf. 1:20) even though worldly wisdom has countless expressions, religious and secular. He understood that, regardless of its personal, social, cultural or religious premises and orientation, worldly wisdom is actually one precisely because it derives from the mind of man as he is in himself. For all the differences between people, there is but one natural human mind and therefore one human wisdom. 74 d. Whatever their distinct emphases or orientation, all forms of natural wisdom are ultimately one, and that one “wisdom” is foolishness before God. Paul’s own life with Christ had taught him this, but he substantiated his claim to the Corinthians by drawing upon the Scriptures (vv. 19-20, cf. 1:19). Here again it is important to reiterate the way in which Paul viewed and interacted with the biblical text. Unlike so many Christians in the past and present, Paul didn’t view the Old Testament text as a collection of discrete theological, doctrinal and practical proof-texts. He rightly understood the Scripture’s individual texts to be components of the overall Text: Like individual tissues in a body, each contributes in precise, determined fashion to the one organic, all-encompassing storyline which unfolds God’s realization of His eternal purpose (His wisdom) in Jesus Christ. Thus Jesus Himself insisted that all the Scripture testifies of Him, and His Spirit equipped His witnesses to proclaim Him by revealing to them how that is indeed the case (cf. John 16:13-15; Acts 1:1-8, 2:1-36, 3:12-26, 4:5-12, 23-30, 7:1-53, 8:26-35, 13:1-41, 15:1-21, 17:1-3, 10-11, 18:4-11, 24:10-15, 26:1-27). Paul had an organic, narrative sense of the Scripture, and this perspective drove the way he employed it in his ministry and preaching. He could not think of a particular scriptural passage except as it fit into the overall Old Testament storyline with its myriad interwoven themes and sub-narratives. - What this means is that Paul didn’t cite a passage of Scripture because it happens to contain a couple of key words or ideas that relate to the things he was discussing at the moment. - When Paul drew upon a particular text, he was drawing upon its broader salvation-historical context and meaning. He never used a text as an isolated proof-text, but always as a hook that brought with it a whole realm of content and significance (ref. 1 Corinthians 9:6-11; 2 Corinthians 6:1-18; Romans 9:22-26; Galatians 4:21-31; Ephesians 4:7-13; etc.). Paul wasn’t alone in viewing the Scripture in this way; it was the perspective of all the New Testament writers, even as it was of Christ Himself. Sadly, many Christians don’t understand this, and so find themselves in the uncomfortable position of trying to vindicate their doctrine of scriptural literalness and “contextual meaning” in the face of the apparent “out of context” way Paul and his counterparts used the Old Testament text. Ironically, in some instances inspiration itself becomes their answer to the apparent misuse of the text by the New Testament writers: “They were inspired men and so could find meanings beyond the immediate context; we’re not inspired, and so can’t do what they did.” What all this means for the present passage is that Paul’s citations in support of his claims about worldly wisdom must be examined and considered within their broader salvation-historical and christological context. To fail to do so is to fail to grasp Paul’s meaning in employing them. 75 1) Paul’s first citation is from Job 5:13, which is set in the midst of Eliphaz’ first address to his friend Job. Like Job’s other two friends, Eliphaz sought to lead his suffering friend to see the true cause of his plight, and thereby discover the remedy for it. Eliphaz was the first of the three to speak, and this opening address centers on his conviction that Job was responding to his situation foolishly (4:1-5:27; cf. 15:1-6, 22:12-22). The basis of Eliphaz’ rebuke was Job’s despair over his desperate situation and his tacit charge of injustice against God (2:1-26). Eliphaz responded that God is not unjust, but the same cannot be said of men. All are impure in God’s sight and all lack the wisdom to sit as His judge (4:12-21). Irrespective of what Job may have believed about his circumstance and God’s role in it, he needed to acknowledge that the Lord was treating him justly, submit to His reproof and seek His mercy going forward (5:1-27). It is in that context that Eliphaz insisted that God “captures the wise in their craftiness.” The notion of wisdom here refers to the human judgment that regards itself as insightful and shrewd and yet is actually foolish and devoid of understanding. It is the wisdom by which men vindicate their independence from God and convince themselves of the rightness and ultimate triumph of their labors. Eliphaz recognized the folly of that thinking: God’s wisdom always prevails, and it is antithetical to its human counterpart (5:8-16). This means that God’s wisdom always triumphs over men’s wisdom, but in such a way that it exposes their folly (5:12-14). Eliphaz ascribed that sort of “wisdom” to Job and called him to seek the Lord in repentance and humble entreaty. Eliphaz’ theology of divine vs. human wisdom was correct in principle; however, he failed to apply it properly to Job as well as to himself. Eliphaz, too, was foolish, not understanding the true nature of Job’s plight and what God was doing through it – first, with respect to Job himself, but more importantly, as it contributed to His ever-deepening revelation of His own wisdom that was yet to be revealed in Jesus Christ. Eliphaz understood something of the antithesis and interplay between divine and human wisdom, but he was unable to rightly apply that insight to his own judgment and the conclusions he drew respecting the circumstance before him. In that regard, Eliphaz was just like the Corinthians. And as in his case God had “caught the wise in his craftiness” (Job 42:7-8), so it was with the worldly wise at Corinth; they, too, were misjudging His revealed truth and speaking things of Him that were not right; they, too, were going to be brought under His judgment. 2) Paul’s second citation is from Psalm 94:11. Though not typically reckoned among the imprecatory psalms, this psalm parallels them in calling for God’s retribution upon those who come against His people. 76 With respect to the issue of worldly wisdom, the psalmist rebuked these opponents as the worst sort of fools: men who believe they can array themselves to destroy the Lord’s people without His knowing or responding. The heart of the psalmist’s rebuke is the folly of assuming that the Creator of men – the One who gives them their capacity to perceive and discern – is Himself unaware and without discernment (vv. 5-11). The “wisdom” of the fool tells him that all is well; even if he can’t convince himself that he’s doing the Lord’s work, he is confident God will never bring him to account, or if He does, that he will be able to exonerate himself (cf. Psalm 10:1-13). But the truth is that Yahweh does see and know and He will exact just recompense. The psalmist cried out to the Lord to arise against the wicked, foolish oppressor, and He has answered that cry in His Son. The Lord knows that the musings and machinations of men are vain and destructive (v. 11), and He has exposed and condemned them by the cross of Christ. Thus the import for the Corinthians: These who affirmed God’s assessment and condemnation of natural wisdom when they embraced Jesus Christ – God’s wisdom – had allowed themselves to again become enamored with it. Did they think the God who’d condemned and overthrown the glory of men in their wisdom would tolerate it in His children – those whom He’d delivered from it? e. Paul summarized his assessment by exposing what it was that the Corinthians were actually seeking through their factions. They were “boasting in men,” but not out of jealousy for those particular men; in the end, their concern was for themselves. They were concerned to be associated with the right individual and thereby gain the reward they sought, which was the approbation of God, other men, and ultimately their own hearts. The proof that the Corinthians had a self-serving goal in their factions is found in Paul’s qualifying statement: “So then let no one boast in men, for all things belong to you…” Whether they consciously understood it or not, the Corinthians were seeking to gain something for themselves through aligning themselves with certain individuals. Their natural minds told them that there was profit for them – something they could claim as their own – in those allegiances, but the mind of the Spirit in Paul exposed the error and folly of that thinking: There was nothing to gain through their allegiances to men for the simple reason that all things were already theirs. Barrett enlarged this consideration by highlighting the particular “gain” that is a sense of personal identity and belonging: “Boasting in, and glorifying, human leaders is not only dishonoring to God but also degrading to those who boast, for it mistakes the relationship between the Christian and the leader. Those who gloried in the church leaders said, I belong to Paul, I belong to Apollos, I belong to Cephas. This inverts the truth. You do not belong to this or that minister, for all things are yours…” 77 Paul’s insistence was that all things belong to Christ’s saints, and that includes the men He raises up to lead them; the Corinthians didn’t need to lay claim to Paul or Apollos or Cephas (or anyone else) because they were already theirs (3:22a). This is true in the sense that the Church’s leaders are its servants (3:5). Such men are preeminently servants of Christ Himself – undershepherds who serve the Chief Shepherd (1 Peter 5:1-4), but for this very reason they are servants of Christ’s flock. The Lord has appointed leaders to serve His saints in His name and for His sake; they are Christ’s gift to His Church, not its overlords. Thus Paul intended his statement to indict and rebuke the leaders at Corinth as much as the congregation. The saints were culpable for forming factions by aligning themselves with particular individuals, but the leadership was also culpable for allowing the factions to exist and for attaching themselves to them. If the congregants sought gain through their factions, so did the leaders. They may not have been the direct objects of allegiance, but by taking sides in the factions they effectively made themselves the “on-site” leadership representative of Paul, Apollos or Cephas. Leaders as well as congregants were using the Lord’s servants for their own gain, seeking from them personal identity and status. Christ’s servants belong to His Church, but so do all things. Some have puzzled over why Paul chose to mention the things he did – the world, life, death, things present and things to come, but his catalog was purposeful and appropriate. Paul didn’t arbitrarily list some things within the all-encompassing category that is “all things,” but things that marvelously capture and express his point. When Paul referred to “all things” as belonging to the saints, he was speaking of that which is theirs in Christ – that which has come to them as the fruit of God’s wisdom in Christ. Again, Paul used the phrase, “the wisdom of God,” in reference to God’s eternal purpose for His creation which is bound up in the person and work of the incarnate Son. Christ has manifested and fulfilled the divine wisdom, and by His gospel – the good news of this fulfillment in the inaugurated kingdom of God – this wisdom is now being revealed to the world and bearing its fruit. The wisdom of God concerns the restoration and everlasting perfection of the whole creation in its relationship with Him and then with itself. Paul understood this, and so recognized that what the saints possess in Christ vastly transcends forgiveness and cleansing. He knew that God’s goal isn’t atonement for transgression, but the summing up of the whole creation in His Son. Soteriology is grounded in and serves eschatology, which itself is preeminently christological. The things Paul enumerated speak to this truth: In union with Christ, the saints possess the glory and riches of creational renewal and perfection. The cosmos itself is theirs, but so is the life that is in Christ and, with it, His triumph over death. He has inaugurated the new creation and they are sharers in it (“things present”), but with complete assurance of the everlasting fullness to come. All things are theirs, because they are of Christ and Christ is of God (Romans 8:31ff).
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:02:05 GMT -5
Excursus: Heeding Paul’s Exhortations Paul recognized that the various problems in the Corinthian church were the product of their natural-mindedness (their “fleshliness,” 3:1-4). He also understood that their fleshliness escaped their conscious notice; they were self-deceived about their true condition and the way they were thinking and judging. Far from being ashamed of “boasting in men,” they were proud of themselves and believed that they were honoring Christ by passing judgment on His servants. They ascribed to themselves spiritual wisdom and maturity and couldn’t see that they were foolish and infantile, men who were effectively denying the mind of Christ within them. The Corinthians didn’t recognize their self-deception, but Paul did and he directed them to confront it seriously and decisively (ref. again 3:18, 21). The apostle was clear in what the Corinthians needed to do, but was conspicuously silent regarding how they were to go about doing it – how they were to become wise by becoming fools. The obvious implication is that Paul believed the Corinthians knew exactly how to deal with their folly and self-deception. He felt he didn’t need to give them specific instructions, and the first reason was his close, long-term relationship with them. Paul knew what the Corinthians had been taught because he’d been their primary teacher over a period of a year and a half. He knew that he’d imparted to them the spiritual resources of understanding sufficient for them to deal with their natural-mindedness and the multitude of problems it was causing. But beyond that, Paul understood that the Corinthians possessed the life and mind of Christ. All things were theirs in Christ through His indwelling, transforming Spirit; the Corinthians – as all of God’s saints – were fully adequate for all that was required of them; they simply needed to recognize and exercise that adequacy. Paul was confident that the Corinthians possessed the knowledge, discernment and spiritual resource necessary to fulfill their obligation; providing them with a set of “howto” instructions would have undermined and even denied the very things he believed about them and sought to remind them of. The Corinthians needed to be confronted and challenged, but Paul (and Apollos) had grounded them in the gospel such that, once awakened to their folly and self-deception, they were fully able to apply the remedy they already possessed. So it ought to be with all Christians; why, then, do so many fall short? - First of all, human beings naturally follow the natural law that things follow the path of least resistance. This is true of planets and star systems hurtling through space, air moving through a building, and water running downhill. It is also true of students taking a course, workers doing their jobs and, all too often, of Christians living the Christian life. It’s not that such individuals have no interest in obedience and godliness; they just prefer a simple definition of them and a way to “become holy” with the least amount of thought, effort and struggle. Their minds direct them toward doctrinal and practical prescriptions for living the Christian life and a simple, concise articulation of the procedures for achieving success in their efforts. This is not to imply that all believers approach their lives in Christ in this way; it is only to affirm that this way of thinking characterizes the natural mind; it is sure evidence of natural wisdom at work in Christ’s saints. 79 Natural-mindedness inclines Christians toward “to-do” lists and “how-to” strategies, and so they readily gravitate toward those who will provide them to them. This is why Christians instinctively love “practical” sermons and feel less than satisfied when preachers don’t supply them with a prescriptive “application.” - Another reason Christians don’t deal with natural-mindedness is that it’s invisible to them. And that’s because they don’t know what it means to be a Christian. A person can’t perceive his thinking and judgment to be a fleshly counterfeit if he doesn’t know what it means to think with the mind of Christ. And how can he understand that if he really doesn’t understand what it means to be “in Christ”? For many Christians, the “gospel” they know and embraced when they came to faith embodies a handful of truths regarding Jesus’ death for sinners, the promise of forgiveness for their sins and the need for repentance and obedience. Those things are biblically true so far as they go, but they are actually stripped of truth when they are stripped of their biblical context and meaning. Yet a minimalist “gospel” will yield its fruit: It leaves its adherents to conclude that being a Christian amounts to little more than being forgiven, living an upright life and being assured of a future in heaven. On the other hand, many lose the gospel of God’s wisdom in Christ and its meaning for their Christian lives in a maze of doctrinal minutiae. For them, employing the mind of Christ becomes synonymous with theological study and commitment to a particular doctrinal formulation. - In all this, the lion’s share of the fault lies with the Church’s shepherds. For every Christian who chafes at the seemingly overwhelming vastness of God’s wisdom in Christ and craves a simpler “gospel,” there are multitudes of believers who have never really had the biblical gospel set before them. And there has never been an instance of a Christian who sought a shepherd to come alongside him in his natural thinking (whatever form it happens to take) who has been unable to satisfy his quest. Itching ears always find willing scratchers. Paul confronted the Corinthians with their self-deception and he expected them to deal with it decisively. It wasn’t enough for them to admit the wrongfulness of their factions; they needed to address their underlying cause, and that meant first “coming to their senses” respecting the way they were thinking and recognizing that they’d fallen prey to the deceitfulness of natural wisdom. What appeared to them to be godly wisdom was actually destructive foolishness; once they discerned that, they were ready to embrace that which is wisdom indeed; they were ready to begin employing the mind of Christ. 1. Discerning the Natural Mind The natural mind is a deceiver; it deceives others as well as itself, and does so as a matter of course. For all men inhabit the world their minds present to them, and the natural mind forms its impression of reality and responds to that impression in and of itself. The natural mind determines for itself what is true, proper and wise independently of the Spirit of truth, and so cannot avoid falsehood, delusion and self-deception. 80 This being the case, it follows that dealing with self-deception requires knowing the natural mind; one must know his enemy if he is to defeat him. All people are unique, but the “fleshly mind” is one, even as worldly wisdom is one (3:19). The natural mind operates according to certain perspectives, principles and patterns, and once they’re understood, natural thinking is exposed and can no longer masquerade as wisdom. a. First of all, the natural mind is fleshly. Paul used this term to refer to man as he is in himself apart from God (cf. Romans 8:5-8). The fleshly mind perceives reality in terms of me and not me, and, being self-referential and self-concerned, it appraises and interacts with everything outside it (people, things, circumstances, situations, etc.) in terms of their perceived value in relation to the self. This is why, on the one hand, the natural mind is incapable of authentic love, and why, on the other, its judgments and exertions all reflect the centrality and primacy of perceived self-benefit. This is as much the case in the arena of spiritual concerns (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:10-12, 3:1-4:5, 7:1-24, 8:1-13, 11:1-34, 12:1-14:40 with Romans 14:1-15:7; cf. also Acts 20:17-31 with 1 Timothy 1:3-7, 2:8, 4:1-12, 5:17-20, 6:1-10; 2 Timothy 2:1-18, 22-26, 4:1-4; Titus 3:9-11) as it is in the arena of material ones (cf. Romans 13:8-14; Galatians 5:19-21; Ephesians 4:17-5:12; Colossians 3:1-17; 1 Thessalonians 4:1-12). b. The natural mind is self-referential because it is self-isolated. It draws on outside stimuli, but processes and interprets that data within the fortress that is self. This isn’t to say that Christians who are governed by natural thinking are antisocial or unconcerned with others. The natural mind may be eminently sociable and even sincerely philanthropic; it just cannot relate to and engage in true intimacy – the intimacy that characterizes the relationship within the Godhead. By sharing in Christ by the indwelling Spirit, Christians share in the trinitarian life and love and this vital union determines and defines their relationship with one another. In Jesus’ words, His people are one even as He is one with the Father (ref. John 17:20-23). This sort of relationship is revealed to men in the person of Jesus Christ and realized in the world only in and through His Spirit. It is utterly foreign to this world and incomprehensible to the world’s wisdom which operates according to the natural determinative principle of me and not me. c. The previous two considerations show that the natural mind is preeminently an independent and autonomous mind. Again, this doesn’t mean that “naturallyminded” Christians refuse involvement with or input from other believers. It simply means that, in the final analysis, they retain for themselves all prerogatives of judgment and action. The natural mind does what is right in its own eyes. Interestingly, the natural mind recognizes this principle of independence. But far from renouncing it, it seeks to use it to its own perceived benefit. So churches exalt and exploit individualism by pandering to it, whether in the gospel they preach or the church model and strategies they embrace; whether for the purpose of gaining converts or keeping congregants happy. 81 2. Employing the Mind of Christ If the natural mind contradicts and opposes the mind of Christ, then employing the mind of Christ (the spiritual mind) depends absolutely upon rightly discerning, confronting and overcoming natural-mindedness. Because the natural mind reflects and expresses man as he is in himself apart from God, employing the mind of Christ begins with understanding the true nature of the Christian life. a. Of first importance in this regard is discerning what it means to be “in Christ.” One cannot live the Christian life if he doesn’t understand what it is. Sadly, whatever their doctrine, multitudes of Christians live day-to-day as if being “in Christ” means nothing more for their persons than being forgiven of their sins. That is, they think of their lives in Christ in terms of new convictions, new commitment and new conduct, not new creation. Their priorities and practices are to be “new,” but their essential person is the same as before they were saved. This perspective is perhaps most evident in the way Christians think about the concepts of old man and new man. For many, “old man” and “new man” are metaphors for the kinds of thinking and behavior that characterize the unbelieving and disobedient on the one hand and obedient believers on the other. They are regarded as speaking to distinction in practice rather than to distinction in being. - The first implication of this is that the concepts “old man” and “new man” come to represent a kind of spiritual dualism: They are treated as two competing natures within the same person. Christians are thus reduced to spiritual Jekyll and Hyde creatures who, at any given point, can show forth either of the two natures that still determine them as human beings. - As a result, “putting on the new man” becomes synonymous with the Christian’s abiding obligation of personal obedience. This mindset is so common that Paul’s actual usage and meaning appear suspect to some. Nevertheless, it remains that Paul wasn’t referring to two possible ways of living the Christian life, but to the two forms of human existence: humanness according to the first Adam and humanness according to the Last Adam. Thus “old man” and “new man” are eschatological concepts that speak to the reality of renewal and restoration (new creation) that has come about in Jesus Christ (cf. Ephesians 4:17-24 with Colossians 3:1-11; also 2 Corinthians 5:17). The notion of Christians having two natures is utterly foreign to Paul. A person is of one of the two “Adams” but not both. Those who share in Christ’s life have died to the old Adamic nature and now share in Jesus’ true humanity (cf. Romans 6:1-11; Galatians 2:20; Colossians 3:1-3). Most importantly, this participation in the Last Adam is determinative: Christians aren’t an essential combination of old man and new man; the language of flesh and spirit, death and life, and bondage and liberation makes this clear (Romans 8:9f; Ephesians 5:1ff; Colossians 1:13). 82 Commenting on Paul’s instruction to the Ephesians (4:20-32), Greg Beale makes the following summary observations: “Paul reminds his readers what they learned when they first came to faith (vv.20- 21). At that time they were instructed to ‘lay aside the old man… and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.’ Therefore, it is in the past that the ‘old man’ has been laid aside, ‘the spirit’ has been renewed, and the ‘new man’ has been put on.” b. If “new man” refers to the new-creational existence the believer now has by virtue of sharing in Christ’s life, then all that the Christian is and does in truth is determined by it. This means that, to whatever extent he is thinking or acting apart from or contrary to this defining reality, he is guilty of the disobedience of lying against the truth (Ephesians 5:1-10). It also means that the imperatives of the Christian life are simply the truth and life of the indicatives of new creation: The Christian has the singular obligation – expressed in all sorts of particulars – to live authentically into the truth of the “new man”; that is, to be in mind and practice who he is in Christ. Again, Beale is helpful: “The ‘indicative’ of the new creation must precede the ‘imperative’ to act as a new creation.” The Christian possesses one essential nature, but in accordance with the inaugurated eschatology principle of already-but-not yet. The old Adamic self was crucified with Christ and the new self – the new man bearing the image of the Last Adam – was raised to life in Him (Romans 6:1-7). The old self has been put to death in Christ, but its influence continues on. Adamic man was judged and abolished in Christ, so that those who share in Him share in that abolition. Christians have been released from the enslaving power of the Adamic nature (the old man), but the new man can still live as if that weren’t the case: The Christian must reckon himself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ (Romans 6:10-11). And so, while the “old man” has been crucified, his patterns of thinking and acting still come against the “new man.” For this reason Christians have an ongoing obligation to take their thoughts captive to the truth as it is in Christ – to set their hearts and minds on the heavenly reality that they died and their lives are hidden with Christ in God, and then conduct themselves accordingly. The patterns of the “old man” continue to rise up in the believer’s mind and heart, and the driving force behind these impulses is the natural mind. This means that Christians are obligated to reckon themselves dead to the sinful attitudes and practices characteristic of the natural (“old”) man (Colossians 3:1-17; cf. Romans 6:11-14; Galatians 5:19-21), but even more fundamentally, they’re obligated to discern the operations of the natural mind itself. The obvious reason (which is at the heart of Paul’s instruction to the Corinthians) is that the natural mind is as inclined to religious zeal and piety as it is to immorality and flagrant ungodliness. Like the one it mimics, natural-mindedness readily poses as an angel of light. 83 c. In order to address the problem of natural wisdom the Christian must be able to recognize it. One cannot treat a disease he is unable to diagnose. And recognizing natural wisdom and its operations depends upon knowing what it really means to be a Christian – what it means to be “in Christ.” Skill in detecting the counterfeit results from mastery of the genuine. And when the Christian comes to discern spiritual wisdom (the mind of Christ), he will find, like Paul, that spiritual wisdom stands in antithesis to its natural counterpart. Again, the natural mind is a divided mind – a mind that perceives and reasons in terms of me and not me. Antithetically, the spiritual mind perceives and thinks in terms of common-union, first in relation to God, then in relation to other believers, and finally in relation to the creation itself. Spiritual wisdom doesn’t think in terms of “me” and “not me,” but in terms of “me” as implicated and bound up in “not me.” It recognizes God’s provision in Christ for me, but as it is His provision for the whole creation of which I am a part. So spiritual wisdom thinks in terms of the corporate body of Christ, not the individual believer (just as God taught Israel to think of itself in corporate terms as the singular “son of God”). The spiritual mind recognizes that the unity which exists among believers is grounded in and is an extension of the unity within the Godhead. Thus the spiritual mind cannot think in individualistic categories, and so has no inclination or capacity to operate in an individualistic manner. Independence, autonomy and individualism find no place in the Scripture’s understanding of the Christian life and the Christian Church. This is the fundamental reason the New Testament is silent regarding formal membership in a body of believers; it assumes as a matter of nature and course an essential and thorough common-union among Christians that makes speaking of committed membership completely unnecessary. And so, if one would heed Paul’s exhortations he must commit himself to careful and honest self-examination and personal redirection in the light of the demands of spiritual wisdom. Natural wisdom is a deceiver, and the Christian who would be wise must recognize his propensity to deceive and be deceived and yield himself to God’s provision for it, which is the mind and leading of the Spirit in the context of Christ’s body. The spiritual mind is an open, receptive and yielded mind, not because it denies or despises individual conscience and the lordship of Christ, but precisely because it rightly honors and upholds them. It knows that the natural mind is deceitful and its powers of deception depend upon isolation and autonomy; the man who holds himself accountable to his own musings is a self-deceived fool; he shows that he despises a good conscience that is submitted to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:11-12). So those who would be wise and not self-deceived fools must hold their perceptions, understanding and convictions with due suspicion, true humility and open teachability. The one who believes he knows proves his natural-mindedness (1 Corinthians 8:2), for his conviction renders him isolated and autonomous: Not only can he not yield to those who disagree with him, he cannot even accept them; to do so would be to embrace error.
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:03:25 GMT -5
14. The first of Paul’s present exhortations to the Corinthians pertained to their problem of self-deception (3:18). The natural mind is deceitful and self-deceiving, so that resolving the problem of factions in the church at Corinth (as indeed all of the ills that plagued that body) depended absolutely upon the Corinthians “coming to their senses” and beginning to think with the mind of Christ. The practical issues at Corinth were the product of flawed perception, thinking and understanding; if the Corinthians were to set things right among them, they would have to free themselves from their folly and self-deception. In that regard it’s noteworthy that Paul didn’t accompany his exhortation with specific instruction for dealing with their self-delusion. He understood that the saints at Corinth possessed the life and mind of Christ by His Spirit. They didn’t need a set of behavioral instructions; they needed to be made aware of the natural-mindedness that was distorting and directing their thinking. Paul confronted the truth behind their attitudes and actions; having done so, he knew they had the spiritual resource to respond appropriately. Paul refused to provide the Corinthians with a checklist for remedying their selfdeception, but he did set before them in two particulars what the operation of the mind of Christ would look like in the instance of dealing with their factions. This instruction took the form of two further imperatives – the first one a positive directive (4:1) and the second its negative complement (4:5). Together these imperatives comprise two sides of the same coin, implying and interpreting each other. a. The first of these two imperatives (the third in Paul’s grouping of four; ref. again 3:18, 21) directed the Corinthians to properly consider and regard those who led them. The clear implication is that their factions (1:12, 3:4) – and the naturalmindedness that lay behind them – proved their failure to rightly perceive and esteem their leaders. The Corinthians were deceived about their leaders and their relationship with and responsibility to them as much as they were deceived about themselves and their own maturity and wisdom (3:1-4, 4:6ff). Simply put, they regarded those who ministered to them as objects to be boasted in – entities whose ultimate purpose was to serve their own self-affirmation and self-aggrandizement (I am of Paul; I am of Apollos, etc.). This is the way the natural mind looks at Christ’s ministers (even as it views everything and everyone from the vantage point of self); the spiritual mind has an entirely different perspective and assessment: It regards such men as servants and stewards (4:1). 1) Whether local church leaders or the apostles themselves, all are servants in Christ’s Church. And not servants of themselves, or ultimately of other believers, but of Christ Himself. This fact may appear so obvious as to be superfluous, but things that are obvious as a matter of principle or doctrine often escape the sort of practical scrutiny and application they deserve. The Corinthians would have roundly affirmed Paul’s assertion about those who led them, even while their attitudes, speech and actions railed against it. Their factions and the dynamics surrounding them showed that they did indeed regard their leaders as servants – just not servants of Christ. 85 Paul’s statement hearkens back to verse 3:5, and yet there is an important distinction between these two verses in that he here employed a different noun than before. Although some scholars maintain that he was using the two nouns as relative synonyms, two things suggest otherwise. The first is the fact that this is the only occurrence of this noun in the breadth of Paul’s letters, which points to a conscious decision on his part to use it here; the second thing relates to the first, namely the remarkable pertinence of this particular term to the surrounding context. - The two Greek nouns can be equally rendered servant, but with a notable point of distinction: Whereas the one in verse 3:5 (diakonos) connotes the general notion of servitude – one who serves the interests of others, the present one (huperetes) highlights service as it reflects and expresses the authority of a superior; it denotes a person who acts under orders from someone else. Thus the most common use of this term in the New Testament is in reference to an appointed officer of a governing authority (ref. Matthew 5:25; Luke 4:20; John 7:32-46, 18:1-22; Acts 5:22-26). - This distinction is crucial to the point Paul was making in this context as he brought his treatment of the Corinthian factions to a head. The saints at Corinth needed to be reminded that leaders in the Church are servants acting under authority – not an authority of their own that is self-derived or self-directed, but not the authority of other men either. They serve under the charge of the one master who is Jesus Christ, and it is to Him that they are accountable as servants (cf. John 18:36 with Acts 26:16). Christ’s servant-leaders don’t stand alongside Him as complementary or supplementary authorities, much less as alternative or competing ones. They are appointed by Him and act in His authority and on His behalf; they are the servants of His will and work and will give account to Him accordingly (cf. Luke 12:42-44). Again, this truth may appear patently obvious, but all too often it gets distorted, obscured or effectively ignored in the practical outworking of the relationship between the saints and those who lead them. As at Corinth, so in every place and generation: Christians not only separate and play their leaders against one another, they separate them from and play them against Christ Himself (1:11-12). If it’s true that Christ’s Church is not the servant of men’s desires, whims and agendas, it is equally true of the shepherds He calls to lead His Church. 2) The Church’s leaders are Christ’s servants, but servants whose orders pertain to the truth as it is in Him: They are “stewards of the mysteries of God.” This second descriptor clarifies Paul’s singular use of this particular “servant” term: A steward is charged with the oversight and administration of another’s possessions; he is, in that sense, a servant under orders. 86 As before (ref. 2:7 and pages 51-52 in the notes), Paul was using the term mystery in reference to God’s ultimate restorative purpose for His creation which was progressively revealed and worked out in the salvation history culminating with the Christ event. This purpose was mysterious in that the particulars of its accomplishment and effect could not be fully discerned until Christ’s coming. Throughout the ages God continued to clarify His promise of creational renewal and the means for accomplishing it. He did so through direct pronouncements as well as His ongoing interactions in the world and the various covenantal structures He put in place. God’s ongoing revelation was purposeful and consistent, but prophetic: necessarily shadowy and marked by loose ends which called for faith on the part of those waiting and watching. Across the centuries, the Lord’s servants looked carefully and longingly to discern the form and meaning of what was to come, but the full light of clarity and understanding awaited the coming of the sunrise from on high (cf. Matthew 13:16-17; Luke 1:57-78, 2:22-32; Colossians 2:16-17; 1 Peter 1:10-12; etc.). God’s mysteries awaited the “fullness of the times,” but now they have been fully disclosed and illumined in the person and work of Jesus the Messiah. Jesus thus interpreted Himself to His disciples and then charged them with presenting and interpreting Him to the world of men. Jesus is the True Israel – the Seed of Abraham – through whom God’s blessing comes to all the earth’s families, and He is accomplishing His Abrahamic calling through those who share in His life as the new-creational “Israel of God.” All Christians share in this calling as Abraham’s offspring (Galatians 3:27-29), but it is especially the responsibility of the Church’s leaders – those who are charged with the ministration of God’s gospel. Some important implications emerge from the above considerations – implications which, the context clearly shows, Paul intended his Corinthian readers to recognize and respond to with the mind of Christ: - If Christ’s leaders are His servants charged with the stewardship of the profound truths of His gospel, then their accountability to Him as leaders focuses on their accountability for understanding and administering His gospel. They are servants under orders, and discharging their duty depends upon knowing and proclaiming the mysteries of God. How can the Church’s shepherds regard themselves as obedient servants when they fail to understand – or at least fail to preach and teach – the Old Testament scriptures as God’s story of His salvation now fulfilled in Jesus Christ? - And if Christ’s leaders are accountable to Him and His gospel, they cannot become the servants of any other “master.” Leaders have no right to their own agendas, whether their goal is building an empire or keeping the peace. Neither the Church nor its gospel belongs to or serves them, but they are likewise not the servants of other Christians and their agendas. 87 The Corinthians were to regard their leaders as servants of Christ charged with a stewardship. But, by its very nature, a stewardship is a trust, and therefore the faithful steward will show himself trustworthy (4:2). For the Lord’s servantstewards, obedience means faithful execution of their solemn trust. And that means unwavering faithfulness to Christ’s gospel and commitment to seeing its fruit produced in the lives of people – those who are the Father’s children as much as those who are yet estranged from Him. In all things, Christ’s faithful servantstewards labor to direct men toward Him (2 Corinthians 11:2; Galatians 4:19-20, 5:1; Ephesians 4:11-13; Colossians 1:28), not toward themselves (whether they do so intentionally or not; whether by intimidation or domination, deception, manipulation or recruitment, or simply the distraction born of ignorance or folly). Kept within the larger context, Paul’s point was this: Christ’s saints must possess and employ a spiritual mind if they are to truly regard and esteem (in heart and action, and not just in doctrinal assent) His leaders as His servants and stewards of His gospel. Where they operate with natural minds, as was the case with the Corinthians, Christians will ultimately view and treat their leaders as servants of their own desires and agendas. So it is with Christ’s leaders: Their faithful stewardship depends upon them employing the mind of the Spirit; otherwise, they, too, will be given to self-serving ends. As it was at Corinth, so it is in every church community: Christians are naturally inclined to raise up and follow men and movements and Christian leaders are naturally ready to accommodate them. The Church’s leaders have a solemn duty to discharge their trust as servants of Christ and His gospel, and that duty implies its complement, namely their accountability to Jesus for the way they carry out their stewardship (4:3-4). Again, a couple of important implications follow: 1) The Church’s leaders are not subject to the judgment of men, whether those outside the Church or those within it. Indeed, they aren’t even subject to their own self-judgment. Here it’s critical to recognize that Paul wasn’t suggesting that Christ’s shepherds are untouchable, autonomous men free from all accountability to those they lead; he was merely affirming that they have one master – the Chief Shepherd. They serve Him – and so His sheep – according to the stewardship He’s charged them with (1 Peter 5:1-4), and thus they cannot serve another master or subject themselves to another’s examination as judge – not even their own. 2) Christ’s leaders serve Him and His gospel and that is where their accountability lies. Men have no ability to determine ultimate faithfulness to that charge; who can finally decide another man’s faithfulness to Christ? And who has so thorough an understanding of the mysteries of God that he can stand as judge of others respecting their conformity to it? Paul acknowledged that no one knew him like he knew himself (2:11), and even so he couldn’t yield himself to his own self-examination. The one who assures himself that he’s come to know reveals the depth of his folly. 88 b. Whether those who lead or those who are led, every believer is obligated and accountable to his Master. Christ is their judge, both now and in the last day, and no man has either the capability or the prerogative to usurp His lordship by taking on the role of examiner and judge (cf. Romans 14:1-13). So Paul’s fourth and summary imperative: “Do not go on passing judgment before the time when the Lord comes…” (4:5a). This exhortation brings to a climax the pointed contrast Paul has been drawing in this passage – a contrast grounded in the larger context and its overarching antithesis of natural versus spiritual wisdom. The contrast in the immediate context involves the matter of judgment as it pertains to the Lord Jesus versus human beings. More specifically, it pertains to the situation in the church at Corinth in which believers were assuming the prerogative to judge Christ’s servant-stewards, evident in the factions that had emerged in the church and with which they were aligning themselves. Though they doubtless believed they were acting in the interest of Christ and His lordship, the Corinthians had actually usurped His authority as Lord and Judge and made themselves lords over those whom He’d given to shepherd them. This truth is powerfully punctuated by Paul’s terminology in verses 3 and 5. Unfortunately, most English versions take a translational liberty with Paul’s language which makes it impossible for the reader to catch his word play. - In 4:5, Paul’s expression “the time” refers to the ordained time of Christ’s appearing when He will enter into judgment with all people, believers and unbelievers alike (cf. Matthew 25:1-33 with 2 Corinthians 5:9-10 and 2 Thessalonians 1:3-10; also Revelation 20:11-15). This judgment event will be the culmination of the biblical concept of the Day of the Lord. - All judgment belongs to the Lord Jesus and His “day” (John 5:19-30), and yet men (sadly even Christians) proudly appoint for themselves their own “day” to take their seat as judge. So Paul’s language in verse 3: “It is a very small thing that I should be examined by you or by a day of man.” In the name of faithfulness to Christ and His gospel, Christians are all too ready to strip the judge’s robe from Him and array themselves in it, thereby becoming judges with perverse reasoning and motives (James 2:1-4). They enthrone as “lord” their perceptions and conclusions regarding men and their understanding and convictions regarding God’s truth (contra 4:5b). Christ’s servant-stewards are thereby rendered their servants and stewards, not of God’s mysteries in Christ, but of their notions of truth. In that way such men ordain a “day of man” – a day in which they sit on Christ’s bema as sovereign judge. This is the marrow of the great evil bound up in the Corinthian factions, an evil that highlights the pernicious nature and fruit of natural-mindedness: Proclaiming oneself of Paul, Apollos or any other man (including Jesus Himself as another “spiritual leader”) amounts to judging Christ’s servant-stewards and thereby both deposing and judging the rightful Judge whom they serve and to whom they are accountable.
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:05:06 GMT -5
In closing, it’s worth noting that Paul felt it unnecessary to explain to the Corinthians his directive to stop passing judgment. He obviously believed they would know exactly what he was calling for and didn’t think they’d be confused when, in the next section of his letter, he instructed them concerning their responsibility to judge those within the body of believers (5:12). There’s no way to know whether or not his confidence in the Corinthians was well founded; what is clear is that many Christians today find themselves baffled by what seems to be Paul’s inconsistent instruction. - Undoubtedly a primary reason for the confusion is the general weakness of biblical understanding in the Church. Having been conditioned to think of the Bible as a collection of theological and practical proof-texts, multitudes of Christians have no real grasp of the organism of the Scripture and the way its parts work together to form a cohesive and coherent whole. This fragmentary, proof-text way of reading the Scripture is applied as well at the level of individual texts. So many Christians fail to see the unified, organic structure of this Corinthian epistle because of their narrow focus on the individual topics Paul addressed in it. Plucking verses 4:5 and 5:12 out of the epistle’s larger context and argument and setting them alongside each other, it’s no wonder Christians find themselves scratching their heads in confusion. - A second reason for the difficulty is the unavoidable contribution of culture to biblical exegesis and understanding. The theological and interpretive task is never done in a vacuum, but always reflects the historical, cultural and ecclesiastical contexts in which it is situated. In the case of the American Church, it resides in a society in which passing judgment on people and things is largely frowned upon. Post-modern influences have added to this sensibility, with the result that many today believe that any sort of value judgment is wrong. Not only is meaning often treated as a personal, wholly subjective matter, the same treatment is given to the categories of truth and error and right and wrong. In such a culture, making judgments is regarded as foolish and wrong at best and arguably even evil. So also the Church itself is not untouched by the culture in which it finds itself. This is a matter of divine design as much as inevitability: God intends and requires Church-culture interaction, for the accomplishing of their Abrahamic calling requires that Christians engage and “leaven” their communities and cultures. However, most often the “leavening” goes in the wrong direction: Rather than bearing Christ’s fragrance – the truth of new creation – in the surrounding culture, Christians often import their culture’s sensibilities into the Church (even if unwittingly in the name of outreach, relevance, contextualization, etc.). On the other side, and often as a reaction to the Church’s compromises, some Christian communities regard secular culture as corrupt and corrupting and so denounce its various features and tenets. In a culture like America where political correctness and refusal to pass judgment are widely treated as virtues, many churches react against the culture’s “wishy-washiness” by taking hard and fast positions on virtually every issue (a posture eminently suited to the natural mind). 90 For these reasons and others as well, Christians often find themselves struggling to understand and apply their responsibility to “judge with righteous judgment.” Paul’s apparent self-contradiction in this epistle only adds to the conundrum. Thus it’s worthwhile to draw some summary conclusions regarding Paul’s present instruction, especially toward the goal of laying a solid foundation for what is to come in the subsequent context (and the balance of the epistle). Once again, it’s crucial to keep Paul’s directive in context. Some want to lay it alongside Matthew 7:1 (and perhaps other verses) and read it as a generic prohibition intended as a comprehensive Christian ethic: Don’t judge anyone or anything at any time or under any circumstances. Such a reading is ridiculous on its face and makes it impossible to rightly understand either the present passage or the broader scriptural instruction regarding the matter of judging. This reading becomes even more absurd when judging is understood in terms of reaching conclusions and having beliefs and convictions. In context, Paul issued his prohibition in relation to the problem of factions in the Corinthian church. By aligning themselves with certain leaders (“I am of Paul; I am of Apollos; I am of Cephas), they were boasting in one individual over against the others (3:21). In this way they were passing judgment on them all, binding themselves to one so as to discount, marginalize or even disparage the others. Moreover, Paul was implicitly indicting the Corinthians of passing judgment on Jesus Himself, for the Church’s leaders are His servants, raised up by Him as stewards of His gospel. By aligning themselves with one servant over against the others, the Corinthians were effectively calling into question the Lord’s judgment and usurping His authority as judge. They were applying their own criteria to the men Jesus gave to His Church as ministers, assuming the right and ability to rank them according to their own standards of performance and worthiness. Jesus made no such distinction, but rather regarded each man as distinctly but equally fitted to his own appointed labors in the Church (3:5-9). The above considerations are fairly obvious, but what is often missed – especially by those who ignore or minimize the larger context – is the fact that Paul was dealing with the overarching problem of natural-mindedness at Corinth. The Corinthian factions showed them to be guilty of judging their leaders and Christ Himself, but all of this was the result of their “fleshliness” – of their failure to employ the mind of the Spirit (3:1-4). Viewed carefully in context, it’s obvious that Paul wasn’t telling the Corinthians that they were never to pass any sort of judgment on any person or thing, much less that they were to renounce any and all personal convictions. What he was calling for was an end to the kind of judging that is in inherent in the natural mind and its operations. Again, and importantly, the natural mind is preeminently a judging mind: It operates from within the fundamental perceptual premise of “me” in contradistinction to “not me.” Everything that is not me is appraised and interacted with on the basis of how it appears to me to stand in relation to me. For the natural mind, self – or more precisely, one’s sense of oneself – is the datum and standard relative to which all things are measured. 91 Also crucial to understanding Paul’s instruction is recognizing that the natural mind is self-deceiving. As it pertains to this context, the natural mind deceives itself regarding its ability and authority to scrutinize others and pass judgment on them. And implicit in this sense of personal prerogative is the natural human confidence of capability to look beyond appearances to the hidden realities behind them. The natural mind judges in a way that betrays its arrogant presumption that it has access to the things that are hidden; that it is able to look into men’s hearts. So it was with the Corinthians (4:5b), many of whom were eager to charge Paul with all sorts of questionable motives and intentions in his labors among them (ref. esp. 1 Corinthians 9:1-23; 2 Corinthians 1-4, 10-13). The natural mind judges from within itself on the basis of itself (its perceptions and convictions). This is why, in aligning themselves with one of Christ’s servants over against the others, the Corinthians were making His servant-stewards their servants and stewards, not of the truth as it is in Christ, but of their notions of that truth. They usurped Jesus’ authority by binding His servants and their message to themselves, but also by taking His sole prerogative to “bring to light the things hidden in the darkness and disclose the motives of the heart.” They judged and set one servant over against another on the basis of a self-deluded confidence in their capacity to perceive and know. But precisely because the natural mind is given to self-deception, its powers of judgment are untrustworthy while appearing to be rock solid and completely reliable. Self-deluded yet self-trusting, naturally-minded men set themselves in the place of Christ, affording to themselves insight and prerogatives that don’t belong to them. They assign themselves the role of judge, but their failure to acknowledge the difference between their perceptions and notions and truth as it actually is ensures that they are unrighteous judges who subject all things to themselves and so ultimately obscure and lie against the truth. This is the framework for understanding Paul’s demand that Christ’s people not pass judgment on one another. It is also the grid through which his subsequent statement (5:12) and all of his instruction in the epistle (and elsewhere) must be viewed. And what emerges first of all (and what ought to be obvious even apart from these considerations) is that Paul wasn’t calling for Christians to abstain from all judgment – as if that were even possible. There is a critical difference between making judgments and passing judgment in the sense in which Paul was speaking. It’s impossible for a human being not to make judgments; all of life involves interfacing and interacting with the surrounding world through a process of perception, assessment, conclusion and action. And this applies to what a person believes as much as to what he does. Everyone reaches conclusions respecting everything he encounters in life, whether experientially or intellectually. Therefore, if one conceives of “judging” in terms of reaching conclusions and forming beliefs and personal convictions, then Paul’s instruction becomes utterly nonsensical. But Paul wasn’t calling for a vacuous mind devoid of conviction. At the same time, the Christian’s personal beliefs and convictions are directly and profoundly implicated in what he was demanding. 92 The relationship between one’s beliefs and convictions and the obligation to not judge implicates epistemology. That is, it involves recognizing the distinction between one’s knowledge of a thing and the thing itself, as well as between what a person knows and how he knows what he knows. Ultimately it involves recognizing the crucial distinction between personal perception and conviction and actual truth. - First of all, the fact that someone sincerely believes something to be true doesn’t make it so. So Paul could affirm that his conviction of personal blamelessness did not acquit him (4:4), though he held it with a good conscience as the result of honest and diligent self-examination. Paul was able to scrutinize himself at a level impossible for any other human being (2:11), and yet he was unable to judge himself fully and flawlessly. However sincerely, carefully and thoroughly he sought the truth concerning himself, his self-judgment inevitably fell short. - And even where one’s convictions and actual truth coincide, they never do so perfectly; there is always some disparity between truth as it really is and as it is discerned. So “saving faith” implies that a person’s beliefs about Christ coincide with the truth that is bound up in Him. And yet there remains a subjective quality to faith – as a matter of individuality, ignorance and immaturity. In this way, one Christian’s “faith” is not the same as another’s, and each is to hold and honor his own faith as his “own conviction before God.” Indeed, a Christian cannot yield his faith to the faith of another without committing sin, and yet this is precisely what the one passing judgment insists upon. He is demanding that the brother he’s judging submit his own faith and conscience to him (ref. Romans 14:1-23). Paul understood, practiced and preached what escapes multitudes of Christians, including many of the believers at Corinth. He recognized that even the most mature among Christ’s saints knows only “in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9) and that every believer’s transformation into Christ’s perfect humanity is always incomplete on this side of the grave (2 Corinthians 3:18; Philippians 3:10ff). As a result, the one who thinks he knows – thinks he has arrived at truth free of deficiency, admixture and error – has, by that alone, roundly refuted his own claim (1 Corinthians 8:2). Few Christians would consciously claim such knowledge, but many operate as if they had absolutely no doubt of it. Whether their leaders or their fellow believers, Christians are all too ready to bind their brethren to their own faith and conscience. To pass judgment in this way is to commit sin; how, then, do believers exercise their obligation to examine and test all things? In terms of this context, how do they identify Christ’s faithful shepherds while avoiding factional distinctions and alignments? Paul provided the way forward: Christ’s true ministers are His servants and stewards of the mysteries disclosed and fulfilled in Him: Jesus’ shepherds are men of constancy and integrity who aren’t self-seeking, but labor to see Christ’s life (not mere knowledge or conduct) perfected in His own. They are diligent to “rightly divide the word of truth” – not as men who have bound up all truth, rid themselves of all error and secured every saint’s full agreement, but as those who are faithful to discern and uphold the gospel of Jesus Christ as revealed in all the Scripture.
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:08:02 GMT -5
d. Paul understood that the Corinthians’ factions were not about promoting the men they were rallying around, but about promoting themselves. To the question of who was distinguishing them, they were compelled to answer that they were distinguishing themselves. By posturing on behalf of one against the other the Corinthians were setting themselves apart from and over one another. Making distinctions among Christ’s servant-stewards meant making distinctions among themselves, with the ultimate outcome being that each one was distinguishing himself from his brethren – setting himself apart as superior. There were actual distinctions among the body at Corinth and those who led them, but distinctions designed and put in place by God. Each individual believer was unique, but because each received his own unique endowment from God Himself. The answer the Corinthians should have given to Paul’s first question is that God was the One who distinguished them. Their personal distinction was indeed a cause for boasting, but boasting in God. The natural mind always confuses and inverts the truth, and so it was with the Corinthians’ notions respecting their own personal significance and that of others around them. The mere fact of their factions showed that they didn’t rightly regard distinctions within Christ’s body, but it was all the more evident in the way they devised their factions. Stated differently, their fleshliness was evident in the fact that they divided Christ’s body into factions, but even more so in the criteria they applied in making those divisions and ranking the men associated with them. The Corinthians’ factions showed what they believed about notability and greatness, but their perspective and criteria of judgment were antithetical to God’s. Their fleshly “wisdom” led them to assess greatness a certain way; in His wisdom, God saw things very differently. The antithesis between divine and natural wisdom has its focal point in “Jesus Christ and Him crucified” – that is, in the antithesis between the truth of the “Christ event” as the revelation and accomplishment of God’s wisdom and how men perceive, interpret and respond to it. This antithesis is at the heart of Paul’s instruction in the larger context (1:18-2:16, 3:18-23) and is the central premise behind his sarcastic reprimand. This is evident in the fact that Paul’s reprimand itself consists of a series of antitheses, each of which corresponds to the primary antithesis of spiritual and natural wisdom, but in ironical fashion: From their vantage point of fleshly wisdom, the Corinthians viewed Paul and his fellow apostles as foolish and weak derelicts, while regarding themselves as prudent, strong and distinguished. Had they applied spiritual wisdom they would have reached the opposite conclusion. And while Paul’s contrasts pertain first and foremost to the inner operations of a person’s mind (the “wisdom” his mind employs), inward reasoning inevitably finds expression in outward disposition and conduct. So it was with the Corinthians and their resultant divisions and factions; so it is with the spirituallyminded man and his conduct and the response it receives (4:9-13). 98 Three further things about Paul’s reprimand ought to be mentioned: - The first is that Paul’s series of antitheses pertains directly to two groups of individuals: Paul and Christ’s apostolic servants and the Corinthians. - Second, Paul’s hyperbolic language highlights the fact that the natural mind operates with a flawed perspective and sense of perception: It has an exaggerated (caricatured) sense of self as well as others: positively in the case of self; negatively in the case of others. Thus Paul’s language underscores the antithesis between the natural and spiritual mind; they inhabit two very different “worlds” in terms of perception and judgment. - The third issue was alluded to above, which is that Paul’s contrasts are not mere hyperbole for the sake of making a point. They express the truth that very different life experiences attend those who operate with the mind of the flesh as opposed to the mind of the spirit. From his three questions Paul moved immediately to a three-fold rhetorical pronouncement: “You are already filled, you have already become rich, you have become kings without us.” Paul’s use of asyndeton (a literary device whereby clauses are strung together without conjunctions for the sake of emphasis) shows that he intended these three statements to function as a unit in order to reinforce the same fundamental point. Paul was, as it were, hitting the Corinthians with a series of quick, sharp jabs that worked together to effect a decisive knock-out. And Paul was hitting them with what their disposition and divisions implied: their proud confidence that they were full – that they lacked nothing and were fully satiated in terms of spiritual resource in insight, maturity, gifts and wisdom (“you have become rich”) and the power and authority of judgment such resources convey (“you have become kings”). It’s important to recognize Paul’s statements as ironic and sarcastic: He was deriding the Corinthians for their self-important delusions, not affirming them. He was using what they implicitly believed about themselves in order to expose the truth that their self-judgment – as their judgment of him and others of Christ’s apostolic servants – was the perverse product of a natural mind. However much the Corinthians may have bristled at his words and felt misrepresented by them, their factions (as the other issues Paul would deal with in his letter) proved him right. The Corinthians’ attitude and conduct betrayed their sense of superiority – a superiority not shared by Paul and the other apostles: They had become rich rulers “without them.” This phrase contributes to Paul’s meaning in a couple of ways: - First, it reflects what is implied in the very notion of superiority: The one who is superior possesses something which others lack. Whether by exalting one man or depreciating the others, the Corinthians betrayed their hubris that Christ’s servants were subject to them and their judgment. 99 - Second, the phrase highlighted the crucial distinction Paul saw between himself and the Corinthians : Full of themselves, they had set him aside as unseemly and irrelevant; for his part, Paul wanted them to know that he neither claimed nor desired any share in their “fullness.” The spiritual mind sees through the ignorance and folly of fleshly thinking. Paul’s assessment of the Corinthians was antithetical to theirs; he flatly disagreed with their self-appraisal, the fundamental reason being that he had an entirely different conception of fullness, riches and authority. Consciously or otherwise, the Corinthians ascribed to themselves grounds for self-boasting; Paul looked at them and saw grounds only for rebuke and repentance. Thus his sarcastic remark: “I would indeed that you had become kings so that we also might reign with you.” Some scholars believe that Paul was drawing upon conventional philosophical notions in order to make the Corinthians see that their supposed “wisdom” was essentially no different from that promoted by the esteemed pagan philosophers of their day. For example, the Stoics believed and taught that the attainment of wisdom (self-mastery) enabled the disciple to transcend natural entanglements; in this way the “wise” attained true satisfaction (“fullness”) and mastery (“rule”) over all things. Whether or not this was Paul’s intention, the Corinthians almost certainly would have made the connection themselves. Either way, they couldn’t miss his meaning: Their convictions were merely the musings of fleshly, unspiritual minds. Paul didn’t regard the Corinthians the way they regarded themselves, as men of mastery and power. But neither did he measure himself according to their notions of greatness. Paul understood that sharing in Christ means reigning as kings, but, until the last day, sharing in Him means sharing in His reproach, suffering and death (cf. 2 Timothy 2:12; 2 Corinthians 4:1-12). The balance of Paul’s reprimand opens up his three-fold pronouncement by means of a series of paired contrasts directed alternately at the Corinthians and Christ’s apostles (4:9-13). And again, the contextual framework for those various contrasts is the radically different “grid” and sensibilities provided by the natural and spiritual mind. (Paul used the apostles in his comparison for at least two reasons: First, they epitomized the wisdom and life example which is antithetical to the natural counterparts embraced and promoted by the Corinthians; second, the apostles epitomized the witness role to which God calls His servants.) The fleshly Corinthians conceived of distinction and greatness in terms of natural human categories – things such as status, prominence, power, accomplishment and recognition. (The fleshly-mind can equally find greatness in moral and ethical virtue, philanthropy and self-sacrifice.) And so, recognizing the unique distinction of Christ’s apostles as the foundation of His Church and the stewards of His gospel and authority (cf. Acts 1:1-8, 2:42-43; Ephesians 2:11-22; Revelation 21:14), they naturally assessed a man’s apostolic claim on the basis of that person’s conformity to their notions of greatness. This is precisely why Paul appeared to many of them to be an inferior apostle, if not an outright imposter. 100 Appraised through their natural grid, Paul (and those apostolic figures who followed in his steps) was a painful embarrassment. By his own account, Paul was a man beset by weakness and physical and material lack, a man without distinction and personal resources – indeed a virtual beggar, easily ignored, brushed aside or crushed under the feet of men. He was an unimpressive and infirmed figure who seemed to also possess a weak inner constitution: a man who wouldn’t even stand up for himself when reviled, slandered or persecuted. Great men – and surely greatness characterizes Christ’s chosen apostles – are men of power, authority, significance and esteem; men of notable distinction and reputation who are acknowledged and served by others and who exercise their prerogative as commanding figures. Is it any wonder that, to the natural mind – even when it operates within Christians, men like Paul are regarded as “the scum of the world” (refuse or uncleanness to be purged and disposed of) and “the dregs of all things” (that which is scraped away, such as the dirt from one’s shoes)? Many among the Corinthians didn’t regard men like Paul and the lives they lived as in any way indicative of greatness, and Paul himself knew better than anyone how much his life deviated from natural human conceptions of distinction and renown. He had no delusions about the difficult and ignominious life he was living in the service of Christ. The Lord had told him at the outset what he was appointed for (Acts 9:1-16), and the ensuing years had given Paul more insight and clarity regarding the “glory” bound up in the apostolic calling: Jesus’ apostles were, in many ways, the least distinguished among His saints; as stewards of His gospel and examples to His people, the apostles were preeminently men put on humiliating display before the whole creation as those “condemned to death” (4:9; cf. 2 Corinthians 1-4, 11). Richard Hays’ comments are illuminating: “Paul offers the image of himself and the other apostles as prisoners sentenced to death. The image is taken from the well-known practice of the Roman ‘triumph,’ in which the victorious general would parade through the streets in a chariot, with the leaders of the defeated army trailing along in the rear of the procession, to be ‘exhibited’ and humiliated as a public ‘spectacle’ on their way to imprisonment or execution… It is a stunning image, not least because Paul suggests that it is God who has won the victory and made a spectacle of the apostolic prisoners. The Corinthians, by contrast, fancy themselves as leaders of the procession, victorious kings who therefore, Paul suggests, are not subject to the authority of God.” (emphasis in original) Paul employed this same imagery in his second Corinthian letter, and there he provides crucial insight into why God orchestrates His victory procession with His servants exhibited as a public spectacle of humiliation and ignominy: It is in order that they should bear Christ’s fragrance before the world – the fragrance that directs men toward Him (2:14). God intends for His servants to bear witness to His Son and the gospel of His triumph; if He were to display them to the world in any other fashion He would have them bearing witness to themselves. 101 The critical point is that the watching world witnesses God’s gospel of His victory in Christ primarily through the living witness of his heralds, not what they say. And Christ’s victory came through the weakness and “foolishness” of His humble, obedient self-offering (1:23; cf. Philippians 2:5-8; also 1 Peter 2:18-23). Ironically, defeat, debasement and death are at the heart of God’s absolute triumph; to employ Paul’s imagery, in the first instance God’s victory parade before the world had Him leading in His triumph His own Son – humiliated, crushed and led to His death. Paul recognized that he and the other apostles were charged with testifying to “Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (2:2), which meant testifying to God’s triumph through weakness, humiliation and death. The gospel sets forth the truth that God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, the weak things to shame the strong, and the base and despised things of the world to nullify the things the world greatly esteems (1:27-28). How, then, can those who are Christ’s servants and stewards of His gospel adorn themselves with the world’s trappings – its wisdom, strength, and values – and expect that they will bear Christ’s fragrance and so lead men to Him? Approached from a different vantage point, the gospel heralds the “good news” that God has triumphed to usher in His kingdom of the new creation. This kingdom doesn’t have its essence or genesis in this world and its notions of power and dominion (John 18:36; cf. Luke 22:24-30); it reflects and operates according to God’s wisdom in Christ, which appears as foolishness to human “wisdom” (1:20-25, 2:6-9). God’s servants are charged with heralding this kingdom, and this amounts to proclaiming the truth of new creation. But this renewal exists only in those who share in Christ’s life by His Spirit. This means that Christians’ proclamation to men of the gospel of the kingdom is their testimony to the truth of new creation as it is embodied in their own persons and the community of believers. And their embodiment of new creation is precisely the life of Christ in them, for He is the essence and first fruits of new creation. Thus Christ’s witnesses testify to the gospel of new creation by manifesting in their own persons His life; they proclaim His gospel by bearing His fragrance. And they bear His fragrance by manifesting to the world the truth of Jesus Christ – that which the world regards as weakness, foolishness and worthlessness, namely His ignominy, reproach, suffering and death (2 Corinthians 4). Any other witness is witness to self; it is anti-Christ (ref. 11:12-15 within 2 Corinthians 10-12). In this way Paul’s rebuke pierced to the heart of the Corinthian factions: The issue wasn’t selfish squabbling or even arrogance; it was the truth of the gospel and its testimony that were at stake. The Corinthian factions betrayed the mind which appraises God’s servants according to natural values and considerations. This was why Paul was maligned and marginalized in favor of “eminent apostles” – men who bore the marks of natural “greatness” in contrast to the counter-intuitive, foolish and weak greatness of the selfgiving, dying Jesus. The Corinthians imagined themselves standing with such eminent men at the head of God’s triumphal procession, but the Lord they professed to serve and bear witness to had, like Paul, been exhibited at the rear, a man condemned to die.
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:09:40 GMT -5
16. Paul’s sharp reprimand is the climax of his treatment of the Corinthian factions. By it he showed how radically the natural mind is set in antithesis to the way things really are – to the truth as God knows it to be. Paul made his point by contrasting his own “greatness” with the Corinthians’ standard of apostolic eminence. By their measure, Paul and those like him were found severely wanting; indeed the Corinthians were compelled to question Paul’s very claim to apostleship. Their minds had no avenue to reconcile apostolic eminence and authority and men who were, in earthly terms, the “scum of the world.” The Corinthians grossly misjudged Christ’s apostles, and their misjudgment was fundamental to their divisions and factions. They were rallying around men who best satisfied their personal criteria of greatness, and their posturing was seriously undermining the life, unity and integrity of the body of Christ in Corinth. But for all that, there was an even greater evil in their thinking and conduct: Whether or not they recognized it, the Corinthian zeal for “God and truth” was making true witness to Christ and His gospel impossible; quite the opposite, they were proclaiming a false, anti-Christ gospel among themselves and to the watching world. Their natural-mindedness left them bearing their own fragrance rather than Christ’s. Paul revealed to the Corinthians that they were guilty of offenses beyond what they could have imagined and which must have shocked them to consider. They believed they were promoting a high view of God’s Church by rallying around its most eminent leaders; what they were really doing was defiling and working toward the ruination of His holy sanctuary (3:16-23). So also they believed they were honoring Christ’s gospel and its mission by exalting those apostolic witnesses who appeared to be its most notable, gifted and powerful emissaries; instead, they were denigrating Christ and His gospel and directing men away from Him by bearing false witness to the world (1:17-2:5). a. Given the gravity of the issues and their implications for the Church and its witness, Paul’s use of blunt and sarcastic language with the Corinthians was entirely appropriate. He knew that a gentler and more subtle approach would likely be lost upon them; they needed to understand the seriousness of this situation and how seriously Paul himself was taking it. He was determined to strip the veil from their hubris and self-delusions and drop them to their knees, but not for the sake of shaming them. No doubt his words provoked shame in at least some of his readers, but Paul actually had a different motivation and goal. Shaming the Corinthians may have made a point and achieved an effect, but only as a hollow victory; Paul’s reprimand was a ministration of love. What he sought was godly conviction and repentance befitting the saints of God and the leading of the mind of Christ. Paul’s intention was admonition (4:14a): instruction that corrects and redirects rather than merely inform and prick the conscience. b. Paul’s reprimand was the faithfulness of a devoted father (4:14b-15). He wasn’t interested in merely unmasking the Corinthians’ foolishness and sin or even in vindicating his apostleship; he was chastening them as his beloved children. Following his heavenly Father’s pattern of love and nurture, Paul’s goal for the Corinthians was liberation and restoration from captivity to the flesh and its fruit. 103 God was the Corinthians’ true Father, but Paul was their father “in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” He’d, as it were, begotten them as children for God through the ministration of the gospel of power (cf. 1:18 with Romans 1:16-17). The Corinthians would have many pedagogues over time (note Paul’s rhetorical ten thousand), but all pedagogues serve the same function: They care for and train up children who have but one father, and Paul was that man (cf. Philippians 2:19-22; 1 Timothy 1:2; Titus 1:4). Many servants of Christ had and would instruct and lead the Corinthians, but it remained that they had only one spiritual father. c. In the very nature of the case, children share in the substance and likeness of their father. There is, therefore, an intrinsic integrity – a rightness or righteousness – when children manifest in themselves the likeness of their father. So it was that Paul, the spiritual father of the saints at Corinth, could exhort them to be imitators of him (4:16). Viewed within the larger context, Paul was calling the Corinthians to perceive, judge and act as he did, through the mind of Christ. - Their natural-mindedness amounted to a contrariness on their part; they were at odds with their father Paul, whose thinking and judgment accorded with the wisdom given him by the Spirit’s leading (2:6-13). - Imitating Paul, then, meant renouncing their fleshliness and embracing the wisdom in which he walked. This wisdom allowed him to appraise greatness the way his Father does: as “bearing in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus should be manifested in our mortal flesh.” Imitating Paul meant (and means) recognizing and living out the truth that greatness is Christ-likeness attained through personal deconstruction and reconstruction by the Spirit, not the perfecting of the edifice of self in accordance with human standards (2 Corinthians 4:6ff; cf. Philippians 3). - If the Corinthians became imitators of their spiritual father’s wisdom and understanding, their attitudes and manner of life would also be brought in line with the mind of Christ. They’d recognize their stupid arrogance and see the folly and evil of boasting in men; they’d discern the true, counterintuitive greatness bound up in Christ and Him crucified and so naturally order their lives and witness accordingly. They’d willingly join Paul at the end of God’s victory procession as men condemned to die. The obvious implication of these considerations – one made clear by Paul in his instruction elsewhere – is that he was calling the Corinthians to imitate him as he imitated Christ. Which is to say, Paul was calling upon the Corinthians to live out Christ’s life and mind in them just as he was. They, too, were sharers in Christ by His indwelling and renewing Spirit, and so imitating Paul meant following after him as a man yielded to the life of Christ in him. It wasn’t clones or mimics of the man Saul of Tarsus that Paul sought, but saints of God living into the truth as it is in Christ: mature children who would follow upon his faith and love and the selfgiving humility of true wisdom (cf. 11:1; Ephesians 5:1; 1 Thessalonians 1:6). 104 d. Paul was deeply troubled about the Corinthian church. His strained relationship with them was certainly a central concern for him, but Paul recognized that that particular issue, as all the problems at Corinth, was symptomatic of their fleshliness. The core malaise wasn’t bad conduct or dysfunctional relationships, but flawed judgment; the Corinthians were reasoning and functioning as “mere men” (3:1-4). And so, with an eye to healing his relationship with them, but out of ultimate concern for the larger issue, Paul informed the Corinthians that he was sending to them his young associate Timothy (4:17). Most likely this refers to the same episode Luke noted in Acts 19:21-22. Paul penned this Corinthian letter from Ephesus during his three-year ministry there, and Luke recorded that Paul sent Timothy and Erastus back into Macedonia during the latter part of his time at Ephesus. Nothing more is said about the two men’s travels in Macedonia, except that Timothy was with Paul when he later departed Greece and headed north toward his eventual goal of returning to Jerusalem with the churches’ offering to the saints there (20:1-4). Some scholars believe Timothy carried the first Corinthian epistle with him, although 16:10 clearly makes that view problematic. (Paul’s wording here also seems inconsistent with 16:10 – “if Timothy comes” versus “I have sent Timothy,” but this discrepancy can be resolved in various ways.) Whatever the relative timing of the arrival of Timothy and Paul’s letter, Paul wanted the Corinthians to understand why Timothy had come to them; Paul had sent him as his representative to “remind them of his ways which are in Christ.” Paul didn’t clarify what he meant by “his ways in Christ,” but the statement itself and the context reveal his general meaning. First, his “ways” were the subject of his instruction in all the churches, leading to two further insights: Whatever these “ways” were, they could be communicated through verbal instruction. Second, Paul regarded them as of first importance since he made them a component of his instruction in every church body. Some hold that Paul was referring to instruction in Christian morality, but the context argues for a broader understanding. - To a significant extent the Corinthian church was estranged from Paul. Some regarded him as, at best, an inferior and insignificant apostle; others questioned his apostolic status altogether. And questioning the credibility and even the legitimacy of his apostleship, it was a short leap for the Corinthians to start questioning his integrity and motives. - The Corinthians were at odds with Paul, but because they were viewing him with natural minds. His person, life and circumstance didn’t coincide with their notions of eminence, and that discontinuity left them judging, not their own criteria and conclusions, but Paul himself and his apostolic calling and faithfulness. The Corinthians had formed and nurtured an impression of Paul in his absence, and over time that impression supplanted the truth that was Paul (4:9ff; 2 Corinthians 10-12). 105 In their minds (and no doubt reinforced by their interaction with each other), the Corinthians had made Paul into someone he was not, and Paul was wise enough to know that the only way to shatter their false image was for him to reintroduce himself to them and reestablish the truth of who he was. Short of him coming in person, the next best thing was to send someone to Corinth who could accurately represent him to them – not only by speaking of him correctly, but by modeling Paul himself. This is precisely what Paul had in mind, evident in his language of father and son. Like all sons, Timothy was of his father and bore an essential likeness to his father. Such was Paul’s confidence in this young man: He believed that the Corinthians would be reminded of the truth of his person and ways by hearing and observing his “faithful child in the Lord.” Like Timothy, the saints at Corinth had a righteous obligation to show themselves faithful children of their spiritual father (and therefore of their heavenly Father), but that could not happen until they were reacquainted with the true Paul and his life in Christ Jesus. e. Paul completed his treatment of the Corinthian factions and transitioned into his next subject by means of a final warning (4:18-21). He was sending Timothy to Corinth, but with the promise that he himself would follow shortly. Moreover, he was coming as a devoted father fully committed to their correction; whether by letter or in person, Paul’s mind and ministry to them were the same. Their factions highlighted the spirit of arrogance among them, and if they did not deal with it by the time he arrived he most certainly would, and would do so decisively. Paul previously identified this arrogance as the underlying issue in the Corinthians aligning themselves with one man against others (4:6). That same sense is clearly in view here, but now more specifically in relation to Paul himself. Corinth had its “Paul group” (1:12-17), but that meant that the church also had many others who were aligned against Paul. But as far as he was concerned, it made no difference (3:4ff): Whether disposed toward him or against him on behalf of others, Paul recognized that all such “boasting in men” is a matter of arrogance, and he wasn’t about to put up with it; he was going to confront their arrogant presumption of power with that which is power indeed. Many at Corinth were “puffed up” – men who were full of themselves and all too happy to divide and hurt Christ’s body for the sake of their self-assured notions and beliefs. They had made their judgment synonymous with truth, and therefore their convictions synonymous with righteousness. At Corinth (as in every church), natural minds were striving to supplant Christ as Lord, and Paul was committed to vanquishing them. For, though the natural mind ascribes power to itself, it is actually powerless: Its only resource is words, and its “power” consists in its ability to use words to deceive the naïve and foolish. Words have no power – truth does, and the reason is that the Spirit of truth stands behind the truth and empowers it. Thus natural wisdom is empty and impotent; its only power is the power of deception. But spiritual wisdom has power because it reflects the mind of Christ: the truth of God that is His wisdom and power in Jesus. Paul was coming to Corinth and he’d confront their arrogance in the effectual power of God’s gospel; he desired to do so in gentleness, but, for Christ’s sake, he was fully prepared to bring a rod.
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:11:21 GMT -5
B. Immoral Marital Relationship (5:1-13) From the problem of factions in the church, Paul immediately turned his attention to another serious concern. It involved a particular individual in the Corinthian congregation, and most likely the group from Chloe’s house also reported this situation to Paul. (For various reasons, it’s doubtful that the letter from the Corinthians contained this report.) 1. The matter involved sexual immorality, specifically that a certain individual “had his father’s wife” (5:1). At first glance it may appear that this was an adulterous affair, but Paul’s language and the context argue otherwise. First of all, Paul employed a noun that refers generically to sexual impurity rather than marital infidelity, which is typically expressed by a different noun. Second, Paul’s verb and grammar indicate an ongoing relationship, which is highly unlikely in the case of a man having an affair with a woman who is married to his father – even if that woman was not his biological mother. As well, the context is clear that the Corinthians were well aware and approving of this relationship, which meant that it was manifested openly and unashamedly; one could hardly imagine such a situation in the instance of a woman engaged in an ongoing affair with her husband’s son (let alone an incestuous relationship with her own son). The best indication from all the evidence is that this particular individual was having an open, romantic relationship with his stepmother following either the death of his father or her divorce from him. Assuming this arrangement, the next question to be answered is how specifically Paul conceived of its offense. a. This arrangement rules out consanguineous incest, although that certainly suits Paul’s depiction of a notorious sexual relationship rejected by virtually all cultures. (Note that Paul referred to this woman as the wife of the father and not the man’s mother.). Neither can one make age difference between the two the issue; it was common in Greco-Roman culture for men to take much younger second wives, making it likely that these two individuals were reasonably close in age. Finally, the offense can’t be adultery since there was no marital infidelity. b. One possible answer is that the man and his stepmother had failed (or refused) to marry and were therefore guilty of fornication. Another possibility is that the man was married and so was effectively holding this woman as his mistress. But in this case Paul would have likely used the language of adultery rather than sexual impurity. Moreover, neither of these scenarios seems plausible in view of the Corinthians’ open approval of the relationship. c. The best answer is that the arrangement described above has itself been widely rejected by human cultures throughout recorded history. This isn’t universally the case, but it certainly was under Jewish law (cf. Leviticus 18:8; Deuteronomy 27:20; note that the law of the redeemer kinsman didn’t allow for a man to marry his stepmother – Deuteronomy 25:5) and in many Gentile cultures. The crucial question here is whether such marital arrangements were outlawed (or at least frowned upon) by the Greco-Roman culture of first-century Corinth (ref. 5:1). 107 In this regard, a second century Roman jurist named Gaius wrote: “It is illegal to marry a father’s or mother’s sister… nor can I marry her who was at one time my mother-in-law or stepmother.” Likewise a citation from Cicero (a prominent Roman philosopher, lawyer and statesman of the first century B.C.) points in the same direction: “And so mother-in-law marries son-in-law, with none to bless, none to sanction the union, and amid nought but general foreboding. Oh! To think of the woman’s sin, unbelievable, unheard of in all experience save for this single instance!” Cicero’s scenario isn’t identical to the one Paul was addressing, but it falls into the same general class of marital arrangements. 2. Paul rightly found fault with the man himself, but he equally indicted the whole Corinthian congregation (5:2). What ought to have provoked deep grief and vexation in their hearts was met with happy acceptance. The Corinthian believers were abiding what their pagan countrymen would not, and that alone demonstrated the gravity of their offense. If Greco-Roman culture in general gave a wink and nod to all manner of sexual activity, Corinth virtually enshrined it. The Corinthian believers resided in a city notorious throughout the empire for its unbridled expressions of sexuality, so much so that Corinth became a well-known virtual metaphor for sexual sin. God intended the saints at Corinth to testify to His Son and His gospel by bearing His fragrance in their city; by this relationship and their disposition toward it, the Corinthian church was standing together with their pagan countrymen in testimony against the gospel. As with their divisions, so with this situation: The Corinthians were effectively bearing their own fragrance – the fragrance of the natural man – and so lying against the truth of the gospel of new creation and their participation in it. They were “walking like mere men” (3:3) and Paul recognized this to be, at bottom, a matter of arrogance. By again raising the subject of arrogance (4:6, 18-19), Paul was indicating that he regarded the present issue to be another manifestation of natural wisdom. If the Corinthians’ factions displayed the arrogance that is the hallmark of the natural mind, so did this unholy relationship and the church’s response to it. a. Some have conceived of this arrogance in terms of a high-handed disregard for God’s authority and standards. The idea is that the Corinthians knew exactly what they should have done but stubbornly refused to do so. This is a convenient interpretation, but one that is superficial and short-sighted. More than that, it fails to capture the real issue and so misses the serious implication for all believers. b. Paul has linked this notion of arrogance with the intrinsic way the natural mind functions. He was speaking of arrogance in terms of its essential pathology, not its symptomatic expressions in things such as boasting or bravado. It speaks to the quality of being full of oneself (literally, self-inflated or “puffed up”), and thus reflects the self-orbiting frame of reference which defines man in his alienation from God, and which also marks Christians who fail to employ the mind of Christ (the “spiritual mind” – 2:14-3:3). 108 As with their factions, so here: The Corinthian arrogance was not high-handed rebellion; it was that they were perceiving and appraising this particular situation with natural minds. Had they been viewing things with a spiritual mind as Paul was, their hearts would have matched his in vexed sorrow rather than happy acceptance. They regarded their factional alignments as evidence of their wisdom and maturity, and so it was with this relationship between a member of their body and his stepmother. The Corinthians weren’t refusing to condemn what they knew to be unholy; they believed their approval showed mature and wise understanding and they praised themselves for it (5:6). b. A spiritual mind applied to this situation would have left the Corinthians deeply grieved, but it would also have moved them to expel the immoral brother from their congregation. This was Paul’s judgment in the Spirit, and he didn’t need to be present or investigate further to know that this is what Christ required (5:3-5). These verses are challenging and subject to nuanced interpretation. The primary difficulty lies in the relationship between Paul’s various clauses and phrases, especially those in verse 4. But however they are related, the basic meaning remains the same: Paul wasn’t physically present with the Corinthians, but he was with them in spirit. Most importantly, he was present with them in the power of Christ Himself – the One who is Lord of His Church (“our Lord Jesus”), and it was in His authority (“the name of our Lord Jesus”) and power that the church was to assemble and carry out the Lord’s will as Paul discerned and prescribed it. 3. Assessing the situation with the mind of Christ and acting in His authority and power, Paul had already expelled the offender from the assembly and the Corinthians were to see his determination realized. In this, too, they were to be imitators of him (ref. again 4:14- 16). Paul wasn’t directing them to take their own action; they were to act on his behalf, carrying out his judgment as Christ’s apostle and their spiritual father. And that meant they were to act with their father’s understanding, motivation and goal. And Paul’s goal wasn’t condemnation, but consummation; it was grounded in his assumption that the offender was a true son of God. Regarding this man as a Christian, Paul understood this action as purgative rather than punitive; the purpose for expulsion wasn’t to punish, but to purge the offending brother of his fleshliness (“delivering him to Satan” as giving him over to the realm where Satan’s mind and power rule – Ephesians 2:1-2; 1 Timothy 1:20) with a view toward his final salvation on the last day (5:5). 4. Paul’s judgment and determination reflected the mind of Christ Himself, and so were animated and informed by love (cf. 2 Corinthians 2:1-11). This was true with respect to the subjects of this expulsion as much as to its object: By insisting that the Corinthians carry out his demand, Paul was confronting and addressing the fleshliness of the whole congregation and not just that of the offending individual. The latter’s fleshliness led him into an unholy relationship; theirs led them to embrace him in it. Thus Paul’s prescription pertained to the entire Corinthian church, as did its goal of repentance and restoration. The offender needed to be expelled, but the whole body needed to expel him together, united in one mind and one understanding and sharing the same goal. 109 The entire congregation needed to unite in this action, but not as the outcome of a lengthy season of discussion and debate. Paul was calling them to implement his determination, not counsel together toward their own consensus. There was no need for discussion, and, beyond that, there was an urgency about the matter. At least two things contributed to Paul’s sense of urgency: The first is implicit in the larger context, which is that this situation, like the Corinthian factions, jeopardized the church’s witness; the gospel and its testimony to the world were at stake. The second reason is explicit, which is Paul’s recognition of the polluting and corrupting effect of sin in the church (5:6-8). a. In making his point Paul drew on the imagery of leaven in a lump of dough. Yeast is introduced into one part of the lump, but from there – and entirely on its own – it extends its influence until ultimately the whole lump is leavened. So it is with sin in the Church, and notably in this instance the sin of boasting. Arrogance was still the issue in Paul’s mind, but here he shifted his terminology and so his emphasis. The previous term (4:6, 18-19, 5:2) emphasizes the internal disposition of arrogance (being full of oneself), while the present term highlights the object, content, or expression of arrogance (that in which one boasts). Paul recognized that the Corinthians’ boasting would have a leavening effect on the whole church, and this is an important dynamic that needs to be clearly understood. In Jewish law and sensibilities, leaven represented impurity and, in its physical operations, was understood to have a corrupting effect. That is, once introduced into another substance, it eventually affects the whole, rendering it impure. Thus most of Israel’s grain offerings needed to be unleavened (Leviticus 2:1ff, 6:14ff; the peace offering and Pentecost offering were notable exceptions). The Law used leaven as a metaphor for the infectious quality of human impurity, but it also emphasized this principle directly by its prescriptions for dealing with offenders within the assembly. In many instances, such individuals were “cut off” from Israel (ref. Leviticus 7:20-27, 18:1-30, 20:1-22, 22:1-3); in others they were punished with swift and unmerciful retribution – not just to punish the violator, but in order that the rest should be fearful of doing the same thing (Deuteronomy 17:8-13, 19:15-21; 21:18-21; etc.). God wanted Israel to understand that the violation (the uncleanness) of the one implicated the whole and, left unaddressed, would have a defiling and debilitating effect on the entire congregation. The reason God demanded swift and severe treatment of “sin in the camp” is that He understands its power to corrupt. In the case of the natural mind, the tension between pure and impure always equalizes in one direction: That which is pure never purifies the unclean; the impure always pollutes the clean. Moreover, the Scripture shows that this dynamic operates in two important dimensions: The first pertains to the interaction between individuals. The impurity of one person affects and ultimately infects those around him. They are seduced and emboldened by the apparent rewards of sin, both in obtaining desired ends and in avoiding bad consequences (cf. 15:33 with Deuteronomy 13:6-11; Psalm 12:8). 110 The second involves the interaction between persons and things. This dimension is less obvious but critically important because it exposes the reason the unclean always prevails against the clean. It does so by highlighting the truth that uncleanness doesn’t inhere in things, but in the mind of the one interacting with them. God sought in various ways to teach this truth to the sons of Israel, who couldn’t see that their “clean” conduct and conformity to divine prescription were defiled by the impurity of their minds (Haggai 2:10-14). The natural mind instinctively looks outside itself to detect uncleanness, and thus the sons of Israel linked their own punishment in expulsion from the land with the disobedience of their forefathers: Their fathers had eaten sour grapes, and now it was their teeth that were being set on edge (cf. Ezekiel 18:1-32 with 24:1-25). Hadn’t they been meticulous in their observance? And that being the case, they must be suffering for the sins of their fathers. They couldn’t see that all their holy exercises were unclean because their hearts were defiled (cf. Isaiah 1:10-13, 29:13-14, 66:1-4). Paul, however, understood that impurity resides in persons and not things, and he insisted that the saints recognize it and respond accordingly (cf. 1 Timothy 4:1-6; Titus 1:15). He knew that purity in the Church wouldn’t come from submitting to the natural wisdom of “do not handle, do not taste, do not touch,” but from putting on the Lord Jesus Christ – from having hearts and minds fixed on things above (Colossians 2:20-3:11; cf. Romans 13:8-14; Galatians 5:1-25). The impure always corrupts what it “touches” – whether a person or a thing – because of the relationship between impurity and the natural mind. The natural mind is itself impure and corrupts other people by playing on their own fleshliness; so also it defiles things because it perceives and appraises them through its own impurity and makes them servants of uncleanness. Paul recognized that impurity is a function of the fleshly mind, and so realized that purging it from the Corinthian church required more than merely expelling the offender. That action needed to express the mind of Christ operating in the church: The leaven of arrogance – not just a man – needed to be expelled from the assembly. b. Paul communicated this to the Corinthians by drawing on the imagery of the Passover. Of all of Israel’s “unleavened” holy rituals, Passover was the most rigorous. Not only was unleavened bread eaten at the Passover meal, all leaven was purged from the assembly of Israel for seven days. Yahweh’s covenant “son” was to be wholly unleavened for the entire duration of the Feast, and anyone who ingested leaven was expelled from the covenant people (Exodus 12:1-20). Such was the Law’s prescription, and Paul understood that the Passover – in its historical meaning, particulars and symbolism – has now been fulfilled in Christ. He is the unleavened Israel as well as the unleavened Passover itself, and His people have been made a new, unleavened lump in Him (cf. 6:9-11; 2 Corinthians 5:17). The assembly of the first-born is unleavened because it partakes in Christ, God’s true Passover. But, like its Israelite counterpart, it must continue to keep the feast – not as an annual, week-long ritual, but as the perpetual obligation to “clean out the old leaven”: to be what it is in the purity of integrity and truth.
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:13:05 GMT -5
5. Paul’s directive regarding this man was consistent with his previous instruction to the Corinthians (5:9), notably in an earlier letter to them (a letter lost to the Church, providentially omitted from the New Testament canon). Somehow Paul had been made aware that they’d misunderstood that letter and its exhortation concerning association with immoral people. Apparently the Corinthians concluded that Paul was forbidding them all interaction with all such persons, which was not at all his meaning. (Some scholars speculate that this misinterpretation was intentional – that the Corinthians were intentionally employing the reductio ad absurdum argument: reducing Paul’s instruction to its supposed logical absurdity in order to justify rejecting it.) a. Whether or not the misunderstanding was intentional, Paul made sure he corrected it. He wasn’t calling the Corinthians (or any believers) to refuse interaction with all ungodly people; indeed, such an obligation enjoys its own reductio ad absurdum fallacy: In the very nature of the case, the world is comprised of “worldly” people, so that the only way to avoid associating with them is to remove oneself entirely from this world, either by dying or by renouncing all contact with non-Christians (5:9-10). Even if one could achieve such isolation, it violates the Church’s fundamental responsibility of witness. Christians are to be salt and light, not a lamp hidden under a basket; as Abraham’s true children, they are to bear Christ’s fragrance and thus mediate His blessing to all men (ref. Matthew 5:14-16; cf. also 1 Corinthians 7:12-16, 9:19-23; 2 Corinthians 5:18-20). b. Paul’s instruction regarding separation pertained to the ungodly in the Church, not in the outside world. But precisely because it implicates relationships within Christ’s body, it is crucial that Paul’s meaning not be misconstrued (ref. 3:16-17). The first thing to note ought to be the most obvious, which is that Paul’s list of impieties (vv. 10-11) is representative rather than exhaustive. He wasn’t providing the Corinthians with a catalog of sins which demand the punishment of excommunication, but a general depiction of the fleshliness which defines the natural man and so marks the natural mind – the fleshliness the Church must not abide (cf. 6:9-10; Romans 13:12-14; Galatians 5:19-21; 1 Peter 4:1-3; etc.). Secondly, Paul’s instruction pertains to individuals whom the assembly has come to regard as brothers in Christ. The NAS rendering – “a so-called brother” – is unfortunate because it connotes cynical disbelief on Paul’s part. Paul wasn’t speaking pejoratively or derisively; he was merely indicating that his instruction pertains to ungodliness among individuals in the Church who are named in the body – by the saints and by themselves – as brothers in the Lord Jesus (ref. the KJV, NKJV, ASV and ESV translations). Third, and perhaps most important, Paul wasn’t demanding that there be no further interaction between Christ’s saints and the sinning brother. He wasn’t calling for complete separation, but the severing of Christian fellowship, and that with the goal of ultimately securing the offender’s repentance and restoration to full fellowship (ref. again 5:5 and 2 Corinthians 2:1-11). 112 This is evident from the broader context, but also from Paul’s language. His verb (here rendered associate) refers literally to the intermixing of individual substances, as when ingredients are blended together in a medicinal potion. It’s noteworthy that Paul is the only New Testament writer to use this verb, and he employed it solely with respect to relationships in the Church (cf. 2 Thessalonians 3:14 as the only other instance outside this passage). This singular usage highlights, on the one hand, the way Paul conceived the intimacy that exists between the members of Christ’s body, and, on the other, what he meant when he called for such “mixing together” to be withheld from a sinning brother. This same meaning is reinforced by Paul’s insistence that this non-association include the severing of table fellowship (5:11b). The issue here wasn’t merely sitting down at the same table, but the fellowship embodied in Christians taking their meals together (cf. Acts 2:46-47), especially as this table fellowship had its centerpiece in the observance of the Lord’s Supper (11:20-34). This finds a counterpart in John’s instruction to the saints to not welcome into their homes those who’ve strayed from the true doctrine of Christ (2 John 9-10). His point was not to keep such persons outside of one’s house, but to withhold the hospitality of Christian fellowship from them. (Some Christians have wrongly used this passage to justify their refusal to speak with cultists who appear at their door.) Christ’s Church is a holy (unleavened) assembly precisely and solely because it consists of persons who are members of Him (cf. John 6:53ff; Romans 8:9; Galatians 2:20; Colossians 3:1-3). But for that very reason, and in that specific sense, they are members of one another – members whose individual existence is bound up in the whole (cf. 12:12-27; Ephesians 1:22-23, 2:11-22; 1 Peter 2:4-5). As such, the severing of fellowship serves two vitally important purposes: First, it attests, affirms and preserves the holiness of Christ’s Church, for its own sake and for the sake of its witness to the watching world. But second, it serves the health of the body by working toward repentance and restoration in its erring members. c. These considerations provide a solid foundation for interpreting Paul’s closing clarification regarding the Church’s obligation toward sin as it manifests itself in the Church and in the world (5:12-13). The saints are to judge those within the assembly, leaving to God the judgment of those outside. Here, too, several observations are important to note: The first is that the context explains what Paul meant by the Church judging those within its ranks. This judgment is neither absolute condemnation of erring brothers nor the arrogant “passing of judgment” Paul previously decried (4:5). It is a ministration of spiritual wisdom and love: love for Christ, love for His Church, and love for its individual members. It is not the natural-minded judgment which defiles and tears down Christ’s Church by usurping His authority, legislating consciences and constructing coalitions around personal convictions, notions and agendas; it is the spiritual judgment which honors and edifies the Church, regarding it and its individual members as “holy to the Lord.” 113 The saints’ judgment of the immoral and ungodly is restricted to those within the Church precisely because of what that judgment presumes, what it entails, and what it seeks. This judgment involves the severing of Christian fellowship by expelling an unrepentant brother from the assembly of believers. Obviously this form of judgment cannot extend to people outside the Church. Moreover, it has its goal in the preservation of the Church’s well-being and purity along with the erring person’s repentance and restoration to fellowship; this, too does not apply to those outside the body of Christ. Christians cannot execute this sort of judgment with respect to unbelievers because it doesn’t pertain to them; unbelievers don’t reside in the realm where this judgment exists and operates. Thus even God Himself cannot judge those outside the Church in this way, but this doesn’t mean such persons are exempt from judgment altogether. They are, however, exempt from all judgment at the hands of Christ’s Church; God alone is their judge. This observation is critical because so many Christians fall prey to the tendency to pass judgment on unbelievers. They make themselves the judge in a myriad of ways, from concluding (tacitly or overtly) regarding a person’s “reprobation,” to making judgments regarding a particular individual’s sin and guilt before God, to calling God to execute sentence upon them (cf. Luke 9:51-54; this attitude is exposed, for instance, by the way many Christians use the imprecatory psalms). Christians are not men’s judges, but they are God’s heralds; their responsibility is to proclaim that the living God has judged all things in His Son and that He righteously commands all people to obtain forgiveness, cleansing and newness of life in Him (2 Corinthians 5:9-21). For those who disobey this gospel, there is an appointed day of judgment and retribution (cf. Matthew 7:21-23, 25:31-46; John 6:22-40; Acts 14:14-17, 17:24-31; 2 Thessalonians 1:6-10; 1 Peter 2:6-8, 4:17). The last observation concerns Paul’s employment of the Deuteronomic prescription for dealing with impiety/impurity in the assembly of Israel (5:13b). This prescription occurs repeatedly in Deuteronomy (ref. 13:1-5, 17:1-13, 19:11- 20, 22:13-24, 24:7), and Paul’s citation follows the Septuagint rendering in these passages, with two exceptions: He substituted the aorist imperative for the future indicative, and he altered the verb number from singular to plural. These changes don’t alter the meaning (let alone assault scriptural inspiration), but merely reflect that Paul was applying this prescription as a directive to the Corinthian church. As with the Passover, Paul drew upon this aspect of Israel’s Law fully recognizing its salvation-historical relevance to the Church. The Law of Moses – Yahweh’s covenant with Israel – described and prescribed Israel’s identity and role as His son, and fundamental to the nation’s sonship was its obligation of sanctity. Israel was “holy to the Lord” – a people set apart to Him for His own possession according to His covenant election of Abraham (cf. Exodus 3:1-8, 6:1-8, 19:1-7; Deuteronomy 4:1-20, 7:1-8; cf. also Psalm 105; Isaiah 41:1-9, 51:1-3; etc.). 114 The critical point of this is that sanctity in the assembly was central to Israel’s self-understanding and integrity – not only in terms of its relationship with Yahweh as His consecrated, firstborn son, but also for the sake of fulfilling its election and calling with respect to the world: By conforming to its identity as the son of God, Israel would testify of its Father to the nations around them. The crucial implication of this – and one that is routinely missed in the Church – is that Israel’s sanctity didn’t concern, nor was it determined by, conformity to a moral code within the Law of Moses. The nation’s obligation of purity derived from its identity and mission, and those things were the measure of its conformity: As to identity, Israel was God’s elect son (cf. Exodus 4:21-23; Deuteronomy 7:6- 8; Isaiah 1:1-4; Hosea 11:1-2), and, in the very nature of the case, sons possess an essential likeness to their father. (Note that Israel’s sonship and its destiny in Jesus Christ – who is the embodiment of Israel – presupposed man’s creation in the divine image and likeness. Man was created as image-bearer to be image-son, which sonship is realized in Jesus Christ – first in His own person, and then in those sharing in His life as the Last Adam. Jesus is the origin and destiny of man.) Israel’s sanctity concerned, and was determined by, its integrity as the “son of God”; its purity consisted, not in moral/ethical uprightness as such, but true godliness – the “God-likeness” appropriate to His sons. This was God’s demand of Israel, and it’s precisely the reason He condemned His “son” for perpetual unrighteousness irrespective of the nation’s meticulous conformity to the Law’s demands (cf. Matthew 22:34-40; Romans 13:8-10 with Isaiah 1:1-15; Matthew 15:1-11, 23:23-28). There is no more powerful illustration of this than the quintessential Israelite Saul of Tarsus – a man who was blameless under the Law and yet regarded by the God he served as a blasphemer and grievous offender. Israel’s mission presupposed and flowed out of its identity. Yahweh had chosen Israel to be His firstborn son, but by virtue of His covenant with Abraham. Israel’s election and identity were bound up in God’s election of Abraham, which election served His larger purpose to recover and restore His creation to Himself. God didn’t set apart Israel to have them conform to a moral code; He chose them and set them apart for His righteousness’ sake: His commitment to uphold and fulfill His covenant oath to Abraham – the oath that all the families of the earth were to obtain divine blessing in him. God’s purpose was that the watching world, being aware of Israel’s status as His elect son, would come to know Him, the Father, through the loving devotion and goodness – the purity – of the son. Israel’s obligation to purity (sanctity) in the assembly reflected its Abrahamic identity and mission, both of which it was unable to fulfill. But this was by divine design, for Israel was to find its destiny in another Israel from within Israel. Jesus is that son; He is the seed of Abraham for the sake of the nations’ blessing, but He is carrying out His work of global witness and blessing through His Body that is His fullness and fragrance. This assembly, unleavened in Him, must keep the feast that is its Abrahamic birthright for the sake of its Abrahamic calling, which means keeping it in the purity of integrity and truth.
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:14:19 GMT -5
C. Legal Disputes (6:1-11) The Corinthians had been withholding judgment in the case of the individual involved with his stepmother, but they had no such scruples when it came to other matters. In those instances they were all too willing to enter into judgment, even to the point of seeking legal vindication outside the church. The same natural-mindedness that perceived righteousness in refusing to judge the immoral brother reached the opposite conclusion in the case of other brethren in the Church. Amplifying the irony, this congregation who apparently interpreted Paul’s earlier instruction as calling them to pass judgment on unbelievers (ref. again 5:9-13) were doing just that, but in a way very different from what they imagined: The Corinthians were passing judgment on unbelievers, not by condemning them, but by deferring to them. They were judging those outside the Church worthy to pass judgment on those inside the Church. Paul had just reminded the Corinthians of their responsibility to judge those within the Church, and they could have answered him that they were honoring that charge: They were indeed judging their brethren; just not in the way Paul meant. They were judging their brothers unrighteously with natural minds, evident in the fact that they were subjecting them to the judgment of naturally-minded men – men devoid of Christ’s mind precisely because they were devoid of Christ’s life and Spirit. And so, though Paul here turned his attention to a different specific concern, the fundamental problem remained the same. As with their factions and bad judgment, so with their personal disputes: The Corinthians were guilty of denying the mind of Christ which they possessed as the endowment of their union with Him; they were guilty of acting as if they were yet “mere men.” Paul was serious about remedying the various issues at Corinth, but that meant confronting them with the mind of Christ. And that, in turn, meant viewing and approaching them from an eschatological perspective: with a mind that understands what has come in the person and work of Jesus Christ and what that realization means for the Church and the world. - Paul’s concern wasn’t with morality and relational harmony as such, but with Christians thinking and acting in accordance with the truth as it is in Christ Jesus – the truth of the new creation He has inaugurated in Himself as the first-fruits from the dead (ref. 15:1ff). The answer to all of the Corinthian maladies (as those of every Christian) was thinking, judging and living with the mind of Christ, which means perceiving people, things and circumstances – indeed all of life – the way He does. This, in turn, is what it means to be led by the Spirit (cf. John 14:16-26, 15:12-15 with Romans 8:9-11; Galatians 5:1-26). - And to perceive all things the way Jesus does is to discern by faith what is not available to the senses, namely that the world the Christian inhabits has, in and by Jesus, been judged, conquered and reconciled to God. For that reason, living in accordance with the former order of things (the “world”) is to live a lie. The world – and, more importantly to Paul’s argument, the saints – were once determined by the former order; now that order has been judged and overthrown in Christ (6:9-11). The material creation yet awaits its renewal, but human beings are already sharers in the new creation in the “inner man” by the renewing power of the Spirit. Therefore Christians can no longer view themselves “according to the flesh” any more than they can the world or its inhabitants. To be a new creation means seeing with new eyes (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:1-21; Ephesians 4:17-5:17). 116 Paul’s perspective was that of eschatological fulfillment and realization in Jesus Christ, the Last Adam. He saw himself living in the everlasting new creational kingdom promised in the Scriptures and now at last, in the “fullness of the times,” inaugurated in God’s Messiah. Paul brought this perspective to bear in treating the preceding Corinthian issues, and it was no different here in the case of their personal disputes: In His person and work, Jesus has exposed and condemned the world and its wisdom as vain and foolish, and the Corinthians had embraced Him as God’s true wisdom in contradistinction to the natural counterpart. They had rejected worldly wisdom; how, then, could they reaffirm it in their disputes with one another? If their actions were lying against the truth of their identity in Christ, it was only because they’d allowed themselves to rebuild in their minds what they’d torn down when they came to Him in faith. 1. In addressing the Corinthians’ disputes with one another, it’s important to note that Paul regarded them in the same way he regarded the previous issues – as merely symptomatic of the larger problem of arrogance: “Do you have the audacity to have a matter with another judged before the unrighteous?” Here Paul wasn’t ascribing arrogance to the fact of a believer having a dispute with a brother, but with his determination to have it adjudicated by the “unrighteous.” This is the only context in which Paul used this adjective in relation to men (cf. Romans 3:5), and it is best understood in two senses, one contextual and the other historical. a. In context, Paul was clearly using this term in reference to unbelievers as opposed to Christians (vv. 2-6). Employed in this way, unrighteous speaks, in the first instance, to the person’s relationship with God and only then to his character and/or conduct (ref. 6:9-10). Paul was finding fault with certain individuals in the Corinthian church, not because they were seeking legal vindication from immoral or licentious men per se, but from men who were not believers – men who lacked the mind of Christ. Such men were unrighteous in the fundamental sense that they were not right with God: They remained alienated in their minds, and therefore darkened in their understanding (Ephesians 4:17-18). However learned, prudent and scrupled they might have been, they were yet natural men devoid of the life of the Spirit and the mind of Christ. And in Paul’s judgment, a natural man cannot appraise the man who is spiritual – the man who is of the Spirit (2:14-16). b. But there is an historical consideration that must also be taken into account. And that is the well-attested corruption which marked the practice of Roman civil law. In this regard, ancient Roman jurisprudence didn’t differ much from its counterpart in every age and culture. Because civil law deals with personal and ethical grievances rather than statutory crimes, civil courts are ripe for corruption. First of all, in civil suits a court’s decision often comes down to the credibility of the contesting parties. But credibility has an intrinsic subjective quality, with the result that a person’s credibility can easily – even unconsciously – be enhanced by factors unrelated to the dispute itself. All else being equal, who comes across as more credible in court, a prominent figure in the community or a person living on the street? As it is today, so it was in the Roman world: Class, status, money and other forms of influence cannot help but affect civil justice. 117 Beyond their ability to enhance credibility, wealth and status also supply the means for bribery. Thiselton’s comments in this regard are worth noting: “Roman criminal law in this period was relatively fair and objective. But this was not the case in civil law. Here judges and even juries expected to receive some quid pro quo for a favorable verdict. This might come in terms of a straight financial gift with strings; a promised payment; or a debt to be paid by using economic or social influence or by providing new business opportunities or openings.” This characteristic of Roman civil law, together with Paul’s charge that the suing parties were wronging and even defrauding their brethren (ref. 6:8), strongly suggests that the Corinthian situation involved more notable individuals bringing civil suits against their lower-class brothers, and doing so precisely because they knew their personal status and influence would ensure their success in court. 2. Paul confronted the Corinthians’ legal disputes with a series of questions which highlight his eschatological perspective (6:2-4). When Paul considered the Corinthians (and all believers), he thought of them in terms of who they were in Christ, not merely how they were behaving and conducting themselves. Their sinful conduct wasn’t irrelevant to him, but he saw it as a matter of contradiction and denial; their fundamental and greatest offense was disobedience to the truth. Thus the answer to the Corinthians’ sin – whatever form it might happen to take – was right thinking and right judgment. If they would conform their minds to the truth, their conduct would take care of itself. Accordingly, Paul approached the Corinthians’ legal disputes by reminding them of their appointed destiny respecting judgment. That consideration alone was sufficient to show the absurdity, not to mention the flagrant unrighteousness, of them yielding judgment in the Church to unbelievers (ref. again 1:20-25). He issued his reminder in the form of a series of questions, the heart of which is the two parallel pairs of questions in verses 2-3. The first thing to note about the pairs is that both of them reason from the greater to the lesser. This way of reasoning was common among the Jews, and Paul employed it regularly in his letters. The second is that Paul’s parallelism between the two pairs of questions has an ascending, and therefore climactic structure. Again, eschatology – that is to say, the truth of the inaugurated eschaton which is the everlasting kingdom of God – is the ground and substance of Paul’s argumentation. He was reminding the Corinthians of who they were in Christ, what they had been appointed for, and what their identity and destiny meant for their present lives. He’d already reminded them that, by the Spirit, they’d been given the mind of Christ, and that this spiritual “mind” enabled them to appraise all things (2:15-16). However, the mind of Christ empowers sound judgment, not just for the present, but also for the future. And with respect to the future, Paul reminded the Corinthians that they possessed and were being perfected in Christ’s life and mind unto the judgment of the Last Day when they will participate in Jesus’ climactic judgment of His creation (cf. Daniel 7:9-27 with Matthew 19:28; Luke 22:24-30; Revelation 2:26-28, 3:21; cf. also Hebrews 2:1-12). 118 a. In his first pair of questions, that arena of judgment pertains to the world (6:2). Paul’s word here is kosmos, which in context refers to the natural created order, but especially as it has its focal point in the human creature. His point was simply this: God, in Christ, has appointed Christians to judge His creation as it has, since the fall, existed in estrangement from Him, and therefore in contradiction of its true created existence, identity and function. (Note the different context of “judging” between this passage and Paul’s preceding discussion in 5:12-13). Beyond the seeming contradiction of 5:12-13, this judging role has confused and even startled some who find Paul ascribing to the saints a prerogative of judgment which eclipses or even supplants the Lord Jesus Christ as God’s sole ordained judge (cf. Matthew 25:31ff; John 5:22-23; 2 Timothy 4:1-8; etc.). But this is not at all the case; rather, the saints’ role as judges presupposes – but also necessarily follows from – the fact that Jesus is the judge of His Father’s creation. The saints will not judge in their own right, but as those who share in Jesus’ sovereign judgment. Indeed, it could not be otherwise, and that for two reasons, one active and one passive: The first derives from the inseparable unity that exists between Christ and His saints. As the community of human beings who will, on that day, stand fully clothed with Jesus’ humanity (i.e., as the perfected Church which even now is His fullness), the saints will necessarily sit with Him on His judgment seat, adding to His judgment their own harmonious amen (ref. again Hebrews 2:1-12). But the saints will also judge the world in the passive sense that their righteousness (“rightness”) as restored creatures will inherently contradict and therefore indict their fellow creatures who remain estranged from God. This judgment pertains to the Last Day, but it carries crucial implications for the present. For even now the saints possess Jesus’ life and mind; even now they have the resource – and more importantly, the responsibility – to rightly “appraise all things” (2:15). If they will one day sit in judgment of the whole creation, and even now possess the substance of that which equips them for that monumental task, aren’t the saints competent to constitute the least tribunal in the present age? b. Paul’s second pair of questions builds upon and amplifies the first pair: Christ’s saints are appointed to sit with Him in judgment of His creation, and that extends beyond the natural, material creation to include the supernatural one. For all the power and greatness of the angelic hosts, they, too, will be subject to the judgment of “just men made perfect” (6:3). Paul here transitioned to a different set of objects to be judged, but the reasons for this judgment being granted to the saints remains the same; the Church will judge angels precisely because it is the “fullness of Him who fills all in all.” As such, it testifies both to Him as His Body and against the impure, unrecovered creaturely realm as His restored creation. Once again, this profound truth has implications in the present. In a very real sense, the Church is fitted to judge the matters of eternity; how, then, can it ever be argued that it lacks what is necessary to judge matters of this life? 119 3. Paul’s two sets of parallel questions function synergistically to make his point; his fifth question punctuates it in summary fashion (6:4). This is an important observation because this verse is ambiguous and therefore subject to different interpretations. But however one concludes regarding Paul’s meaning, that meaning must fit well as the capstone to his argument to this point. Commentators differ in their interpretations in substance as well as nuance, but all the variations can be organized under two general heads. a. The first has Paul referring to adjudicating disputes within the Church. One version of this interpretation is reflected by the NIV, which treats Paul’s verb “appoint” as an imperative: “Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, appoint as judges even men of little account in the church!” Viewed in this way, Paul’s directive points in a couple of different directions, both of which are held by some commentators. - The first carries a note of sarcasm as it has Paul expressing his conviction that even those of no account in the Church are better qualified to judge disputes than the most skilled and wise judge who is an unbeliever. He was in effect saying that spiritual wisdom would direct them to entrust their disputes to the judgment of the least worthy and least esteemed among the saints before even the wisest jurist outside the Church. - The other option is that he was deriding the Corinthians, scolding them for needing formal church tribunals to settle their disputes rather than resolving them as loving brethren employing the mind of Christ. In that case they might as well appoint as judges the least capable among them. Alternatively, this verb could be an indicative, which results in the following sort of reading: If then you are to have tribunals within the Church to deal with matters of this life, will you appoint as judges saints who are of no account? (That is, saints who are unfit for the task; men who will judge with a natural mind.) b. The second general interpretation has Paul still talking about the problem of taking disputes outside the Church despite the fact that the saints ought to be able to settle them. It can be rendered this way: If then you are to have tribunals within the Church to deal with matters of this life (and you are), do you sin and lie against the truth of your fitness to judge such things by appointing as judges unbelievers who lack the mind of Christ – unrighteous men whom you ought rightly to regard as of no account in resolving disputes among you? The first option (treating Paul’s statement as referring to appointing judges within the Church) doesn’t fit as well with his thought and the flow of his argument. Among other things, Paul never referred to any Christian as being of “no account” – that is, a person to be despised as contemptible. Not only did he not believe or teach this, the very notion contradicts the thrust of the epistle, which emphasizes the saints’ obligation to know who they are in Christ and live into their glorious identity (cf. 6:9-11 with Ephesians 1:15-23). All things considered, the second view does better justice to the context and argument.
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:15:35 GMT -5
4. Unlike with his treatment of factions, Paul here fully intended to shame the Corinthians (cf. 4:14, 6:5-6). He wanted them to see the shamefulness, not of their disputes per se, but of the thinking surrounding them and the implications and consequences of it. In the first place, the fact that individuals in the church were taking their brothers to court implied that those individuals were unable to identify any wise ones within the church body – except, of course, themselves, who were wise enough to recognize that their disputes were best judged by the worldly “wisdom” of civil courts. Most likely that implication never occurred to those bringing the suits; their action betrayed their preoccupation with prevailing in their grievances, so that they likely reasoned no further than the best avenue for realizing that successful outcome. But Paul saw the bigger picture and measured the situation at Corinth in terms of the overarching issues of the gospel of Christ and the Corinthians’ participation in Him. There were many reasons for those involved in these suits to be ashamed, and Paul highlighted four of them: a. The first and most obvious reason for being ashamed was that those bringing these civil suits were guilty of wronging and defrauding their brothers (6:8). The context suggests that Paul was assigning wrongfulness first to the action of taking a personal dispute before a court of unbelievers rather than resolving it in the Church. He was thus saying to the Corinthians that handling disputes in this way rendered the suing party guilty of wronging and defrauding his brother, regardless of whether that brother was himself guilty of any wrongdoing. b. But Paul was also no doubt alluding to the fleshly thinking behind such lawsuits. This points to the second reason for shame, namely that the suing parties were wronging and defrauding themselves. Anyone bringing a civil suit does so because he has the expectation he will succeed in court; otherwise, why incur the trouble and expense? And he is confident of prevailing either because he’s convinced he’s in the right or because he believes he can move the court to rule in his favor. In the case of the former, the person trusts in the court’s wisdom and integrity; in the case of the latter, he trusts in his own capabilities and resource. The former exalts worldly justice while the latter scorns it. The fact that the suing party is a Christian doesn’t necessarily preclude these dynamics, and where they are present the wrong and fraud are exacerbated. - In the scenario where the suing Christian believes he’ll prevail because he’s in the right, he isn’t simply placing undue confidence in civil justice; he’s exalting worldly wisdom and righteousness over their spiritual counterparts. Does he really trust unbelievers more than the saints to discern, honor and vindicate the truth? The Christian implies just that when he seeks justice in court rather than in the Church (vv. 1-6). - The violation is obviously even worse in the case of a believer bringing a suit against his brother because he thinks he can manipulate the court. If the preceding scenario finds the suing Christian guilty of wrong and fraud toward his brother, the latter enlarges the violation to include wronging and defrauding the court itself. 121 c. The third reason is an extension of the previous two, which is that these lawsuits reached beyond the persons involved; they were wronging and defrauding the whole Church. The Church’s life is to be one of unity and harmony; when one member suffers the whole body suffers; when one is honored and made to rejoice, so does the whole (12:12-27; esp. vv. 24-27). It is in this context of unity and harmony that the Church is built up in Christ – that the body actually causes the growth of the body (Ephesians 4:1-16). In God’s economy and esteem, the individual believer cannot be regarded except in connection with the corporate ecclesia. Just as it was with Israel, the sin of the one (or the few) undermines, weakens, defiles and corrupts the whole, bringing the whole body under God’s judgment if not addressed (ref. again 5:1-8). This way of handling disputes wronged and defrauded the individual litigants – those bringing the suits as well as those being sued, but the wrong and fraud equally impacted the whole church. d. The fourth reason for their shame is less obvious, but it is embedded within Paul’s reprimand in verse 7. This concerns the Church’s outward witness – specifically the fact that these lawsuits were bearing false testimony regarding Jesus and His gospel. By handling their disputes this way, the Corinthians were wronging and defrauding the unbelieving world. Three observations make this apparent: 1) The first is Paul’s remark that the plaintiffs in these suits suffered defeat in them simply by taking their disputes with a brother before a civil court. Some scholars go further, arguing that Paul was assigning this defeat to the mere fact of grievances among the saints; Christians should be above disputes as they act in love. But this exceeds Paul’s language and his concern with how believers resolve disputes, not the fact they have them. 2) Paul further illumined his meaning by indicating that this defeat came even to those who were in the right in their grievance. It’s noteworthy that Paul wasn’t the least concerned about the particular matters in dispute, who was actually in the right, or who prevailed in the process of adjudication. In his judgment those issues were irrelevant; what mattered was the truth of the life and mind of Christ in His people and their true witness to Him and His gospel among themselves and in the world. 3) From Paul’s vantage point, even if a grievance was sound and justice prevailed so that the plaintiff won his case without having to resort to any sort of unethical maneuver, that individual still suffered defeat. Win or lose, handling disputes in this way constituted a failure that resulted in defeat – defeat not just for the suing party, but for the authentic, accurate witness to Christ and His gospel in the Church and before unbelievers. This is the reason Paul contended that it would be better to be wronged and defrauded than to be vindicated in this way. And so here again, in the instance of the Corinthians’ legal disputes, the antithesis between the natural mind and the mind of the Spirit comes into sharp relief. 122 - The natural mind recognizes that God is concerned with truth, and so reasons that He must surely be pleased when one of His children is shown to be in the right in a dispute. How could God be pleased when wrongfulness prevails? Though He might prefer that disputes be mediated in the Church rather by an outside tribunal, in the end what concerns God most is that the truth is vindicated. - The spiritual mind likewise acknowledges God’s concern for and commitment to truth, but it understands it from a different vantage point: It considers issues, situations and circumstances from an all-encompassing, spiritual perspective. That is to say, the spiritual mind examines and judges the matters of this life through the proper lens, which is the spiritual, eschatological one. Those whose minds are governed by the Spirit recognize that truth is a matter of meaning, and meaning is determined by God, not human perception and judgment. And God assigns the meaning of a thing or situation, not by considering the thing or situation in itself, but in terms of its relationship to all other things as everything fits together and works together toward His full accomplishment of His design for His creation in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:9-10). Stated simply, the meaning of anything – and therefore the ultimate truth of that thing – is a matter of eschatology; it’s a matter of God’s revelation and realization in Jesus Christ and their import for the creation in all of its myriad components, features, aspects and dynamics of interrelatedness. Whatever the thing, situation or circumstance, its true meaning is determined by its relation to God and His accomplishment and final purpose for His creation in Christ. Any other “meaning” is necessarily false. So it is that the natural mind can assess a thing as it appears in itself, and, in this way, arrive at a meaning for that thing that is functional at the level of a narrow, isolated consideration. But lacking an eschatological and christological grid, the natural mind can go no further; it cannot determine true meaning. So here Paul recognized that the matter of truth and righteousness in the Corinthian disputes (as all their issues) vastly transcended the particulars wrapped up in those disputes. Truth and righteousness respecting their disputes weren’t determined by factual or legal rightness, but by how those disputes were viewed and handled in light of the larger, determinative concerns raised by eschatology – by the truth as it is in Jesus Christ and the responsibilities and obligations it imposes upon His saints. This is why Paul was unconcerned with the details and outcomes of their disputes; his only concern was that the truth of Christ and His gospel be honored and upheld in the Church and the world. Thus the issue isn’t whether God is concerned about truth and righteousness. The issue is how truth and righteousness are determined and who determines them. God determines them, and He does so rightly because He perceives and judges each individual thing organically – not as that thing appears in itself, but as it exists and functions within an allencompassing, intricately interrelated whole. The meaning and truth of any given part is bound up in the whole. (Again, truth and meaning are a matter of eschatology). This is true of biblical revelation, and it is true of the particulars of creaturely existence – whether a jigsaw puzzle or the innumerable features and details of a human life. 123 So it was true of the Corinthians’ disputes with one another: God’s concern with truth in this instance looked beyond the specifics of a particular matter of contention to how that dispute fit into the overarching and defining eschatology, its outworking and fruitfulness in the world, and its final consummation. This explains how a person can be factually and legally in the right and yet be wrong before the bar of God’s justice; it explains how the God of truth can ascribe falseness and guilt to the vindication of truth. 5. To the natural mind, this sort of reasoning appears illogical and absurd. But to the spiritual man – the man informed and led by the Spirit, this all makes perfect sense. He is able to see with Christ’s eyes and perspective; he can see beyond that which appears to the senses and natural intellect; indeed he judges the natural in the light of the eternal – in light of the reality of the new creation that exists in and through Jesus Christ. And being able to see beyond what is seen (2 Corinthians 4:16-18), the spiritual man is no longer constrained to be a grasping creature: a creature whose existence is defined and driven by the insatiable self-seeking inherent in a self-referential perspective on all things. Paul highlighted this truth with his summary commentary in verses 9:9-11. At first glance this passage may appear to change the subject, but it actually focuses Paul’s preceding discussion. This is evident from his use of the conjunction or to introduce the passage. This conjunction correlates what precedes and follows in the sense of indicating a critical implication of the Corinthian lawsuits. By taking their brethren before unbelievers, these individuals were effectively denying their participation in Christ. Again, the natural man is a grasping (self-seeking) man: He views everything and everyone in terms of its perceived value to him; he is a creature who cannot see the forest for the “trees” of self-derived, self-orbiting perception, judgment, and interest. Paul saw this quality of the natural man reflected in the Corinthians’ lawsuits – even in their insistence on being proven in the right. The natural man is a self-enslaved, grasping creature, but Jesus had delivered the Corinthians from that “dominion” and brought them into His kingdom of the new creation. Therefore, for them to continue in the patterns of their former enslavement was to lie against the truth. Thus Paul’s meaning: “By your lawsuits you wrong and defraud your brethren, aligning yourselves with the unrighteous, not only in seeking and deferring to their judgment as natural-minded men (6:1), but in following the leading of your own natural thinking. Don’t you know that the unrighteous have no share in the kingdom of God? Stop deceiving yourselves. You once were such men, driven and enslaved by the grasping passions of the natural mind, but you were washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of Jesus and in the Spirit of God.” Keeping this passage in its context is critically important, especially in light of the tendency to treat it as a discrete passage treating a fresh topic. For many, verses 9-11 serve as a Christian assurance proof-text: a biblical litmus text for determining whether or not an individual is really saved (and so also a practical prescription for living the Christian life). But to view it in that way is to strip away its context and so miss Paul’s actual meaning. This passage must be interpreted within Paul’s larger argument, and when that’s done several important observations emerge: 124 a. The first pertains to what has already been mentioned, namely Paul’s catalog of sins. Again, Paul’s design wasn’t to provide a list of behaviors as a salvation litmus test, but to broadly portray the characteristic pattern of the natural man as a grasping creature. Paul’s palate highlights man’s fundamental sensuality – the fact that his existence in this world is informed and driven by his natural cravings (even spiritual cravings, which the natural mind also strives to gratify; Colossians 2:1-23). Maslow postulated this in his “hierarchy of needs,” but only as an echo of what Jesus had asserted on a Galilean hillside two millennia earlier (Matthew 6:19-34): The natural man is a self-seeking creature consumed with selfgratification, even in the “spiritual” attainments of doing and being “right.” b. Second, Paul contrasted his graphic portrayal of the natural man with the reversal which God has effected in Jesus Christ – the creational purging and renewal which the Corinthian believers themselves were partakers in. Though they were all once natural men (even if not personally guilty of any of the specific manifestations Paul mentioned: “such were some of you”), the Corinthians had been washed, sanctified, and justified. Interestingly, the first thing some notice about Paul’s declaration is the order in which he presented his verbs. The reason is that Paul’s order raises a question for those who think in the classical categories of justification and sanctification in which the former logically, soteriologically and actually precedes the latter. This is the case because justification is regarded as positional and instantaneous while sanctification is practical and ongoing: A person is justified (reckoned as righteous) at the moment he puts his faith in Christ; having now been justified, he begins the process of sanctification in which he progressively grows in his actual holiness and Christ-likeness. Treated this way, sanctification follows upon and necessarily presupposes justification. When a person comes to Paul’s statement with this a priori assumption regarding justification and sanctification, he instantly notices Paul’s apparent transposition of the terms and feels the need to resolve it. There are scholars eager to help, and Matthew Henry’s answer is generally representative: “Here is a rhetorical change of the natural order: You are sanctified, you are justified. Sanctification is mentioned before justification: and yet the name of Christ, by which we are justified, is placed before the Spirit of God, by whom we are sanctified.” But when these three ideas are understood more precisely in terms of their biblical meaning, one discovers a beauty and perfection in Paul’s order: First, the verb rendered wash occurs only here in Paul’s writing. In its only other occurrence Luke associated it with the ritual of baptism (Acts 22:16). It is a compounded form of a particular verb, and this compounding highlights the notion of purging from the impurity and defilement of sin (“wash away,” as compared with the more general idea conveyed by the uncompounded verb – ref. John 13:10; Acts 9:37, 16:33; Hebrews 10:22; 2 Peter 2:22). 125 The verb rendered sanctify is common throughout the Scripture. In all of its various cognates it is concerned with the idea of holiness, even when used in reference to God’s people as His “holy ones” (saints). But fundamental to this notion of holiness (sanctification) is the principle of consecration: Created things are holy, not because of what they are in themselves or what they do, but because God has taken them to be His own possession – so the sanctuary and its servants, implements and rituals (Exodus 24-31); so the land of Canaan (Exodus 15:13); so God’s people (Deuteronomy 7:1-6, 14:1-2; cf. Exodus 19:5-6;1 Peter 2:9). David Peterson observes: “Just as Israel was made holy [sanctified] by God’s saving action in the time of Moses, and again in the restoration after the Babylonian Exile, so sanctification in the New Testament is an integral part of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. It is regularly [indeed, foremost] portrayed as a once-for-all, definitive act and primarily has to do with the holy status or position of those who are ‘in Christ.’” The verb justified is the most challenging for linguistic, doctrinal, and traditional reasons. Apart from the linguistic complexity and nuance of this one Greek root and its cognates, the formalization of the doctrine of justification has tended to isolate the concept from its biblical context. While rightly treated as a forensic concept, it is often divorced from its covenantal, eschatological and christological framework. In terms of its law court connotation, “being justified” is depicted in the action of a judge declaring the accused to be in the right. As such, it says nothing per se about being right in oneself, doing right, or becoming right. True, God is “justified” in the sense that He is right and does right – particularly in that His actions always conform to His word. God is justified by His faithfulness, but this sense of “being justified” flows from the character of God, not the verb itself. c. The meaning of these three verbs illumines Paul’s reason for ordering them as he did, but his rationale becomes all the more clear when one considers his final qualification: “… in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (6:11c). Paul ascribed the Corinthians’ cleansing, consecration and justification to Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, not to the exclusion of the Father (note the Spirit of our God), but because the Son and Spirit are the effectual agents of the triune God’s purpose for man, and beyond him, the whole creation. The accomplishment of the divine purpose – summarized in Paul’s three verbs – is in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is both the Creator unto the creature and the creature unto the Creator. And precisely because this creational work is a matter of renewal and perfection – a matter of life out of death – it is a work done by the life-giving Spirit (cf. Genesis 1:1ff; Romans 8:1-11; 2 Corinthians 3:1-4:6). Paul’s concern in the Corinthians’ legal disputes lay in what they implied. The offenders were aligning with the unrighteous, not by their lawsuits per se, but by acting as if they were yet “mere men.” They were acting as natural men, and so denying that, in Christ by His Spirit, they’d been cleansed from their sin, delivered from their alienation and sanctified (set apart) as God’s own. And being restored to the Father in the Son, they were justified – given the full status of sons.[
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:17:45 GMT -5
D. Summary (6:12-20) Commentators differ in their understanding of the relationship this passage has to the preceding context. Two observations, however, appear indisputable. The first is that these verses depart from the previous topic of legal disputes; the second is that they reengage the earlier issue of immorality in the Church (ref. 5:1-13). Does this structure indicate that Paul’s treatment of lawsuits at Corinth should be regarded as a parenthesis within his larger discussion of immorality and sexual purity? If so, why did Paul interrupt that discussion and insert this parenthesis? If, on the other hand, verses 6:12-20 act as a summary of the broader context, how far does that summarization extend? Beyond their pertinence to Paul’s instruction on immorality, do these verses apply as well to the matter of legal disputes? Even more broadly, there is good reason to believe Paul intended his summary to bind up all of his instruction to this point as it illumines, from a different vantage point, the root cause of all of the Corinthians’ foolishness and failures. At the very least, this passage clearly sums up Paul’s treatment of the immorality issues in the Corinthian church. That much is beyond dispute (ref. 6:13, 15-18). But Paul was a man of broad perspective who reasoned according to overarching principles which have sweeping relevance and implications. Thus he confronted the individual issues at Corinth, not with discrete remedies, but with the need for the Corinthians to think and judge rightly. Whatever the particular malady, it had its source in the perversions of the natural mind, so that the remedy lay in genuine repentance – in minds governed according to the truth as it is in Christ Jesus. So here it seems best to read Paul broadly, especially since he built his summary arguments upon general maxims (vv. 12-13). How exactly those maxims apply to the larger section and its various concerns remains to be seen, and will hopefully be illumined by the following treatment. 1. Paul presented his first claim as a composite of two parallel statements (6:12). In this way it notably echoes the parallel structure of Hebrew wisdom literature. Specifically, each sentence in the pair takes the form of antithetic parallelism (i.e., “this, but that” – a structure common in the Proverbs), and the two together stand as roughly synonymous, and therefore mutually interpreting and reinforcing. a. The first thing to consider is the relation of this maxim to the Corinthians themselves. Many scholars believe that these statements represent Paul’s answer to a common saying at Corinth, namely that “all things are lawful.” But assuming this to be the case, did this saying reflect a perverse Christian perspective, GrecoRoman philosophy, or perhaps even Gnostic spirituality? It could very well be that the Corinthians had misjudged their new life and freedom in Christ, confusing liberty in Him with license. But it is also true that certain strands of Greek philosophy (notably Stoicism and Epicureanism) emphasized complete liberty for the man who discerned true virtue and ordered his life accordingly. But Gnosticism also exalted human liberty through its radical division of the human body and spirit, the former being regarded as flawed and temporal, the latter as pure and eternal. This division led some Gnostics to teach that the body could be indulged in every way with no impact upon the soul. 127 Paul didn’t clarify the source of this saying and the Corinthians’ relationship to it, but it’s entirely possible they had taken what was a common cultural notion and grafted it into their Christian conviction regarding their liberty in Christ. If this conclusion is correct, this suggests that Paul knew the saints at Corinth were employing this maxim in this way and he intended to rebuke and correct it. b. It’s also crucial to note that Paul was using the term lawful in the broad sense of what is permissible or acceptable, not what is defined and prescribed by law. The context makes this clear, as does the fact that Paul didn’t associate this “lawfulness” with any ethical or legal code. The issue behind this saying wasn’t what a law prescribed, but how the Corinthians conceived their obligations and freedom as Christians (with their ethical convictions likely resulting from a blending together of philosophical and cultural norms and Christian instruction). This observation is important because many read Paul’s assertion (“all things are lawful”) and their minds immediately turn to questions of law and grace and the believer’s relationship to divine law (in whatever sense). This distracts them from the matter at hand and leaves them concerned to qualify Paul’s statement so as to bring it into subjection to their particular theology of the Christian’s obligation to law (whether conceived as “moral law,” the “law of Christ” etc.). c. In terms of this lawfulness, it’s hardly likely that the Corinthians were viewing it in absolute terms as authorizing any and all conduct and actions. No reasoning person – Christian or otherwise – honestly believes there are no limitations or constraints on his or her life. Rather, the context implies that the Corinthians were applying this notion to themselves in one (or both) of two ways: - The first is that they had adopted the Greek (and Gnostic) philosophical concept of the absolute division between the material body and the immaterial spirit. (One reason Gnostic thought found a receptive audience in the early Church was the seeming agreement between the Christian and Gnostic concepts of flesh and spirit. But whereas Gnosticism used these terms to designate the material and immaterial aspects of human existence, the biblical terminology refers to the old and new natures: “flesh” as corresponding to the old man and “spirit” as corresponding to the new man.) If the body is material and temporal and the spirit is immaterial and eternal, then nothing done in, by or to the body touches or affects the spirit. Moreover, the activities of the body – indeed, the body itself – perish at death (ref. 6:13a), leaving only the liberated spirit to continue on. - The second is that the Corinthians had developed a perverse sense of their new life in Christ and believed that it transformed all their earthly actions. Paul himself taught that all things are pure to those who are pure (Titus 1:15), and the Corinthians were such men; they were new creatures in Christ (6:11; 2 Corinthians 5:17). Didn’t that imply that their actions and activities as “new men” were also transformed and made spiritual? 128 d. Whatever the Corinthians’ relationship to the claim that all things are lawful, the crucial concern is the way Paul answered it. He answered, not by denying the claim, but by affirming it. In the realm in which Paul was speaking, all things are indeed permissible to the Christian, but permissibility isn’t the criterion the mind of Christ applies in judging the rightfulness of an action or activity. The spiritual man measures things by their profitability, and that as a comprehensive assessment and not merely with respect to himself and his own personal concerns. - Paul’s verb refers to the advantage, benefit or usefulness – the value – of a thing, action or activity, but the exact nature of this profitability must be determined by the context. - In this instance, Paul’s parallel statement (6:12b) leaves no doubt as to his meaning. Profit, not permissibility, determines the rightness of a course of action, and profit is measured in terms of the principle of true freedom, or conversely, of subjugation: Not all things are profitable… I will not be mastered by anything. Paul’s two statements present an interesting play on ideas: He was speaking to the issue of how a Christian is to appraise and interact with those things which are permissible to him – those matters in which he has freedom. In that regard, Paul maintained that the believer is to regard and approach his freedom from the vantage point, not of lawfulness (permissibility), but of the principle embodied in true freedom itself. In a word, liberty is only liberty when it exalts and strengthens true freedom which exists in Christ. Or stated differently, how can something be of the nature of freedom and its authentic life and expression when it produces the fruit of subjugation? True freedom begets freedom, not bondage. This principle will have important implications in Paul’s larger argument. 2. Paul’s second maxim (6:13a) builds upon the first by clarifying how the Corinthians were conceiving the permissibility of all things. It appears they reasoned that the activities of their physical existence only impacted the physical realm – the realm God designed to be transitory. The body and its functions and actions serve a purpose in this life, but they and their relevance cease with death. This is clearly the case with bodily processes in general, but Paul’s words suggest that the Corinthians were applying this principle to all that a man might do with his body. But this is to err, for bodily actions and activities are not synonymous with natural biological functions, and this is evident in several particulars: - First, biological processes are inherent to an organism and its existence; they are essential and necessary rather than optional or volitional. Accordingly, they occur automatically (at least relatively so, if not absolutely as in the case of organ activity) rather than as the result of conscious thought and decision. - And corresponding to the fact that they are volitional, bodily actions and activities – in this instance, sexual actions – involve the use of the body as a vehicle or instrument. Conversely, biological functions and operations are intrinsic to the body, as in the metabolic activity implicated in the food/stomach relationship. 129 - Finally, and from the standpoint of logic, it is a fallacy to equate actions in the body and actions of the body. Unless two things are strictly identical, they may correspond at any number of points, but they never correspond at every point. The key in relating non-identical things is determining where they correspond. 3. Paul doesn’t indicate whether the Corinthians had been employing the maxim of verse 6:13a to justify their behavior or he simply proposed it by way of illustration to make his point. Either way, it really doesn’t matter; the outcome is the same: This maxim compelled the Corinthians to see the natural-minded fallacy behind their stance on sexual behavior: Explicitly or implicitly, and whether grounded in pagan spirit/flesh dualism or a perverse understanding of Christian liberty and sanctity, they wrongly conceived the distinction between their spiritual existence as Christians and their lives “in the body.” They weren’t wrong to see a distinction; the problem was in how they understood it and ordered themselves in view of it. a. That the Corinthians did indeed recognize a body/spirit distinction is evident from Paul’s instruction in both of his epistles to them (cf. 15:1ff with 2 Corinthians 4:1- 5:4) – instruction which doubtless reinforced the things he’d taught them during his extended personal ministry in Corinth. The Corinthians understood that the Christian life involves the day-by-day restoration of the “inner man” even while the body (the “outer man”) that clothes the spirit is declining unto eventual death. b. The Corinthians didn’t deny the transforming work of the Spirit and they rightly recognized it as a work pertaining to the inner man. Quite apart from apostolic instruction, no one would be so foolish as to claim that the Spirit was transforming his body. The church at Corinth – as everywhere – was watching its members grow old and increasingly infirmed until death finally gained its victory. (Indeed, the fact of physical decay and destruction in the grave was a fundamental reason for the Corinthians’ struggle with the matter of bodily resurrection.) c. The Corinthians weren’t wrong about the life versus death distinction between the Christian’s spirit and his body. They would have also known from Paul’s instruction that bodily and spiritual matters must be properly distinguished. So he would have taught them that food and drink are indifferent and, in themselves, have no defiling effect on the spirit (8:1ff; cf. Romans 14:1ff; Mark 7:14-19). In a myriad of ways, the body and spirit stand independent in this life. Rightly understood and applied, it is absolutely true that food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, and that the Lord has appointed both to pass away. But this doesn’t mean that everything pertaining to the body is spiritually irrelevant; to take the body/spirit distinction that far is to go beyond the bounds of truth. Life in Christ does implicate the body, even as it does the spirit, and it does so in both realms of the present life and the life to come. Food and its corresponding physical organs are destined to perish, but not so the body they pertain to. The believer’s body, as his spirit, has an eternal, glorious destiny; and though his body, unlike his spirit, hasn’t yet entered into the life of eternity, it exists even now in the promise of that life: “The body is for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body” (6:13b).
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:37:42 GMT -5
The Corinthians had overreached in their distinguishing as Christians between the body and the spirit. In some respects, the believer’s body is exempt in this life from Christ’s redemptive work and the new creation He has inaugurated; in another sense, it is very much a partaker in the new creation and must be consecrated to the Lord even as the spirit is. This dynamic is fleshed out in terms of the truth of resurrection – not only as a future hope, but, more importantly to Paul’s argument, as a present reality (6:14-20). Paul noted the correspondence between the stomach and food and the fact that both pertain to the present age alone; they are not of the new creation, and thus God has appointed them to pass away. He drew a similar, but contrasting correspondence between the body and Christ Himself: The stomach and food find their specific purpose and meaning in relation to each other, and in similar fashion so do the believer’s body and Christ. But whereas the former relationship pertains only to this life, the latter is ultimate and everlasting. The indivisible relationship between the believer’s body and the Lord is a key feature of eschatological fulfillment – i.e., of the eschaton, and the very fact that the eschaton has been inaugurated in Christ means that the Lord/body relationship is a present reality and not merely a future one. (God’s everlasting kingdom is fully realized in its substance, though not yet in its consummate form.) - The present aspect of the believer’s participation in Christ’s resurrection (and in particular, the present relationship between the Lord and the believer’s physical body) is Paul’s main consideration in this passage, but he laid the foundation for that treatment by noting the ultimate outcome God has appointed for the Christian’s body (6:14). Jesus’ resurrection is the glorification of His own body, but it is equally the guarantee of the same glorification for His people; the divine power that raised Him in an incorruptible body will do the same for them (cf. 15:1ff with Philippians 3:17-21). This promise of future resurrection is sufficient to disallow the notion that the Christian’s life in Christ doesn’t in any way implicate what he does in and with his body. It’s true that the present body is of this world and perishes at death, but this isn’t the end of the story. The believer’s body is appointed to share in Christ’s life and consummate humanity as truly and thoroughly as is his spirit. - The Christian’s body is destined for future glory, but even now it possesses the first-fruits of that glory in the earnest of the Spirit (Ephesians 1:13-14); as the Church is Christ’s body and believers are individually members of it (12:27), so their physical bodies are members of Him by His indwelling presence in His Spirit (6:15, 19; cf. John 14:16-20; Romans 8:9-10; Colossians 1:25-27). Though presently subjected to corruption and decay and destined for death, the believer’s body is nonetheless “for the Lord” even as is his spirit. The reason is that “the Lord is for the body”: Jesus’ resurrection life is the destiny of the whole creation (Ephesians 1:9-10; Romans 8:18-23); how much more the human body which He Himself assumed in His incarnation and sanctified and glorified forever (cf. 15:35-49; Hebrews 2:5-18)? Jesus has taken in Himself Adam’s nature and form in order to take to Himself Adam’s children – not merely in a loving relationship, but in the exhaustive intimacy portrayed in the one-flesh union of husband and wife. 131 4. Yahweh spoke of His relationship with His covenant people as that of a husband to a wife (cf. Jeremiah 31:31-32 with Isaiah 50-54; Hosea 1-2; etc.), and Paul recognized that that covenant union has found its destiny in Jesus Christ and His Church as the fulfilled “Israel.” Paul thought biblically, and this meant thinking of Christ’s relationship with His saints in terms of the union of a husband and wife (ref. 2 Corinthians 11:1-2; Ephesians 5:25-32; cf. also John 3:22-29; Revelation 19:6-8, 21:1-12, 22:16-17). That imagery was in his mind as he penned his instruction to the Corinthians, and is evident in this passage in his subtle allusions to marriage and the sanctity of the marital union. - The husband-wife relationship best expresses the divine-human relationship precisely because the union of a man and a woman embodies the deepest and most thorough form of intimacy known to human beings. No natural relation can capture the intimate spiritual union between God and His people, but the marital union comes closest and is therefore the most effective way for God to speak of it. - Yahweh employed the marital metaphor with Israel, not because He and the covenant nation actually enjoyed the intimate relationship the metaphor signifies, but because of Israel’s prophetic and typological role. What God chose Israel to be it would become in Jesus Christ, the True Israel, and Israel would itself obtain this blessed status together with the Gentiles as the fulfilled “Israel of God.” The husband-wife intimacy revealed (but not realized) in Yahweh’s relationship with Israel has now become an everlasting reality in the being-to-being union of the triune God with the human race in and through Jesus Christ. What God was to Israel in prefiguration and promise, He has become in reality to His Church; He has realized the intimacy of His ordained union and communion with His image-sons, and therefore they know Him and He communes with them as He is – as Father, Son and Spirit. - Even in its most perfect expression, the intimacy of husband and wife falls far short of the divine-human union. The marital union is material and natural; its intimacy is confined to the limits of a “one-flesh” union. Conversely, God and His people share a “one-spirit” union: They have become one with Him in Jesus Christ by the Spirit who is the Spirit both of the Father and of the Son (6:16-17). The Corinthians’ one-spirit union with Christ is the basis for Paul’s stinging reminder to them that their bodies are “members of Christ” on the one hand and the “temple of the Holy Spirit” on the other (“Do you not know…”; vv. 6:15, 19). The former is true because the latter is true, and both realities stripped them of their foolish notions about the exemption of their bodies from their lives in Christ. - The union between believers and Christ is spiritual and not physical; it is a “onespirit” union that the husband-wife “one-flesh” union only symbolizes. But this doesn’t mean it has no relation to or import for the Christian’s body. Quite the contrary, precisely because they are one spirit with Christ and their union with Him in the Spirit pertains to and encompasses the whole person, believers’ bodies are just as much joined to the Lord and sanctified to Him as are their spirits. 132 5. The above considerations of the spiritual import of marital imagery are important because they are fundamental assumptions behind Paul’s argument in this passage. His concern wasn’t with the husband-wife relationship as such, but with what it signifies in the spiritual realm and how it finds its ultimacy and true meaning in the divine-human relationship centered in the person of Jesus Christ. In particular, Paul was subtly pressing the Corinthians toward the recognition that, if the “one-flesh” dynamic of the husbandwife relationship has grave implications for human sexuality and how it is to be expressed – which indeed it does (cf. Matthew 19:1-9; Hebrews 13:4), how much more is that the case by virtue of the “one-spirit” union which exists between the Christian and the Lord who is his spiritual Husband. a. It was obvious to Paul that the Corinthians had failed to grasp this, and he was determined to put an end to their foolishness by confronting them, not merely with the fact of their sexual immorality, but with the implications of it. His thesis was this: If believers’ bodies are members of Christ – by virtue of His present indwelling in the Spirit as well as their future share in His bodily glory, then He is implicated in everything they do in their bodies. When they join themselves sexually to another person who isn’t their spouse, they bring Him into that union. It’s not just that Jesus is brought into an unholy act; He is effectively joined to that other person: Christ’s members are made the members of a “harlot” (6:15). Though Paul was non-specific in his charges, there is no doubt that he was addressing a literal problem of sexual immorality at Corinth. That such behavior would be present in a community of Christians strikes the modern reader as outrageous, especially since the context indicates that the Corinthians were not particularly disturbed by it. But viewed within its historical and social context, this sexual activity and the church’s response become more understandable. Sexual involvement beyond the marriage bed was an accepted part of GrecoRoman society and culture. The people of first-century Corinth would have scratched their heads in mocking disbelief at the American phenomenon of men sneaking off in shame to engage prostitutes in secret encounters, often under the cover of night. In their world, it was expected, not merely socially acceptable, that men would have sexual relations with women other than their wives, whether as part of religious rituals or mere recreation. Hays’ comments are helpful: “The social world of the ancient Corinthians differed greatly from ours. Prostitution was not only legal, it was a widely accepted social convention. ‘The sexual latitude allowed to men by Greek public opinion was virtually unrestricted. Sexual relations of males with both boys and harlots were generally tolerated’ (Talbert, 32). Thus, the Corinthian men who frequented prostitutes were not asserting some unheard-of new freedom; they were merely insisting on their right to continue participating in a pleasurable activity that was entirely normal within their own culture.” 133 This perspective brings the sexual immorality among the Corinthian believers into a new light. It didn’t reflect high-handed rebellion against their faith and their Lord; extra-marital sexuality was part of everyday life, and these Corinthian offenders – and their wives and Christian brethren – likely didn’t give their actions a second thought. This dynamic highlights the profound effect culture and historical context have on both Christian theology and Christian practice. - People are confined to and immersed in their own time and culture, with the result that they’re largely blind to the myriad factors influencing their perception and judgment; they are like the fish that doesn’t know it’s wet. - A person’s historical, cultural, and even religious contexts have immense effect in forming his worldview and the lens through which he perceives and interprets all things – things inside him as well as outside him. There is no neutrality or absolute objectivity in human existence; every person’s perspective, thought and convictions are framed by contextual considerations. This pertains to a person’s theology as much as to his practice, as Church history makes abundantly clear. Paul wasn’t confronting overt rebels, but believers who yet needed to take their thoughts and notions captive to Christ. They were yet thinking with natural minds – minds insensitive to the cultural and personal presuppositions behind their convictions and conduct; minds still operating according to the natural human principle that personal conviction is identical with objective truth. b. It seems obvious that the immorality Paul was addressing involved prostitution, but it would be a mistake to limit his charge of “harlotry” to that particular practice. In the first place, there was a whole range of accepted sexual practices in Corinthian culture, including those associated with religious rituals. Whether or not any of the believers at Corinth were engaging in such rituals is unclear, but Paul wouldn’t have wanted his readers to confine his instruction to any particular form of sexual immorality. He was articulating an all-encompassing perspective from which Christians are to view and employ their bodies, and he expected the Corinthians to apply his instruction in that way. Paul’s principled approach along with contextual considerations points toward a broader use of the word harlot than simply in reference to a prostitute. In the first place, Paul was addressing the matter of immorality in the broad sense of any and all improper sexual engagement (ref. 6:13, 18-19). Secondly, this Greek noun itself has various physical (sexual) connotations as well as a crucial spiritual one. In fact, the Scripture most often employs the notion of harlotry with respect to unfaithfulness to God. If Yahweh was a husband to His covenant people, then their unfaithfulness to Him (in whatever form) amounted to harlotry (cf. Judges 2:17; Psalm 106:34-39; Isaiah 1:21; Jeremiah 2:14-24; esp. Ezekiel 16 and 23). And if Israel’s turning away from Yahweh constituted harlotry, how much more is that the case with Christians who are truly joined to Christ as their Husband? 134 Paul knew the Scriptures and was well familiar with its use of marital imagery in relation to the covenant. Most importantly, he recognized that covenant union as a marital relationship has been realized in truth in the union of Jesus Christ and His Church. For this reason it’s quite likely that Paul intended a double entendre by his use of the term harlot. He was doubtless addressing the problem of Christians engaging in extra-marital sexual activity, but he was concerned to put that activity into its proper context: The Corinthians needed to understand that their great offense wasn’t lying with harlots; it was committing adultery against their true Husband. Even more, because they were members of Him, their adultery went beyond an affair behind His back; they were guilty of joining Him to their lover. c. One further thing to consider is Paul’s assertion that sexual immorality is the only offense which a Christian commits “against his own body” (v. 17). The obvious problem with this is that it’s not true in the strictest sense. There are lots of sins that directly assault and violate the body, including intoxication, gluttony and other eating disorders, self-mutilation and suicide. Commentators have ranged in their explanations from treating this as a careless overstatement on Paul’s part to an intentional use of rhetorical flourish in order to make his point (i.e., that no other sin implicates and violates the body to the extent sexual immorality does). But treated in context together with the preceding observations, it appears Paul was singling out sexual sin because of the implications it carries for the believer in the spiritual realm (verse 19 clarifies verse 18). The Christian who sins sexually sins uniquely against his own body, not because sexual acts involve the body – that applies to many actions and activities, but because the Christian’s body belongs to the Lord, the Husband (ref. 7:3-4). Clearly the believer’s body belongs to the Lord no less with respect to every bodily sin, but the marital connotations of the “one-spirit” union between Christ and His own by His indwelling Spirit give to sexual transgression a unique dimension of violation and offense. 6. In closing out his summary Paul made a pointed shift from marital to redemptive imagery. The believer’s body – and ultimately the corporate body (the Church) as God’s “spiritual house” – is the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit, but the basis for this holy inhabitation is Christ’s work of redemption that began with the incarnation and reached its climax at Calvary. The Christian is to glorify God in (not just with) his body because he is not his own; he was bought with a price. All that he is and has belongs to the Lord. Redemption highlights ownership, and this fact alone is sufficient to establish the believer’s obligation to submission and obedience. But by itself this dimension of Christian truth is inadequate to fully state the case, as Paul makes clear in this context and throughout his writings. Christians have been redeemed, but not to become mere servants. For servants have no enduring place in the Father’s house; it is sons who remain in it forever (John 8:31-36). Christians are sons of the Father, and so brethren of the Son. But, viewed as a body, Jesus’ Church is His Bride. He gave Himself to purchase a people, but a people conceived as the object of His devoted love (Ephesians 5:25-27). It is from that vantage point that the saints are to consecrate themselves to Him, body and spirit.
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:38:47 GMT -5
III. Reported Concerns – A Letter from the Corinthian Church Paul began his letter by addressing with the Corinthians his own concerns – concerns arising at least in part from news brought to him by individuals associated with the Corinthian church (ref. again 1:10-11, 16:17-18). The remainder of the epistle addresses a variety of questions and issues, most of which appear to have been raised by the Corinthians themselves in a letter to him, probably brought by Stephanus, Fortunatus and Achaicus. One of the characteristic features of this section – and the one which demarcates Paul’s treatment of the Corinthians’ questions – is the introductory phrase, “now concerning…” (ref. 7:1, 7:25, 8:1, 12:1, 16:1). It’s notable that Paul didn’t respond to the Corinthians’ inquiries until he’d first addressed the issues he was concerned about, and commentators have proposed different explanations for this. The easiest and most obvious answer is the natural human practice of giving pride of place to one’s own priorities and concerns: Paul penned his letter with the intention of answering the issues raised by the Corinthians, but those matters were going to have to wait until he’d spoken his mind regarding the things that were of first importance to him. This explanation is plausible, but doesn’t fit Paul’s personal character and ministry orientation. He was too conscientious and purposeful to let selfish concerns drive the form of his letters. But more than that, Paul was the quintessential servant of Christ, His gospel and His Church. Whatever his personal issues with the Corinthians, they reflected his abiding concern for them and their growth and well-being. Thus a better explanation for Paul’s structural arrangement in this epistle is that he recognized that genuinely addressing the Corinthians’ questions and concerns required that he first construct the proper foundation for his instruction. Instruction that isn’t solidly grounded in the pertinent overarching principles is analogous to a text without a context: Both are left open to whatever interpretation and application the hearer chooses. Paul was committed to answering the Corinthians’ concerns, but that meant first grounding and framing their perspective and thinking. A. The Matter of Male-Female Relationships (7:1-40) The Corinthians’ letter evidently raised the issue of male-female relationships and Paul chose to speak to them first. Paul’s response indicates that they were concerned with how Christians ought to approach their sexuality. In particular, it seems at least some at Corinth were convinced that believers should adopt a celibate lifestyle. (Christian sexuality may have been one of the factionalizing issues in the Corinthian church; ref. again 6:12ff). This is evident from Paul’s opening statement as well as his subsequent treatment of marriage, divorce and singleness. 1. Paul prefaced his discussion with the assertion, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman” (7:1), and this statement serves as the foundation and springboard for all of his subsequent discussion in this context. But how, exactly, is it to be viewed? Did the Corinthians make this assertion in their letter or was Paul proposing it himself? If the former, then he was repeating back to them their own words as the prelude to responding to them: “As to the things you wrote to me, specifically the contention that it is good for a man not to touch a woman…” If the latter, then Paul was saying something like this: “As to the things you wrote to me concerning Christian sexuality, let me say first of all that it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” 136 The first option is preferable, but in the end it really doesn’t matter; what matters is that Paul was in agreement with this proposition, whether it originated with himself or the Corinthians: His starting point for his treatment of marital issues is the premise that there is a manner of goodness in men and women not “touching” each another. This expression is a euphemism for sexual activity, but in context the issue is sexual involvement within the marital relationship. It seems the Corinthians were querying Paul about the virtue of Christians remaining celibate – even within their marriages (and therefore also refusing to marry and perhaps even abandoning the marriages they had). Paul began his treatment by affirming that there is indeed goodness in celibacy, but not in the way the Corinthians were apparently thinking; celibacy is preferable, but within the realm of singleness. Like everything pertaining to the Christian life, sexuality must be assessed and approached from the vantage point of principles rather than hard and fast prescriptions. 2. Celibacy is good, but it must be considered within the larger question of marriage and singleness. And answering that question is itself a matter of principled deliberation. Paul’s basic thesis was this: Celibacy is preferable for Christians, but not for those Christians who are married. But married or single, all Christians are obligated to live wisely, employing the mind of Christ in all their judgments and decisions. And judging the marital question with the mind of Christ means discerning the truth, not only of what marriage entails and demands, but of oneself as a unique individual. a. Paul believed that celibacy – and so singleness – is preferable for Christians, but he also recognized that the issue is more complex than it may appear. As a first consideration, there is the way in which God created human beings as male and female: The “goodness” in a man not touching a woman must be assessed alongside the principle that it isn’t good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18ff). God created His image-bearers as man and woman such that they complement and complete one another. And this being the case, Paul could not prescribe singleness without denying and violating the created order God put in place. Male and female are complementary, and together they are to fulfill their created design to administer God’s dominion in the earth as His vice-regents. The creation command to Adam and Eve was to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28), and this implicates the marital union and its sexual expression. How can human beings fulfill their created destiny and role of lordship if the race is extinguished through the absence of procreation? God created and ordained sexuality as necessary to His purposes, and Paul recognized that to insist upon singleness is to deny both the institution of marriage and the sexual union of man and woman, both of which are God’s good gifts. Sexuality is a fact of human existence and it is both foolish and wrong to deny or decry it; rather, it is to be appraised and approached with the mind of Christ. Each Christian must consider his own sexuality in terms of his true freedom in Christ: He must not be enslaved by anything, including his passions; where immorality is a concern, the single person ought to marry (7:7-9); for those who are married, they are to give themselves to sexual intimacy with their spouse (7:2). 137 b. Marriage and marital intimacy serve the believer’s good and his freedom in Christ by, among other things, providing a hedge against sexual impurity, but this benefit comes at a cost. Men and women incur a sober obligation to their spouses when they choose to marry (7:3-5). The marital obligation obviously embodies numerous components and aspects, but Paul’s concern here was with the sexual relationship between husband and wife and he focused his attention accordingly. The first aspect of the sexual obligation reflects the fact that the marital union is a union of love, and therefore one of self-giving. Though a Christian man (and perhaps a woman) may be primarily concerned with his own sexual passions and purity in seeking a spouse, he must understand that the marital union imposes upon him a sexual obligation to his wife as much it obligates her to him; he must fulfill his duty to her even as she must to him (7:3). In this way Paul stood against the predominant patriarchy in ancient (and some contemporary) cultures in which wives were regarded as servants of their husband’s wishes and pleasures. Echoing the creation pattern of male and female as equal sharers in the divine image and the human calling of vice-regency (Genesis 1:26-28), Paul insisted – probably to the amazement of some of his readers – that the Christian husband has the same sexual obligation to his wife that she has to him. She isn’t bound over to the gratification of his sexual pleasure, but they are to be mutually the eager servants of each other’s sexual joy and fulfillment in the bonds of self-giving love. Paul clarified this obligation by considering it in terms of the fact that the marital union is a one-flesh union. In marriage, the husband and wife become one flesh, and this means that their bodies belong to one another – not merely as a matter of devotion, but of authority: The wife has authority over her husband’s body even as he has authority over hers (7:4). Again, this notion was utterly foreign in the world the Corinthians inhabited. Husbands had unqualified authority over their wives and their bodies, but to claim the opposite was shocking and scandalous. Finally, Paul explained that the sexual obligation incurred in marriage must be understood in terms of the fact that the marital union is a spiritual union. This does not deny that the marriage relationship ends at death; neither does it imply that marriage is a feature of the everlasting kingdom (cf. 7:39 with Romans 7:1-3 and Matthew 22:23-30). But it does recognize that the marital union functions within the Christian’s union with Christ. The married Christian is first and foremost a Christian, and this means that every aspect and dynamic of his marital union – including his sexual relationship with his spouse – must be perceived and approached from the standpoint of his essential union with Jesus Christ. This truth has sweeping implications, but Paul was here concerned to apply it to the particular issue raised by the Corinthians. Again, Paul’s opening statement (together with the larger context) indicates that some of them had concluded that celibacy in their marriages was the best course to adopt in light of their new lives in Christ. This conclusion may appear strange to the modern reader, but it was entirely reasonable given the world the Corinthians knew and lived in. 138 Sexuality was woven into the very fabric of Corinth’s social and religious life. Men were free (and even expected), as a matter of mere recreation, to engage in every sort of sexual practice, and prostitution and other forms of sanctioned sex filled the city’s temples as well as its bathhouses. Sex was everywhere in Corinth, and the Corinthian Christians understandably struggled to maintain a godly view of sexuality in the face of their culture’s profligacy. They couldn’t help but think of sexual activity when they considered their former lives and the world they’d inhabited. They left those lives behind when they came to Christ; wasn’t it appropriate, then, to forsake all sexual involvement? (Even some of Corinth’s pagan philosophers would have joined hands with them in that conviction.) But as with marriage itself, Paul insisted that the Corinthians view their marital sexuality with the mind of Christ. Not only was there no value in them embracing celibacy, it would actually undermine the integrity of their marriages and rob them of a critical aspect of the blessing God intended for their “one-flesh” union. Far from being unholy or unclean, sexual expression within marriage is as much a component of the Christian’s holiness as are his explicitly spiritual exercises. The Corinthians needed to understand that there is no sacred and secular for those in Christ; all of life is Christified and therefore “holy to the Lord.” Intimacy between Christian husbands and wives doesn’t diminish or deprecate their holiness; it expresses and exalts their holiness when they regard and treat it – like every aspect of their day-to-day lives – as an act of worship in praise and thanksgiving (cf. 10:31 with Titus 1:15; Colossians 2:20-23, 3:17-19; 1 Timothy 4:1-5). Thus Paul granted that Christian couples may refrain from sexual intimacy for the sake of seasons of focused intimacy with their Lord (7:5a), but not as an ongoing disposition within their marriages. Withholding themselves from one another for any other purpose – even apparently godly reasons – is of no positive value and is ultimately dangerous and detrimental. Celibacy will not enhance their godliness; to the contrary, it will undermine it by subjecting them to satanic deception. Paul understood this deception to be two-fold: First, it pertains to the temptation to a fleshly (natural-minded) view of sexuality (here, celibacy within marriage); second, to the temptation to fleshliness in succumbing to sexual impurity (7:5b). 3. In verse 6 Paul further qualified his instruction by noting that he provided it as a matter of concession rather than command; his words gave room for individual judgment and freedom of conscience. But what exactly was Paul making allowance for? What did he mean by “this I say…”? The closest referent is his comments regarding marital abstinence for Christian couples (v. 5), and that instruction certainly fits the criterion of that which is advisory rather than compulsory. But it’s likely Paul was speaking more broadly. His counsel regarding marital abstinence was clearly concessional, but the context supports the conclusion that Paul was referring to the whole idea of believers marrying: He was upholding the propriety of Christian marriage, but as a matter of concession. He was neither commanding nor forbidding it (let alone calling for Christians to abandon their marriages), but he was insisting that believers enter marriage wisely, recognizing the cost to their freedom as Christ’s servants (7:1, 7, 32-35).
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:40:38 GMT -5
Verse 7 concludes Paul’s summary introduction and elaborates on the reason he regarded and treated the celibacy/marriage question as a matter of concession: Paul recognized that each Christian is unique as a human being and is also uniquely “graced” by God with distinct gifts: “…each man has his own gift from God.” In context, he wasn’t referring to spiritual gifts as treated in chapters 12-14, but to divine endowments by which God fits each Christian to either a life of celibacy or to married life. Here, again, the determinative ethic of Christian freedom comes to the forefront, for freedom speaks to a person’s conformity to the truth – the truth of who he is as well as the what of his individual life in Christ: The unmarried believer (widowed or single) who would employ the mind of Christ must decide the celibacy question on the basis of who God made him to be as a unique person as well as the truth of his marital status and what marriage demands. Paul understood that Christians who are free of sexual desire and its pressures and distractions enjoy an enviable position as servants of Christ. He was such a person, and in that sense could rightly wish all of Christ’s saints were like him. But God has not ordained it to be so; He has uniquely fitted and gifted each of His children and each is obligated to know himself in truth and order his life accordingly. Freedom in conformity to the truth, not subjection to formula or prescription, is the measure of godly obedience. 4. This principle of true freedom lay behind Paul’s overarching ethic that the Lord’s people are to remain as they are. Are they unmarried? Let them remain so, but only if their singleness doesn’t violate the truth of who they are and how God has gifted them (7:8-9). Are they married? Let them remain so and honor the truth of their married state and its privileges, responsibilities and obligations (7:10-16). Each Christian thus shares the exact same obligation: the obligation to conform to the truth of his person and his life situation, which includes, but isn’t limited to, his marital status (7:17-26). a. In Paul’s judgment, singleness has advantage over marriage for the Christian man or woman, and thus he encouraged the unmarried to remain that way. Singleness is preferable for various reasons, but not absolutely so (7:8-9). Its preferability is subject to continence, as also to continuance and contentment: Christians are to be content to remain in the condition in which the Lord found them. For those who are married, this means they are not to reject their spouses and jettison their marriages for the sake of their devotion and service to Him (7:10-16). If they came to faith after marrying, didn’t Jesus know that when He called them to Himself? And for those saints who married subsequent to their new birth, wasn’t that also of the Lord (however much they might now question that decision)? Why, then, would they seek to end their marriage? They may have married wrongly or unwisely, but that, too, falls under God’s providential oversight. b. Married Christians are to remain in their marital state, and do so contentedly and with full commitment to their spouses and their marital obligations. In the case of both spouses being believers, neither is to take action to end their marriage. Wives are not to leave their husbands and husbands are not to put away their wives. But if a couple divorces (which doubtless had already happened at Corinth), then the divorced spouses are to reconcile with one another or remain single (7:10-11). 140 This was Paul’s instruction to Christian couples, but he wanted the Corinthians to know that it did not originate with himself. However he came to this conviction – whether through Jesus’ disciples or Jesus’ own words, Paul was able to affirm that his counsel on this matter accorded with the Lord’s design and will. c. On the other hand, he had no such word from Jesus respecting “mixed” marriages involving only one believing spouse (7:12-16). It’s possible that Jesus had spoken on this subject and Paul was not aware of His teaching; it’s more likely that the Lord never addressed this sort of situation precisely because His ministry and instruction were directed toward the people of Israel. In the Israelite context in which Jesus lived and taught, mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews were forbidden and scandalous. When they did occur, the offenders were expelled from the covenant community. Obviously Jews marrying non-Jews is entirely different from Christians marrying unbelievers (who lack the life, spirit and mind of Christ), but Jewish marital convention helps to explain why Jesus didn’t teach on the matter of mixed marriages. Paul insisted that Christian marriages remain intact, but what about believers who are married to unbelievers? If the advantage of singleness for one’s devotion and service to Christ isn’t enough to justify ending a marriage, being yoked with an unbelieving spouse certainly seems to warrant it. Who can live for the Lord as he ought when he is bound to a spouse whose interests and life orientation are contrary to Him? Surely Christ wouldn’t have His servants dragged down and impeded in their faith and devotion by such a marital situation. This was doubtless the thinking of many at Corinth who, having come to faith, were now at odds with their spouse. But what appears good and proper to the natural mind is contrary to the mind of Christ. Paul’s ethic applies to all married Christians, whether or not their spouses are believers: Christians are to remain in their marriages, content and committed to fulfilling their marital obligations to their spouse (7:12-13). All Christians have the same marital responsibilities regardless of whether or not their spouses share their faith and union with Christ. Moreover, they share the same spiritual responsibilities: Whereas Christians with believing spouses are to faithfully strive to see the life of Christ perfected in their mates, those married to unbelievers are to apply the same faithfulness unto the goal of seeing Christ’s life formed in them. Thus Paul: The unbelieving spouse is sanctified by the presence and faithfulness of the Christian spouse, as are the children of their union (7:14). This statement, perhaps more than any other in this context, has challenged interpreters. Some conclude from Paul’s language that unbelieving family members share in the believer’s sanctity. But whatever the unbelievers’ “holiness,” it clearly differs from the believer’s since it exists apart from their being saved (ref. v. 16). Within Reformed circles, this statement is often used to support the notion of “covenant children” (and so also paedo-baptism): children of believers who are not saved, but are “holy” in the sense of being true members of the covenant community (the Church) which God has set apart to Himself. 141 But treated in context apart from a priori and systematic presumptions, Paul’s meaning is not all that difficult to ascertain: At bottom, he was trying to impress on the Corinthians the importance of believers not abandoning their marriages. Some of the saints at Corinth were evidently convinced that honoring God in their sanctity meant renouncing their conjugal relationship with their spouse, if not ending their marriage altogether. Paul wanted them to understand that their marriages exist and operate within God’s holy design, so that honoring Him involves discerning and living out His purpose in their marital union as it functions to manifest the gospel of His kingdom and promote its fruitfulness. - The context suggests that this Corinthian ethic of abstinence and separation from a spouse (especially an unbelieving one) was grounded in the notion that intimacy with an “unholy” person renders the Christian unclean. The principle of separation from those outside the faith community was central to Israel’s ethic under the Mosaic Code, but it was not unknown to pagan religious systems as well. Man is naturally sacral in his thinking (a sacral community is one defined and bounded by a single religious belief system and practice), and an inevitable byproduct of this mindset is the notion that personal holiness demands separation – so far as possible – from those outside the community of adherents. - While acknowledging a right sort of Christian separation – not of physical contact or social engagement, but of understanding, conviction and devotion (cf. 2 Corinthians 6:1-7:4; Ephesians 4:1-5:17; etc.), Paul recognized the Corinthian notion of separation to be a destructive product of natural thinking. Separating from a wife or husband, either conjugally or entirely, does nothing to preserve or enhance the Christian’s sanctity, and that’s equally true in instances where that spouse is an unbeliever. Quite the opposite, the believer’s holiness is manifest, upheld and nurtured when he honors his marital union and fulfills the Lord’s purpose in it. - In God’s design, marriage enjoys its own sanctity in the one-flesh union of man and woman. But it also serves – as does every facet of the believer’s life in Christ – God’s ultimate purpose of restoring all things to Himself in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 1:9-10). The Corinthians were thinking too narrowly, for marriage has great significance beyond itself; it is an important component of the all-encompassing scheme the triune God has put in place to move the creation toward the day of its consummation. - Every Christian is appointed and called to be the light and fragrance of Christ and His gospel in the world, and so also in the “world” of his unbelieving home (Matthew 5:13-16). If the Christian spouse abandons his marriage and family, where is the testimony of Christ to the unbelieving spouse and children? In the name of honoring God and his own holiness, such a one dishonors both. Can a Christian better fulfill his obligation of witness by forsaking it with respect to his family members? 142 Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ – not just in verbal proclamation, but in the unimpeachable testimony of a life manifesting the truth, fruit, and power of the new creation. Rather than thinking in terms of separating from an unbelieving spouse (and so, to a certain degree at least, from the children of that union), the Christian should commit himself to draw ever closer to his unbelieving family with the goal of seeing the truth of the gospel – embodied in himself and his new life in Christ – bear its fruit in his family’s salvation. It is from this vantage point that Paul designated the unbelieving spouse and children as “holy”: They are set apart to God, not in the sense that they are saved (or even necessarily will be) or are members of His Church, but in the sense that God has appointed them – through the vehicle of marriage and parenthood – to dwell in the presence of His Spirit and His gospel as they enjoy living witness in the believing spouse and parent. The unbelieving family members have their sanctity in the Christian spouse and parent, and this, in turn, imposes on the married believer the sober obligation to manifest Christ in his home; can he trust – and excuse himself – that they will see the Lord Jesus through someone else? And so, while the natural mind is quite content to reduce issues to simple concerns with simple answers (in this instance, the rightness of celibacy, even within marriage or by the dissolution of one’s marriage); the spiritual mind understands that things must be approached with a wider view. What may appear to be a crucial concern may not even touch the real issue; and even in cases where it does, dealing with it requires discerning and addressing the whole. The Corinthians were preoccupied with the question of Christian sexuality and apparently sought Paul’s affirmation of a celibate lifestyle. They wanted him to agree that it’s good for a man not to touch a woman; Paul recognized that the truth of the matter could only be determined by a broader consideration. Central to Paul’s Christian ethic was his conviction that believers are to remain in the condition in which God found them when He joined them to His Son. Regardless of their spouse’s standing before the Lord, Christians are not to separate from them or forsake their marital obligations within their marriages. The saints are not to leave their spouses, but what of those unbelieving spouses who are determined to depart? Can a Christian (or anyone) force his wife or husband to stay in the marriage, and should he even try? Paul’s answer was straightforward: “Let the unbelieving one leave; the brother or the sister is not under bondage in such cases,” and the reason is that “God has called us to peace” (v. 15). Peace in all things and repentance and faith in the unbelieving are God’s design and good pleasure. Opposing an unbelieving spouse who is determined to depart serves neither. But assuming the Christian has faithfully exhibited and expressed the life and love of Christ to his/her unbelieving spouse, he can let that one depart knowing that it is ultimately Christ who is being rejected. Just as faithfulness in the marriage had its goal in repentance and faith, so does faithfulness in letting the unbeliever depart. Who knows whether God will yet save him or her (v. 16)?
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2024 18:43:05 GMT -5
5. Some at Corinth believed that the advantages of a celibate life respecting Christian holiness justify divorcing one’s spouse, especially if that spouse is not a believer. But Paul wanted the Corinthians to understand that freedom, not celibacy, is the issue in believers living holy lives. Christ has delivered them from their bondage, and they must be careful to not allow themselves to again be subjected to any form of enslavement. And because any deviation from the truth is movement toward bondage, the Christian who would live as a free man must understand himself and what it means for him to live the life God has given him. He must conform to the truth of his person and his life, and this means embracing with settled contentment what actually is rather than longing or striving for what is not. Christ’s people are to be content to remain as they are, and this applies not just to the marital question, but to every arena and aspect of their lives. The Corinthians were concerned in their letter with the issue of celibacy, and Paul knew they’d tend to read his response through that grid. He was addressing their concern, but with an overarching principle that could not be limited to that one issue. Paul wanted to make sure they understood that his instruction pertained to the totality of their lives, and he penned the next section (7:17-24) with that goal in mind. This is clearly evident from the structure of the passage. - Three times in the passage – at the outset, in the middle and again in closing – Paul reiterated his maxim that believers are to remain as they are (vv. 17, 20, 24). - Between those three instances Paul provided two scenarios to illustrate how Christians are to understand and apply this principle (vv. 18-19, 21-23). Those scenarios will be treated individually, but, by way of introducing and framing them, it’s important to note a couple of things: 1) First, Paul chose real-life situations that actually existed in the Corinthian church (as most of the churches of that day): There were Jewish and Gentile believers within that body and also individuals who were slaves. (Corinth, like all Roman cities, was filled with slaves who constituted the majority of the workforce of the Roman Empire – skilled labor as well as unskilled. It’s been estimated that slaves comprised 75 percent of Rome’s population in the first century.) 2) Second, Paul was careful to choose illustrations that would most powerfully make his point. These particular ones do so in two ways. First, if there are any conditions which would seem to be exceptions to Paul’s injunction for Christians to remain as they are, those related to circumcision and slavery are certainly among them (for personal, religious, cultural and socio-economic reasons). The second way these two conditions are uniquely suited to Paul’s point is that the distinctions of circumcision/uncircumcision and slave/free were profoundly important in the religious, cultural and social context of the Greco-Roman world. They were key issues in identifying one’s social and religious class and status, but Paul recognized that Christ has erased all such distinctions (Colossians 3:9-11). 144 a. Paul’s intent in this passage was to demonstrate to the Corinthians that the principle of true freedom – expressed in the believer discerning his own person and condition and ordering himself accordingly – applies to every facet of one’s life in Christ, not just one’s marital situation. He drew upon two of the most defining and compelling life conditions to prove it, but he prefaced that discussion with an explicit statement of what he’d already implied to this point (7:17). The first thing to observe about this statement is that Paul used two complementary descriptors in constructing it: “as the Lord has assigned to each” and “as God has called each.” - The first speaks to the believer’s individual endowments – the apportionments (gifts, v. 7) which God has uniquely given him and woven into his person and which fit him for the life the Lord assigned to him. - The second expresses the same basic idea, but emphasizes that the Christian’s gifts from God are reflected in and equip him for the condition and circumstances unique to his own life as a believer in this world. Thus the calling Paul refers to is not the individual’s ministerial “call” as a Christian – i.e., the particular ministerial work the Lord is calling him to do, but the condition and circumstances that characterized his life when God called him to faith in His Son. This is obvious from the balance of the passage (vv. 18ff). In a word, Paul was reminding the Corinthians that God had ordered their individual person and circumstance with a view to their salvation and life in Christ; therefore, they were not to despise or try to cast off those features and conditions. Secondly, Paul affirmed that this principle is truly universal. It pertains to the totality of a given Christian’s life, but also to every individual in Christ’s Church. Paul was penning his instruction to the Corinthians because of specific questions and concerns they had raised in their letter to him, but he wanted them to know that his response wasn’t uniquely tailored to them and their concerns; his instruction to them was his instruction to all the churches, irrespective of the particular situation a given person or church was facing. Whatever the condition or circumstance or concern regarding it, Paul’s answer was the same. b. Christians are to remain as they are, and Paul first drew upon circumcision to make the case (7:18-19). This example highlights the issue of religious status and the distinction between Jew and Gentile in the Christian community. The JewGentile question was front-and-center in the first century as the early Jewish Christians wrestled with the growing number of Gentiles coming into the Church. They were fine with Gentiles coming to faith in Jesus, but most believed the way into God’s covenant household continued to be through Israel, as had been the case since Abraham. Thus the Gentiles needed to be circumcised and bind themselves to Torah in order to become part of Messiah’s people; in the early Church, circumcision was of utmost importance as a distinguishing mark. 145 Yet here was Paul insisting that there was no reason for Gentile Christians to be circumcised – any more than there was for circumcised believers to become uncircumcised. Obviously Paul recognized that it’s physically impossible to reverse one’s circumcision; he wasn’t talking about that, but about Christians who came to faith as circumcised individuals (Jews or Gentile proselytes) forsaking their Jewishness (for either ecclesiastical or social benefit). Gentiles are not to become Jewish, but neither are Jewish Christians to renounce their Jewishness. The reason is that “circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing” (7:19a). Circumcision has become irrelevant, not because it’s been abrogated, but because it’s realized its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Circumcision was preparatory and prophetic, and has now attained its ordained destiny in its spiritual antitype (cf. Deuteronomy 30:1-6 with Romans 2:28-29 and Colossians 2:8-12). This is key in understanding Paul’s enigmatic statement that circumcision means nothing; what matters is “keeping the commandments of God” (v. 19b). Wasn’t circumcision a foundational commandment, such that all other obedience was effectively negated by non-compliance with that obligation (cf. Genesis 17:10-14; Exodus 4:24-26, 12:40-51; Joshua 5:1-9)? The Jewish believers at Corinth certainly understood this, and Paul’s words must have shocked them. Whatever matters of indifference may exist for Christians, few Jewish believers regarded circumcision as one of them. While some might allow that Gentile believers didn’t have to be circumcised, probably none would agree that circumcision (and so Jewishness) is not preferable. Even the great apostle Peter – who embraced and promoted the truth that Gentiles are fellow sharers in God’s grace in Christ (Acts 10-11) – struggled with the notion that Jewish and Gentile Christians have equal status in God’s covenant household (Galatians 2:11-21). Peter – like most of his Jewish brethren – had to learn the truth that “circumcision is nothing.” The early Jewish Christians understood from the Scriptures that the Gentiles were to share in Israel’s Messiah; what wasn’t evident to them is God’s design to make one “new man” in Him: to remove all partitions between Jew and Gentile so as to make Gentiles – as Gentiles – equal members in the Abrahamic household; full covenant sons though “disobedient” to God’s covenant command. Now here was Paul – himself a circumcised Jew – making circumcision of no account while insisting upon the necessity of keeping God’s commandments. Again, the reason he could do so was that Paul recognized the all-encompassing reality of christological fulfillment: All the Scriptures testified of Jesus; now that He has come, all scriptural content has been “christified” in the sense of finding its true meaning and import in Him. Circumcision served its purpose as a “shadow” in the preparatory salvation history and has now yielded to the substance it signified. In Jesus Christ, circumcision has become nothing; by implication, so has the distinction between Jew and Gentile. Both have found their destiny in the True Israel – the One in whom Israel, along with the nations, is becoming the Israel of God (Galatians 6:15-16; cf. 3:26-29; Colossians 3:1-11). 146 Paul’s summary assertion in his Galatian epistle thus provides interpretive insight for his present statement: Keeping God’s commandments means upholding the truth as it is in Christ; it means conducting oneself according to the reality of new creation in Him. The truth of new creation is the “rule” imposed upon the sons of the kingdom, and conformity to this truth is compliance with the law of freedom. c. The new creation in Jesus Christ has abolished the millennia-old distinction between Jew and Gentile and the religious status and privilege afforded to those who bear the mark of circumcision. Since the circumcision/uncircumcision distinction no longer exists, every Christian needs to conform to the truth by remaining in the condition in which he was called. And as it is for circumcision and its religious status and privilege, so it is for the class and socio-economic distinctions associated with slavery (7:21-23). If circumcision seemed to certain Christians to be preferable to uncircumcision, the superiority of freedom over slavery would have been affirmed by all. If Paul couldn’t exclude the issue of circumcision from his injunction to remain as one is, surely he’d never make that claim for slavery. Although some slaves in the ancient Roman world enjoyed privileged and even somewhat distinguished lives as servants of powerful and wealthy masters, what man wouldn’t prefer his freedom if given the opportunity? Yet, just as with circumcision, Paul regarded the Christian’s status as a slave or free man to be a matter of indifference: “Were you called while a slave? Stop letting it be a concern to you.” Paul was neither foolish nor callous, but perceived all circumstance through the lens of overarching truth: A Christian may be a slave in this life – even the lowest and most oppressed of slaves, but in reality he is free; whatever his earthly circumstance, he is Christ’s freedman. The Christian slave is defined and determined by his union with Jesus Christ, and the same is true of the free man: He may be free of earthly masters, but he is Christ’s slave. Paul wanted the Corinthians (as all believers) to be free of all subjugation, and this is achieved by living into the truth – not the truth of what meets the eye and experience, but the truth of new creation in Christ. Being a partaker in Christ’s life and renewing power means that earthly conditions are indifferent. Not only are they temporal, they cannot touch the truth of what a person has become in Christ. Present life conditions and circumstances have no mastery or ultimacy; they are neither defining nor determinative. Instead, in God’s hands they are servants of the truth of the believer’s new life and destiny in Christ. Therefore, what matters is that the Christian is Christ’s freedman and bondslave; he’s been liberated from what truly enslaved him to serve a new master. As to his earthly status, he can be content to remain as he is, for he is with God (7:24). Thus Paul: If a Christian slave is offered his freedom, he may take advantage of it, but so as to employ his new-found freedom as Christ’s bondslave. And if that opportunity never presents itself, he is still absolutely free in Christ. And that freedom he must never compromise or relinquish. The Christian who is a slave belongs to Christ and the truth as it is in Him, as does his brother who has no earthly master. Both are equally bound as free men; both must honor and preserve their true freedom and not become slaves of men.
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