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1 CORINTHIANS 3 – COMMENTARY

Bible Text: 

1 Corinthians 3:10-17 (ESV) 

¹⁰ According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. ¹¹ For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. ¹² Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—¹³ each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. ¹⁴ If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. ¹⁵ If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.

¹⁶ Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? ¹⁷ If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.

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1 CORINTHIANS 3 – COMMENTARY

vv.1-4 “The contrast between ‘spiritual’ and ‘worldly’ in 3:1-4 thus differs from the contrasts in 2:6-16. ‘Worldly’ in verse 1 is a slightly different Greek word than in verse 3, but both are pejorative. The KJV translates both as ‘carnal,’ that is, ‘fleshly’ or dominated by one’s sinful nature, in this context mani­fested by jealousy and quarreling. ‘Spiritual’ must therefore mean not merely having the Spirit but having the Spirit in charge. Even at the end of Paul’s one-and-one-half-year stay in Corinth, he had expected these young Christians to be more transformed in their behavior. Now, a full three years later, their squabbling is that much more inexcusable. Their immaturity re­sembles that of adults acting like infants by still eating only baby food (v.2).”[1]

“But to remain worldly, in rebellion against God’s Spirit, for too long a period of time calls into ques­tion one’s salvation, while to claim not to have sinned for some equally long interval trivializes the amount of conscious and unconscious violations of God’s perfect standards which all humans regularly commit.

“The current debate over ‘lordship salvation’ presents similar pitfalls. On the one hand, there is no biblical justification for a two-stage process in which one accepts Christ as Savior at one point in life but acknowledges him as Lord only at another point. No one may come to Christ who does not sur­render his or her entire self in allegiance to a new master. On the other hand, this call must not be presented in such a way that it appears as if one must understand or be able to anticipate everything that will be involved in fol­lowing Jesus. Similarly, inability to conquer sin in certain, specific areas must not automatically call one’s salvation into question. The seemingly paradoxical statement that encapsulates the biblical balance is that salvation is absolutely free but it costs people their entire lives.”[2]

vv.5-9 “The theme in verses 5-9a of the fundamental equality of Christians, in­cluding Christian leaders in particular, must be stressed in order to make sense of Paul’s teaching about judgment in verses 8 and 12-15. From a human perspective, it is natural to imagine that the great evangelists and faithful sufferers among God’s people deserve much more than the con­victed criminal who converts on death-row. But to demand what we deserve is to wind up defeated from the outset. Compared to the perfection God re­quires, the differences among his people are like the differences in elevation between Mt. Everest in the Himalayas and the Mariana Trench in the West Pacific—seemingly vast from an earth-bound perspective yet negligible when viewed from another planet! There is diversity of performance to be sure but not at expense of this ultimate leveling factor (v.7).”[3]

“Paul now goes right to the heart of the matter. What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Some looked up to one, some to the other: but Paul is quite clear—we are both servants, diakonoi (Greek = deacons). We wait at tables to serve you; we wait on God for his instructions. As we obey his wishes, so you are blessed. We move at his bidding. He has assigned to us our responsibilities.

“I planted, Apollos watered (6). Both activities are vital. Each depends on the other. It is no good one planting seeds where the other cannot water them, and the one who waters does not achieve much if he waters everywhere else except where the seeds have been sown. Both functions are important, but useless unless God gives the growth. Both he who plants and he who waters are completely dependent on God—and on each other: ‘God’s fellow workers’ (9), equal in his sight and equal in value (8). Both need to work hard and both can expect to be rewarded at the end (cf. 14): each shall receive his wages according to his labor (8).”[4]

vv.12-13 “Interpreters of verse 12 must guard against allegorizing the six individual building materials. Their significance is collectively to contrast three rela­tively fireproof elements with three that quickly burn up. Nor may this fire be interpreted literally. […]  Doubtless all will have varying degrees of praise and blame from Christ on Judgment Day, but nothing in this passage even remotely suggests that such differing responses are somehow perpetuated throughout all eternity.

“A misinterpretation of the judgment seat of Christ is often bound up with a misrepresentation of carnality. The apparent injustice of being able to pro­fess faith but never show any fruit of it and still be saved seems to be ame­liorated by assuming that such a person will in some sense not get as much out of heaven. If one recognizes that neither verses 1-4 nor 13-15 admit such a person to be a Christian at all, then the tension is relieved by stress­ing that such people are not even saved.

“We must exercise great care, therefore, not to use the category of carnal Christian to give false hope to people that perpetual ‘backsliddenness’ is a viable option for those who want to spend eternity with the Lord.”[5]

v.13 “But ‘the Day’ is not easily turned into anything other than the univer­sal, public reckoning which all people must face on Christ’s return (cf. Matt. 25:31-46, in which pronouncements of salvation and condemnation are combined with an assessment of the works that demonstrate the presence or absence of faith). Given that all believers are potentially leaders in some small sphere of ministry, and that all ultimately contribute in one way or another to the growth or stagnation of the church, it seems far too restrictive to limit the judgment of these verses to any select group of Christians.”[6]

vv.14-15 “Reward is promised here. Paul takes the normal practice of workers being paid for a job well done and projects that the same will be true at the last judgment.”[7]

“No doubt every Christian’s work is mixed in quality; no doubt we all shall have the awesome sadness of seeing much of our work burned up. This should inspire all Christians to take more thorough care how we are building. Yet, whatever the extent of the loss we shall suffer, nothing in the eternal justice of that fire can tear us away from the love of God or from his salvation. Because of what Jesus Christ has done on the cross, it has ‘pleased God […] to save those who believe’ in him (1:21).[8]

vv.16-17 “The transition between verses 9b-15 and 16-17 seems to be as follows: God will indeed respond differently to different kinds of believers on Judg­ment Day, but the real danger to fear is the eternal destruction of those who would divide and tear down the church now. […] What is important is that Paul does not take for granted that every church member is a true disciple of Jesus, particularly when some­one’s behavior remains fundamentally contrary to the spirit of unity that the gospel promotes.

“The term for ‘destroy’ (v.17) must not be watered down to refer merely to temporal judgment nor taken as support for any doctrine of annihilation, in light of the consistent testimony of Paul elsewhere, the rest of the New Testament, first-century Judaism, and the Apostolic Fathers. The reason Paul chose this term, over against more common terms for eternal condem­nation, is to show that the punishment fits the crime. They who would do away with God’s sacred enterprise will themselves perish. Overall these two verses form the strongest warning in all the New Testament ‘against those who would take the church lightly and destroy it by worldly wisdom and di­vision.’”[9]

vv.21b-23 “In order to appreciate the impact of this conclusion, we need to know that it was a universal maxim of Greco-Roman popular philosophy—particularly among the Cynics and Stoics—that ‘the wise man possesses all things.’

“Those at Corinth who boast in their possession of an exalted wisdom that claims to lift them above the rabble and give them possession of all things are making one fatal error: they are leaving God out of their assessment. But Paul insists that all things are God’s, including the church—God’s field, God’s building, God’s temple. Insofar as the wise at Corinth belong to Jesus Christ, they must acknowledge that they do not even belong to themselves. They, like Paul and Apollos, are servants of a common master who owns them all. God is sovereign over all creation and all time. The sooner that truth sinks in, the sooner they will begin to live in the real world rather than in the utopian fantasy of their own wisdom.”[10]

[1] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 72.

[2] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 82-83.

[3] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 78.

[4] John R.W. Stott, The Message of 1 Corinthians (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1985) 57.

[5] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 79-80.

[6] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 79.

[7] Paul J. Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. X (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002) 830.

[8] John R.W. Stott, The Message of 1 Corinthians (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1985) 60.

[9] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 81.

[10] Richard B. Hays, “1 Corinthians,” Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997) 60-61.

Bible Text: 

1 Corinthians 3:1-9 (ESV) 

¹ But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. ² I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, ³ for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? ⁴ For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?

⁵ What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. ⁶ I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. ⁷ So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. ⁸ He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. ⁹ For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.

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1 CORINTHIANS 2 – COMMENTARY

Bible Text: 

1 Corinthians 2:10-16 (ESV)

¹⁰ these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. ¹¹ For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. ¹² Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. ¹³ And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

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

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1 CORINTHIANS 2 – COMMENTARY

Bible Text: 

1 Corinthians 2:6-9 (ESV) 

⁶ Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. ⁷ But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. ⁸ None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 

⁹ But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

    nor the heart of man imagined,

what God has prepared for those who love him”—

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1 CORINTHIANS 2 – COMMENTARY

vv.1-5 “These verses contain Paul’s narrative of com­munity formation. […]  Note what he chooses to place at the center of the picture: ‘Christ Jesus and him crucified!’ Neither his comportment nor his rhet­oric drew attention to Paul; both, however pro­vided free rein to the Holy Spirit and God’s power. It is no surprise, then, that Paul judges his work among the Corinthians as leaving no room for con­fusion; their faith is grounded on God’s power, not on human wisdom or performance or status asso­ciated with sophisticated speech.”[1]

v.2 “For Paul the critical question is what stands at the center of the picture by which all other parts of the picture gain their meaning and keep their perspective. Paul’s answer: He made the careful decision at the beginning of his time with the Corinthians that it would be Christ and the cross, not just at the beginning but throughout. […] If the crucified Christ is at the center of the picture and all else takes its definition and proportion with reference to that, then a constitutive, formative decision has been made about how the community can distinguish between what is important and what is less impor­tant or even indifferent.”[2]

vv.3-5 “Paul’s own personal bearing mirrored his message. His self-presentation was not like that of the esteemed and confident Greek orators; rather, his weakness and fear corresponded to his foolish proclamation of a crucified Messiah. We know from 2 Corinthians 10:10 that some rival preachers regarded Paul as being an unimpres­sive figure: ‘For they say, “His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible.’’’ Interestingly, the words weak and contemptible are two of the words that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 1:27-28 to describe the vehicles that God has chosen to shame the strong and privileged. (The NRSV translates the latter in 1:28 as ‘despised.’) So, Paul did not fit the popular stereotype of the dynamic orator, and he did not employ artful rhetoric—so he says—to sway his hearers. Why? Because he wanted his preaching strategy to be consistent with ‘the word of the cross,’ with the workings of a God who refuses to play games of power and prestige on human terms.”[3]

vv.6-16 “Verse 6 opens with an invitation for Paul’s hearers to include themselves among the mature, the spir­itual people, who can receive Paul’s not-of-this-age wisdom, and closes by giving them the opportu­nity to identify themselves with the spiritual per­son who understands (2:14-15). It even adds the extraordinary claim, ‘We have the mind of Christ’ (2:16). Paul’s notoriously ambiguous use of ‘we’ sometimes refers to him alone but, as here, it sometimes leaves an opening for the hearer to identify with Paul. So this passage is framed by an invitation to the Corinthians to think of them­selves as mature and also to think of themselves as having the ‘mind of Christ,’ which locution in Paul usually means that persons pattern them­selves after Christ (cf. Phil 2:1-5).”

v.7 “The secret and hidden wisdom of God is, therefore, nothing more or less than Jesus Christ and him crucified. Though hidden and secret for generations, he has now been revealed as the Son of God and as the Savior of the world. The word secret (Greek mysterion) has a double stress: mere man cannot penetrate the secret, but God has in his love unlocked it to those who humble themselves before him. It remains secret and hidden to those who still rely on human wisdom.”[4]

vv.10-16 “Paul has shown two fundamental assumptions about people and life in these verses. First, just as there are two ways, so also all humans can be divided into two groups: those with the Spirit and those without. Second, those with the Spirit can discern everything that the unspiritual persons can plus all that is disclosed by the Spirit, who, we must recall, fathoms even the depths of God (2:10). For that reason, Paul concludes (2:15) both that the truly spiritual person ‘examines, knows, discerns’ all things and that the truly spiritual per­son can claim, with Paul, that ‘we have the mind of Christ’ (2:16).”[5]

vv.13-16 “The contrasts in verses 13-16 have received widespread abuse in the his­tory of the church. As with 1:18-20, they cannot be used to legitimate anti-intellectualism, although they certainly oppose all forms of godless intellectualism. Nor do they justify attempts at interpreting God’s will, in­cluding his revelation in the Scriptures, apart from standard, common-sense principles of hermeneutics.”[6]

v.15 “The community has the responsibility to guard the God-given holiness of the congregation, to warn any who stray too near the borders as designated by the vice lists, and to censure anyone, like the man mentioned in 5:1-5, who has violated the sanctity of the borders. This type of judgment, which clearly from 5:5 is not final like divine judgment, but provisional and admonitory, is not only acceptable to Paul but neces­sary for the health of the community. An important part of community life for Paul is believers’ upbuilding, encouragement, consolation, and warning of one another in the daily walk of faith.”[7]

“Verse 15 too is susceptible to severe misunderstanding. […] Here, there­fore, he is thinking primarily of being unjustly evaluated by non-Christians (or by Christians employing worldly standards), who have no authority to criticize believers for their misbehavior, since they themselves do not accept the standards they employ in making their judgments. Christians, on the other hand, may legitimately evaluate the truth or error of non-Christian be­liefs and behavior, although their primary concern should be to keep their own house in order (5:12-13).”[8]

v.16 “We can begin to see why Paul must have felt so frustrated by the sheer fleshliness, or carnality, of the Christians at Corinth. They, like all Christians, had access to the very mind of Christ; but they were precluding themselves from the privilege of being able, by the work of the Spirit, to judge all things (15) through God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, the very wisdom of God. […] Paul is saying that Christian believers can revert to behaving like unbelievers. When a person has been born again by the Spirit of God, he becomes potentially a ‘spiritual man,’ but he is not automatically going to continue walking in the Spirit.

“We must beware of any tendency to sit back on our haunches and to feel that we have ‘arrived.’ We must determine to love God with every fiber of our being. We must link closely with our fellow-believers in the body of Christ, because to have the mind of Christ is essentially a corporate experience; ‘we have the mind of Christ.’ As we pursue these priorities, the Spirit will unfold to us more and more of the wisdom of God in Jesus Christ, our crucified and risen Lord.” [9]

[1] Paul J. Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. X (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002) 817.

[2] Paul J. Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. X (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002) 817.

[3] Richard B. Hays, “1 Corinthians,” Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997) 35-36.

[4] John R.W. Stott, The Message of 1 Corinthians (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1985) 51-52.

[5] Paul J. Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. X (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002) 821.

[6] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 67.

[7] Paul J. Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. X (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002) 823.

[8] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 68.

[9] John R.W. Stott, The Message of 1 Corinthians (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1985) 53-54.

Bible Text: 

1 Corinthians 2:1-5 (ESV)  

¹ And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. ² For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. ³ And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, ⁴ and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, ⁵ so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

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Bible Text: 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 (ESV)

(1 Corinthians 1 Commentary) 

²⁶ For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. ²⁷ But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; ²⁸ God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, ²⁹ so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. ³⁰ And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, ³¹ so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

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Bible Text: 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 (ESV) 

(1 Corinthians 1 Commentary) 

¹⁸ For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹ For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

    and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

²⁰ Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹ For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. ²² For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, ²⁴ but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 

²⁵ For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

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Bible Text: 1 Corinthians 1:10-17 (ESV) 

(1 Corinthians 1 Commentary) 

¹⁰ I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. ¹¹ For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. ¹² What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.” ¹³ Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? ¹⁴ I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, ¹⁵ so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. ¹⁶ (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) ¹⁷ For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

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Bible Text: 1 Corinthians 1:4-9 (ESV) (1 Corinthians 1 Commentary)

⁴ I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, ⁵ that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge—

⁶ even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you— ⁷ so that you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, ⁸ who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁹ God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

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Commentary: INTRODUCTION COMMENTARY TO 1 CORINTHIANS

“Ancient Corinth had become a prominent city-state in the southern Greek province known as Achaia several centuries before the time of Christ. Already in this era, it had eclipsed Athens in prominence […] Roman Corinth had roughly eighty thousand people with an additional twenty thousand in nearby rural areas […] In Paul’s day, it was probably the wealthiest city in Greece and a major, multicultural urban center.”[1]

“Like any large commercial city, Corinth was a center for open and unbridled immorality.  The worship of Aphrodite fostered prostitution in the name of religion.  At one time 1,000 sacred prostitutes served her temple.  So widely known did the immorality of Corinth become that the Greek verb ‘to Corinthianize’ came to mean ‘to practice sexual immorality.’ In a setting like this it is no wonder that the Corinthian church was plagued with numerous problems.”[2]

“The accounts of Strabo and of the second-century C.E. writer Pausanias indicate that the city supported numerous sites of pagan worship and was adorned by magnificent statues of gods and goddesses in public places, including a large statue of Athena in the middle of the [marketplace] […] The Corinthian Christians would have been confronted on a daily basis by these imposing symbolic reminders of the religio-political world out of which they had been called…”[3]

“Paul had founded the Christian community in Corinth through his preaching and teaching (Acts 18:1-11); consequently, he describes himself as having planted the community (1 Cor. 3:6), or having laid its foundation (3:10), or even as having ‘fathered’ it (4:15). According to Luke’s account, Paul spent eighteen months in Corinth (Acts 18:11), sufficient time to develop significant relationships there and to provide extensive instruction. In accordance with his mission of organizing new communities, once the church was up and running, he moved on. It is likely that Paul left Corinth during the year 51 C.E. and that the letter known to us as 1 Corinthians was written some time later, probably during the interval 53-55 C.E.”[4]

“Two convergent factors precipitated Paul’s writing of 1 Corinthians. First, he had received a report from ‘Chloe’s people’—presumably members of the household headed by a woman named Chloe—that there was serious dissension within the community. Their report presumably also included alarming information about other problems within the Corinthian church: sexual immorality, legal disputes, abuses of the Lord’s Supper, and controversies about the resurrection of the dead. Second, the Corinthians themselves had written to Paul asking for his advice about several things. Their letter had certainly posed questions about sex within marriage and eating meat that had been offered to idols; probably it had also raised the issues of spiritual gifts in the community’s worship and Paul’s collection for Jerusalem.”[5]

1 CORINTHIANS 1 – COMMENTARY

v.2 “Even in the opening address of the letter, Paul places the church at Corinth and its particular concerns within a much wider story, encouraging them to see themselves as part of a network of communities of faith stretching around the Mediterranean world[…] [T]he Corinthians must see themselves as part of a much larger movement, subject to the same Lord whose authority governs the church as a whole.

They are not spiritually free agents. The church of God that is in Corinth is just one branch of a larger operation.”[6]

“It is also important to note that Paul speaks to the church collectively. In our day of so many ‘lone-ranger’ Christians, it is important to recall that neither here nor elsewhere does Scripture envisage Christians apart from a local church. So God is also in the process of perfecting his people corporately as well as individually.”[7]

vv.4-9 “How can Paul be so thankful and positive about a church rife with divisions and abuses even of these very gifts? Verses 8-9 supply the answer: God’s character provides the guarantee. He will remain faithful to his promises ultimately to perfect his people, however immature they at times seem to be. When he returns, when the age of fulfillment of all of the remaining biblical promises arrives, then believers will be made wholly blameless. Acquitted of their past sins, they will be fully prepared for the life to come. Even now, his people are in the process of being remolded, even if it is with fits and starts, as they enter into a personal relationship with Jesus.”[8]

v.9 “The word koinonia [fellowship] can refer both to the spiritual relationship to Jesus Christ and to the community of people who are called together into that relationship. In fact, in Paul’s understanding, these two realities are inseparable. To be ‘in Christ’ is to be in the fellowship of the church. The community’s calling is not just to perform a mission or to obey certain norms; rather, the community is finally called into a relationship of intimate mutuality with one another in Christ. To participate in the church was to find oneself summoned to close and even sacrificial relationships with others, including those of other social classes, those with whom one might ordinarily have nothing at all in common.”[9]

vv.10-17  “So when ‘there is jealousy and quarreling among you’ (3:3), nothing distinguishes believers from everybody else. The way of the world has become the way of believers. (What is supposed to be outside the assembly of believers has insidiously moved inside.) The hallmark of Christians is supposed to be unity in Christ; Paul takes anything less than that as a sign of immaturity.”[10]

v.10 “Paul’s basic appeal for unity involves several key expressions. He exhorts the church in the ‘name’ (power or authority) of Jesus that all of them ‘agree,’ literally meaning that they all ‘say the same thing.’ They must abolish ‘divisions,’ a political term for rival parties or factions. They should become ‘perfectly united,’ a verb probably better rendered ‘restored to unity,’ in ‘mind’ and ‘thought,’ terms that include the ideas of counsel and choice. Together these two expressions embrace volition as well as cognition.”[11]

“However many differences there may be, or how distinctive the contributions to the body politic, the members of the body must never lose sight of the basis of Christian unity: the sacred death with Christ in which God inaugurated their new life in Christ. Christians are united in that they share the same prior indebtedness to sin’s power, the same utter need for God’s grace, and the same loving redemptive power of God’s mercy. Christian unity rests on the shared story, not on the opinions that believers have about issues, and not on the distinctive contributions they are enabled to make to the community of believers.”[12]

v.17 “Paul’s fundamental mission is to preach the gospel, not to baptize. In other words, in Paul’s apostolic work the ministry of the Word is all-important, whereas the ministry of ‘sacrament’ has only secondary significance; the community should not be divided by different sacramental practices, because its fundamental ground of unity lies in the proclaimed.”[13]

v.18 “He launches into an extended meditation on the meaning of the cross, seeking to show that prideful confidence in human wisdom is antithetical to the deepest logic of the gospel. The fundamental theme of this section of the letter is the op­position between human wisdom (sophia) and the ‘word of the cross’ (1:18). The cross is interpreted here as an apocalyptic event, God’s shocking intervention to save and transform the world.”[14]

vv.20-21 “Paul sees that the gospel’s power depends on nothing but God’s own power and not at all on the social and cultural conventions of power. Some of the claims of the gospel crash head-on into such status seeking, and Paul does everything within his rhetorical power to heighten the sense of dis­sonance and contrast.”[15]

vv.22-25 “The scandal of this message is difficult for Christians of a later era to imagine. To proclaim a crucified Messiah is to talk nonsense. Cru­cifixion was a gruesome punishment administered by the Romans to ‘make an example’ out of rebels or disturbers of the Pax Romana. As a particularly horrible form of public torture and execution, it was designed to demonstrate that no one should defy the powers that be. Yet Paul’s gospel declares that the crucifixion of Jesus is somehow the event through which God has triumphed over those powers. Rather than proving the sovereignty of Roman political order, it shatters the world’s systems of authority. Rather than confirming what the wisest heads already know, it shatters the world’s systems of knowledge.

“All of this is understandably baffling to Paul’s hearers in the an­cient Mediterranean world. Jews, who have suffered long under the burden of foreign oppression, quite reasonably look for manifestations of God’s power: signs like those done by Moses at the time of the exo­dus, perhaps portending at last God’s powerful deliverance of his peo­ple again from bondage. The Messiah should be a man of power, manifesting supernatural proofs of God’s favor. Greeks, with their proverbial love of learning, quite reasonably look for wisdom: reason­able accounts of the order of things presented in a logically compelling and aesthetically pleasing manner. The Christ should be a wise teacher of philosophical truths. But no! God has blown away all apparently rea­sonable criteria: the Christ is a crucified criminal.

“Those at Corinth who have been converted to the Christian faith through Paul’s preaching certainly ought to know that, because his whole message was ‘Christ crucified’ (2:2). This proclamation of the crucified one is a stumbling block (skandalon) to Jews and craziness to Greeks, but for those who are part of God’s elect people—made up now of Jews and Greeks together, those who are ‘the called ones’ (1:24; 1:2,9) at Corinth and elsewhere—this mind warping paradox is God’s power and God’s wisdom.”[16]

v.26-31 “Of course, it is possible to be rich and Christian, but frequently at the times the church has been least compromised with culture and politics, the majority of believers have not come from the upper classes of the world. From the pre-Constantinian era to the Radical Reformation, from religiously motivated immigration to America in past centuries to the rapid spread of Christianity in the Two-Thirds World today, this trend has proved surprisingly recurrent. For it is precisely the well-to-do who are often likely not to sense any need for God, because they believe they can buy or manipulate their way into meeting all their needs.”[17]

“When God ‘chose the poor’ they were also ‘those who loved him,’ who recognized their need for help and their personal inadequacy and hence turned to the true and living God. One of the key Hebrew terms for ‘poor,’ the anawim, combines precisely these two elements—material poverty and spiritual piety.”[18]

[1] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 18-19.

[2] The NIV Study Bible, “Introduction to 1 Corinthians”  (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1985) 1732.

[3] Richard B. Hays, “1 Corinthians,” Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997) 4.

[4] Richard B. Hays, “1 Corinthians,” Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997) 5.

[5] Richard B. Hays, “1 Corinthians,” Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997) 5.

[6] Richard B. Hays, “1 Corinthians,” Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997) 16-17.

[7] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 41.

[8] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 37.

[9] Richard B. Hays, “1 Corinthians,” Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997) 19.

[10] Paul J. Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. X (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002) 807.

[11] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 43.

[12] Paul J. Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. X (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002) 809.

[13] Richard B. Hays, “1 Corinthians,” Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997) 24.

[14] Richard B. Hays, “1 Corinthians,” Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997) 26.

[15] Paul J. Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. X (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002) 812.

[16] Richard B. Hays, “1 Corinthians,” Interpretation (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997) 30-31.

[17] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 57-58.

[18] Craig Blomberg, 1 Corinthians, The NIV Application Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) 57-58.

Bible Text: 1 Corinthians 1:1-3 (ESV) 

¹ Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes,

² To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:

³ Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

God [What truths about God’s person, activity or character does the text reveal?]

Lessons/insights 

Apply and Obey [How does today’s text apply to me? How will I obey or respond to the truths from today’s text?]

Prayer