Berea Reformed Evangelical Church

Overviewing 1 Corinthians

Last week we saw very briefly that Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is about, more than anything else, the unity of the Body of Christ, the Church. As Christ’s body and as the new Temple of the Holy Spirit, we who are in covenant with God because we call on the name of Jesus Christ are one. This means that we are one with Christ through the covenant—all that is his is also ours. We are also one with one another; and this means also that what is true for one of us is in some sense so for our entire congregation. When one of us falls, we all must come alongside and give aid. When one of us triumphs, we all triumph. When one of us mourns, we all mourn. When a brother sins, you must correct him in gentleness and love, for he would do the same for you. At least that’s how it is supposed to work.

The structure of 1 Corinthians is interesting in its own right, and we will hear some things about that structure as we make our way through the book. But mostly we’ll hear about that at the end as a way of summing up the book after we have gone through all of it. The one basic structural issue for us to remember right now is the two things we saw last week: First, Paul is writing this letter to the Church in Corinth in response to two different sources of information he has on them. One source is a personal report he has received from Chloe’s household about the current status of the Corinthian congregation. The other is a letter that the church had written him asking for his guidance on various matters. These two sources break the book up into two main parts, as Paul spends the first bit speaking to what he heard from Chloe’s report and the last bit speaking directly to the questions the Corinthians had asked him in their letter.

Second, remember that Paul often quotes certain slogans or sayings back at the Corinthians in order to refute them. This can cause some confusion among even the best theologians who read this book, so we will proceed with care. But for the most part these things will become clear as we make our way through the letter.

This brings us to the main problem the Corinthians have. They have forgotten the cross, and because they have forgotten the cross they also have forgotten the resurrection (for there is no resurrection without the cross first.) Now, Paul makes this point to the Corinthians many times in this letter, over and over again, in various ways, and he jumps right in and starts hammering the Corinthians on this point in the passage that we just read. Notice what Paul does; he connects sectarianism—divisiveness—with a denial of the cross. Paul is thankful that all he does is preach the cross, because that is the thing that unites. As we just read in verses 14-17:

“I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, lest anyone should say that I had baptized in my own name. Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanus. Besides those, I do not know whether I baptized any other. For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of no effect.”

First of all, some have been puzzled by the way Paul says here that Christ did not send him to baptize. What Paul means is that Christ did not send him to baptize simply for the sake of baptizing, or for the sake of building up a group of followers of Paul. Paul does baptize, as he himself gives examples here, but he doesn’t do it into his own name. He baptized into Jesus’s name. But Jesus, of course, is the one who died on that cross that Paul mentions in the next verse. So baptism is not out of the picture here. It’s just that baptism is not, by itself, the whole story of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Remember what Jesus commanded His disciples to do in the Great Commission, just before He ascended into Heaven: “Go and baptize all the nations into the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” We are supposed to baptize. Paul baptized. In other contexts he was really proud of it, too. But here, with this group of Corinthians who were not properly united to one another, their baptisms had become a sign of judgment. If you get baptized into Jesus Christ, but you don’t trust Him and so you don’t do what He says, then your baptism will not do you a lick of good at the end of the day.

To really understand what is going on in these verses, though, we need to take a little more time to think about what is going on here. We need to think about the cross and the resurrection ourselves. Let’s think together about the Kingdom of God and what it means, and that will help us get ready to understand this letter to the church at Corinth.

Paul was an intelligent man, highly educated and trained in the philosophy and rhetoric of Graeco-Roman society. He knows how to turn a phrase, how to make a point stick in his reader’s minds, and how to get his foot right on someone’s neck. Rhetorically speaking. So Paul uses a lot of high-falutin’ language in his ministry, but he also uses a lot of sarcasm and crass language as well. He uses whatever language he needs to use, depending on the situation. He argues with paupers, magistrates, merchants, and priests. He argues with Jews and he argues with Gentiles. Anyone who needs to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ—and that would be everyone—is fair game for Paul. And he is willing to talk to them in any way that he has to in order to get them to hear and understand. Of course it is really the Holy Spirit who gets people to understand, but the Spirit uses His messengers as instruments to accomplish His purposes, and Paul is one of these messengers. (So are we, by the way, if we trust in Christ and call upon His name—that makes us messengers for the kingdom of God too.) But anyway, Paul does all of these things and argues with all of these people, not as a way of puffing himself up, but as a way of bringing DOWN all who would set themselves up against King Jesus. Such people—all who oppose the one true and righteous King—must be brought low, they must not be heeded or followed. This is nothing new for Paul. In Colossians Paul tells us that he demolishes arguments and that all of Christ’s enemies will eventually become His footstool. Anything that sets itself up against God—every idol—must be pulled down. Some idols are in our living rooms and some are in our hearts. But they all must come down.

But here’s the really scary thing. Sometimes these idols pop up in the Church. There is darkness among the people who have seen the Light. Idolatry and godless philosophies and hopeless approaches to life are not just found outside the Church among the ‘pagans.’ These things happen right in the middle of God’s own covenant community all the time. It happened to Old Covenant Israel over and over again. Many refused to follow the Lord even after He showered them with blessings and gifts and food from Heaven and miraculous rescues from powerful enemies. Still they bickered and they doubted and many of them turned away when something else came along. Some new religion, some new pretty young thing, some new way of life. And when they did this they died. Many died in the desert after the exodus from Egypt and never got to see the promised land. They stopped trusting in Yahweh, their covenant Lord, and Yahweh left their corpses behind to bake in the sun. And this happened again and again throughout the period of the judges, and the kings, and into the exile. And then in Jesus’ time it happened again in the biggest way of all. God, who had promised to show His people a mighty work of salvation and to send them a Messiah, did just this in Jesus Christ. God sent His own Son to His covenant people. And they killed him. Was God pleased with them for this? Did they remain his covenant people despite all they had done? No, after about a generation God decimated Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and sent the Jews out throughout the world. God took their nation from them. He took the covenant from them.

Here’s why I bring all this stuff about the Old Covenant Jews up. Because Paul brings it up. Some of Paul’s warnings and admonitions to the Corinthians get pretty intense in this letter. Paul really turns up the heat. We will see that Paul actually compares the Corinthians to these same stubborn Israelites who died in the desert because they refused to trust in God, and Paul tells the Corinthians not to be like them. Paul even gives the warning, in a sense, to himself! (In 1 Cor. 10:27 he says “…lest when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.”) There is no easy way around this, brothers and sisters. This is a real warning. Do not be like those Jews who died in the desert. There are SOME people today who share many of our same beliefs about things like predestination and grace and so forth who will tell us that these warnings are simply hypothetical. But I think that’s a mistake. This is a real warning given to people who really are blessed by God and who really have been chosen for a special purpose and have been put into God’s special community of salvation on this earth. And those people—all of them—are told by Paul that they had better watch out or else they might die just like those Israelites. That needs to sink in on all of us. It is scary, but good things are coming from it if we trust in God. He is our loving Father and we are here to sit at His feet and hear His words to us, and we need to trust Him that these scary things have a purpose and that hey will ultimately work to our good. We are His people and He is going to take care of us. Believe it!

These warnings don’t contradict predestination or any of the other good ol’ Calvinist stuff we believe, but we’ll have to wait until we get to that passage to look into that further. I will only say something very brief about it now. The Bible, first and foremost, is a covenantal book. It is a personal record of the interactions between two parties, God and His people. It is full of commands, warnings, rewards, and punishments. This is how covenants work. If you make a contract (the word covenant doesn’t really mean ‘contract,’ but for now it’s close enough) with someone and you don’t hold up your end, then there is some sort of penalty attached. Husbands and wives have a covenant with one another, and if one of them violates the terms of the covenant then it is dissolved. There are things we must do, and there are blessings that come from being in the covenant and there are curses that come if we break the covenant. This is how God shows Himself to us, by making a covenant with us that has all these things in it. God gives us commands, instructions, admonitions, promises and blessings. He tells us that if we stick with Him, then He will stick with us. That is our covenantal responsibility. We must stick with God, or else we will die.

Of course, whether or not we actually do stick with God ultimately comes down to God’s grace: everything is a gift from Him, and He predestines us to be with Him forever based on nothing within ourselves. But the thing is that, in the Scriptures, the WAY God’s predestination and His grace comes to us is through these everyday, historical covenantal events. The WAY the elect find their way to Heaven is by living a life in covenant to God, and being faithful to that covenant by God’s grace. The idea of a person with no covenantal connection to God of any kind who somehow still goes to Heaven because he was predestined, is unheard of in the Scriptures. I’ll say that again for emphasis, it is unheard of in the Scriptures. It does not happen. That’s not to say that there are not exceptions, certainly there are. But the rule, the ‘ordinary’ way that salvation works, is that the elect live their lives on earth in covenant with God by being members of the Church. Almost everything in the Scriptures, every story, every commandment, every wise saying, every record of births and deaths and kings, comes to us as part of a larger covenantal reality. The Bible is, essentially, a record of the covenant between God and His people. And so it is through the covenant that we understand God. The covenant is where God has promised to be present for us. If we are predestined, then we will take God’s covenant with us seriously and we will live under its statutes all the days of our lives. We must understand predestination through the lens of the covenant.

Again, there’s a lot more that can be said about these things as time goes on. Paul will help us see them clearly as the letter progresses. For now, we simply have to realize that the Corinthians are actually in a very scary place indeed. Paul is concerned about the Corinthians. They are in trouble. They are in covenant with God, but they are mucking it up. They are not, many of them, keeping their end of the covenant. They are married, but they are cheating on their spouse. Their church is a hot mess. And they need to shape up.

But what is their issue? What’s the problem, exactly? The problem is that they have forgotten the cross, which means that they have also forgotten the resurrection, which means that they are no longer living and acting as Christ’s living body. See, Christ died on the cross, and now he has been raised from the dead. And his resurrection is our resurrection; in Him we also have been raised from the dead and are now living a new life as a new people of God, made holy by faith. The basic problem of the Corinthians is that they don’t really believe this. They are losing their faith in the cross and in the resurrection. This might seem odd for me to say: how is it that dividing up into cliques and lording it over one another and having immoral sexual and marital relationships and eating the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner and not covering your head properly when you worship (just wait!) and having chaotic unorganized church services…how do those things show that you don’t believe in the cross and the resurrection?

Well, because, if you believe this, if you believe that you are a new creation who has already been resurrected into a new way of living, along with every other person in this room today and along with every other person in the entire history of the world who calls upon the name of Jesus for salvation, if you really believe that, then that effects the way you treat all the other people in this room. If we believe that we are all sharers in Jesus’ resurrection, that we already live a new life in Him, then that means that we are all one. We are one body; we are all in the same boat. We have been made God’s people. Some of us are weird. Some of us are overbearing, some of us are quiet. Some of us have gifts for hospitality and some of us prefer to curl up by ourselves with a good book. Some of us struggle with greed, and some of us struggle with lust. Some of us can’t sit still and some of us can’t say “I love you” to people who need to hear it. But we are all one body in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Look at the metaphors Paul uses in this letter. At one point or another, he will compare us to a human body, to a Temple, and to a loaf of bread. We are all together one thing. In Christ, we—you and me and everyone in this room—are a body, a Temple, and a loaf. Do we believe this? Then it will come out of our fingertips (as others have said). We will act like it.

The Corinthians aren’t acting like it, and that shows that they don’t really believe what they say they believe. They may say they believe in the cross and the resurrection, and glory halleluyah, but talk is cheap. When the rubber meets the road, they do not get along with each other. They do not love one another. They don’t even understand what love is. They are not united. They are not living like one body, like a Temple of the Holy Spirit, or like one loaf. They do not submit to God’s will in the way they worship Him, which is to come together as one whole united body and worship Him in spirit and in truth, but instead they all do their own thing. They do not eat the Supper in fellowship with one another, but use it as an occasion to divide up like high school kids and only sit with certain people. They do not use the spiritual gifts God has given them for the good of the whole body, but instead they use them to glorify themselves, to put on a show, to try to be greater than everybody else. They do not listen to God’s law as something that is given to everyone together in covenant with Him, but instead they treat it as a smorgasbord that each of them can pick and choose from as they see fit. Do you see, children of God, how this all comes down in the end to a lack of unity? All these problems stem ultimately from the fact that the Corinthians do not know anymore—they have forgotten—that they are all united to Christ as one body. And because they refuse to be one, everything is falling apart. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, they must learn to hang together, or they will certainly hang separately. But they have forgotten this, and so they are, indeed, hanging separately. Some of them have already died as judgment from God (Paul tells them this explicitly: some of you have already “fallen asleep,” 1 Cor. 11:30). And some of them are in dire need of judgment and excommunication (1 Cor. 5:5). And of course the whole church is a wreck and in chaos, and everyone is miserable.

So they don’t really believe what they say they believe. They don’t really believe that they are all one body in Christ. And they don’t believe they are one body in Christ because they don’t believe in the cross and the resurrection any more. If there is no cross and no resurrection, then there is no unity in Christ, we are NOT really Christ’s body and it really is every man or woman for themself. We might as well break into factions, try to elevate our own position and bring others down. We might as well ignore God’s laws about idolatry and sexual behavior and whatever else, because we are not really in covenant with Him anyway. Without the cross and without the resurrection, there is no covenant. This is the theme that Paul is going to come back to again and again in this letter.

Despite what they might say, the Corinthians no longer believe that Jesus was crucified for them, died, and as buried, and that on the third day he rose from the dead and ascended into Heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father. We confessed a few moments ago that we believe all these things. And that’s good. But those words “confess” and “believe” used to mean something a bit stronger than simply “we agree”. When you confess one God, the Father Almighty, you are actually leaning upon Him to give you everything you need. When you confess Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, you are actually betting your life on it. And when you confess the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and who unites us together as one body in Christ the Son, you are proclaiming that everything you are and you will ever be is from Him. So live like it, and when you see other people who also confess these things, realize that you have more in common with them than you could ever have with anyone else. For you and they both have been given all things in Christ, every blessing, every promise, every teaching, every grace. And so you together are now living a new life in a new kingdom. There may be people in your own family, even your closest friends, who have not come into this kingdom with you. But everyone who IS in that kingdom with you is your brother, your sister, and your fellow ambassador. Your truest family and your truest home. Forgetting this leads people to division and ultimately to death (the ultimate division!). Remembering it leads to life, and that abundantly.

Amen!