CRITICAL NOTES
1 Corinthians 1:1. Called (to be) an apostle.—Only here and in Romans 1:1. For exact force choose between, (a) one of Christ’s “called” ones, who am also, in point of fact, an apostle; and (b) called specially to this, that I might be one of Christ’s apostles [q.d. perhaps, “Though at Corinth there are some who say that I was not so called”]. Both are true; the latter here more likely. The external call and ordination of the Church (Acts 13:1-2) coinciding with, and following upon, the internal and primary call of Christ Himself (Acts 22:17-21). By the will of God.—Shutting out, (a) man’s authority, (b) any personal merit in Paul. Sosthenes.—Not certainly he of Acts 18:17, though Bengel believes the beating had the happy effect of making him a Christian; as, similarly, the impressment of Simon of Cyrene may have made him and his wife and sons Christians (Mark 15:21; Romans 16:13).
1 Corinthians 1:2. Church of God.—So he calls it (but query the reading?) a little later (Acts 20:28). New Testament equivalent of Old Testament “congregation of Jehovah” (e.g. Numbers 16:3; Deuteronomy 23:2). In Corinth.—In Corinth, of all unlikely places! (see Homily). Sanctified.—Note the perfect tense. A sanctification of relation to God (as 1 Corinthians 7:14), established at a definite date in the past, continuing into the present. Called (to be) saints.—Parallel to Paul’s call to office (1 Corinthians 1:1). Call upon the name.—As Ananias bade Paul do, when he was becoming a Christian (Acts 22:16) [N. B. reading]. As Paul had heard Stephen do (Acts 7:59) [cf. Paul’s “I appeal (same word) unto Cæsar” (Acts 25:11). But this only illustrates a special case of the “calling upon.” Word covers whole range of Prayer, as in the Old Testament equivalent and LXX. parallels]. With all, etc.—Q.d. “I am not writing to you only, though to you primarily and immediately, i.e. my letter to you is also for all who invoke Christ in their prayers, everywhere and in all ages” [cf. Revelation 2:7, where what Christ says to Ephesus the Spirit says to the Churches]. Theirs and ours.—Most probably, “Their (Lord) and ours.”
1 Corinthians 1:3.—Claudius Lysias (Acts 23:26), and even James (1 Corinthians 1:1) and the Council at Jerusalem (Acts 15:23), begin with “Greeting,” the ordinary secular phrase. Here enlarged and ennobled by the Gospel into “grace,” joined with the Old Testament “peace.” Note how, as matter of course, Paul makes Christ a concurrent and co-ordinate source of grace with the Father.
1 Corinthians 1:4.—Dean Howson (Hulsean Lectures, Character of St. Paul, iv.) remarks upon this and many similar incidental indications of Paul’s tendency to break out into praise or prayer. “Pray without ceasing; in everything [even for the good in a Church so full of evils as the Corinthian] give thanks.”
1 Corinthians 1:4. My God.—“My,” q.d. not only, “Whose I am, and whom I serve” (Acts 27:23), but also, “Whom I know, and call, and claim Mine!” (Philippians 4:19). “We belong to each other! I am His; He is mine. Note, “was given,” “were enriched” (R.V.).
1 Corinthians 1:5.—“The grace,” namely this, that “ye were enriched.” Note, in Him” (R.V.). Cf. Colossians 2:9, “In Him dwelleth all the fullness, … and in Him ye are made full.” All utterance, all knowledge.—How glorious and serviceable, but rare, a combination of gifts! How “enriched” the man, the Church, who can speak in all needed modes of expression, all needed, or possible, phases of divine knowledge!
1 Corinthians 1:6. Even as.—Q.d. your enrichment is after the glorious measure and fulness of the confirmation. The testimony.—Whose great, central subject and burden is Christ. Was confirmed.—A special instance of Mark 16:20. Other cases: Acts 2:4 (tongues), Acts 2:43 (wonders and signs), Acts 10:44; Acts 10:46 (Cornelius), Acts 19:1-6 (Baptist’s converts at Ephesus).
1 Corinthians 1:7.—Q.d. “Whilst ye are, as the normal attitude of the Christian life, waiting for” (cf. 2 Peter 3:12; 2 Timothy 4:8; Hebrews 9:28).
1 Corinthians 1:8.—It was confirmed; you shall be. Everybody and everything connected with the kingdom of God is “in power” (1 Corinthians 4:20). Note, “unreproveable” (R.V.).
“Bold shall I stand in Thy great day;
For who aught to my charge shall lay?”
(Romans 8:33). “Shall not come into condemnation” (John 5:24).
1 Corinthians 1:9.—Same connection of thought as 1 Thessalonians 5:24, viz. “Because He is faithful, He cannot but finish, by confirming you unto the end, what He began when He called you into the fellowship.” Fellowship of.—Your common sharing in and with (Romans 8:17) Him. So of and with are both in Hebrews 3:14. Note the solemn enumeration, at full length, of the names and titles of Christ. Paul a herald proclaiming the names and style of the King his Master.
1 Corinthians 1:10. “Fellowship?”—Then what is this I hear about “divisions”? Divisions.—Schisms. Not yet four mountains; as yet one mountain with four summits (Evans). Joined together.—Medical word (“restore,” Galatians 6:1), as if suggesting, Not yet cut off from the body, but dislocated in the body. “Let the displacement be reduced, and all brought back to ease and peace.”
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 1:1-3
Observe (I.) The Twofold Call: (A) Paul’s to Apostleship; (B) Theirs to Saintship.
Observe (II.) The Twofold Holiness: (A) a. Ideal, b. Relative; (B) Real.
Observe (III.) The Twofold Bond of Fellowship: (A) “Our Brother”; (B) “That call upon … theirs and ours.”
Observe (IV.) The Twofold Blessing, with a Twofold Source: (A) “Grace and Peace”; (B) Father; Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 1:1-3. Observe (I.) The twofold call: (A) Paul’s to Apostleship; (B) Theirs to Saintship.—A.
1. He was “separated, even from his mother’s womb, and called through God’s grace” (Galatians 1:15). “No man taketh,” wisely, “this honour unto himself,” any more than did even the Great Apostle of our profession His Priesthood (Hebrews 5:4). How should he run, to any purpose, unless he be sent?
2. As we speak, conceiving of God’s thoughts and purposes and work with “before” and “after” and “after the manner of men,” this call to take up and fulfil Office is a thing more nearly depending upon “the will of God” alone than is the other call to assume and realize and exhibit Character. He seems to give no account of His ways, e.g., in an analogous case, in selecting, using, blessing, and perhaps thus setting aside, one Nation rather than another for some special purpose in His government of the world; or (e.g. Romans 9) in choosing to make the Life of the world depend upon the line of Isaac rather than of Ishmael, or of Jacob rather than of the elder Esau; or why, of all the fishermen in Galilee, Peter, of all the publicans, Matthew, or of all Saul’s family circle, himself, should have been selected for pre-eminent apostolate. It often looks as if such call were precedent to all qualification or grace.
3. And yet, not irrespective of natural qualification or grace. (But the “natural” is the ordering of the Author of Nature and the Creator of the individual Man.) Paul was a suitable vessel, as well as “a chosen vessel.” Are we to say “chosen” because “suitable”? In natural endowment, as well as by providential training, he was the very man to carry the “grace” (Romans 1:5), and to do the work of an apostle. A thorough Israelite, in mind, and education, and sympathy; and yet from Tarsus, a Gentile city, where he escaped something of the rigidity and narrowness of Palestinian Judaism, such as would have entirely disqualified him for approaching the Gentile mind and heart; a noble personal character even before his conversion; he was made for the work, and was only waiting the conversion and the call and the qualifying Holy Spirit.
4. A call to the ministry always presupposes: (a) Gifts. Without these natural points of fitness, not even grace can make the best man a successful minister. Given these, the rest is a question of prayer and hard work. Grace may always be had for the asking (James 1:5: “If any man lack, … let him ask,” etc.). Conversely, the possession of the gifts may set up a fair presumption that their possessor is designed for their complementary work. He should hold himself in readiness for the definite “call.” (b) Grace. Grace may fail to get married to gifts; they may be divorced through unfaithfulness, sloth, or sin. May not even an apostle fall from his grace? Is there only one Judas, an apostle who never fairly began his special work? The unfathomable mystery of the twin problems of Evil and of Free-will of course lies all around and beneath. But as matter of practical conduct, are there no men designed by natural equipment for apostleship, for the ministry, for honourable and blessed Church office who have turned aside from the “call,” or by early giving up self to sin or the world have barred the call which might else have come? Or, short of this, are there none in the Church designed for higher service than what they actually fulfil; who are blessed in their business, but were meant for the ministry; who honour God, and are honoured by Him, but who hold only a second-best place, and receive only a second-best blessing? (c) Fruit. Have they, upon experiment made, found the natural equipment and the added grace fruitful in “turning (Acts 26:18) some from darkness to light”? If this never follows—though “fruit” is hard to judge of, it is so many-sided, and sometimes so obscure a thing—then there has been a mistake somewhere. A physician of souls, who never heals anybody—however he may be diplomaed—has missed his “calling.” (d) Happy for the “apostle” if there be the concomitant, complementary, independent, clear calls, within from the Master, and without from the God-directed Church. (See Critical Notes, 1 Corinthians 1:1, supra.) Happy, if he can say to many, “The seal of my apostleship are ye” (chap. 1 Corinthians 9:2). Happy, if the “call” never become to an unfaithful steward of it (chap. 1 Corinthians 4:2) a condemnation and a torturing memory.
B.
1. Every call involves in the response to it both Responsibility and Blessing. The call to Office throws up most prominently the Responsibility; the call to Saintship the Blessing. It is a perpetual invitation. Observe in 1 Thessalonians 5:24, “Faithful is He that—not called, but—calleth you, who also will do it,” viz. “will sanctify you wholly,” etc.
2. The call to take up the life of the Christian has always this at the heart of it: “Be ye holy” [“Ye shall be holy”]. But it comes in many shapes, according as the ear and heart are ready, or not, to catch and respond to this, its truest meaning and purpose. To the weary, sin-sick, world-sick, unsatisfied life: “Come to Me; I will give you Rest!” To many a God-fearing Israelite, bound under a yoke of multiplied and vexatious prescriptions, “a yoke which neither he nor his fathers were able to bear” (Acts 15:10), the Gospel came as a call “to liberty” (Galatians 5:13). And such have their sympathising analogues in every generation. To souls at lower levels and of duller ear the call has to come, thundering, “Escape for thy life! There is ‘wrath to come.’ ”
3. And, as many forms, so many methods, of the call. A friend stricken down by the side of a Luther “calls.” The invisible seems suddenly to break in upon a sense-bound, world-narrowed man, he hardly knows how or why. He is looking into an open grave, and finds himself gazing into eternity; he is gazing blankly, stunned, at a letter lying upon his office desk, telling him of a great loss, and even the letter and the immediate loss fade away and disappear; he finds himself, “very inconsequently,” pondering, “What shall it profit a man?” etc. He is having one of many, oft-repeated calls. As before a worldling, man or woman, in the very whirl of the world’s life, there suddenly rises up a fair and lovely Ideal of a holy life; strangely the heart goes out, approvingly, longingly, toward it. Not always responded to, but there is the call. And even the man who responds only to the call of his fears of wrath and hell, finds when he enters upon the new life [and there is no “seeing” the kingdom of God” without “entering” it, John 3:3, compared with 5] that he has begun to “follow” not chiefly after safety and heaven, but “after holiness” (Hebrews 12:14).
4. Every man “had his calling” (chap. 1 Corinthians 7:20). The secular station and business is by the call of God, and therefore holy. And conversely, holiness is the calling, the business, of the spiritual life. “A Christian? Yes; but he is not working much at it,” is the reason of so many ineffective, unsatisfied Christian lives. They “grieve the Holy Spirit” who calls them, and would help them, to holiness. It is an interest of their lives, but should be the main interest and business. They are called to be saints; but being saints wants attending to, seriously and diligently, as a holy “vocation.” [The preacher may notice and use: (a) The distinction between κεκλημένος, e.g. Matthew 22:3-4; Matthew 22:8, the Supper parable, and the κλητοί, here and in the similar passage, Romans 1, ad init. The κλητοί are the new people of God, the new Israel; their calling being ideally complete. In κεκλημένος (perf. part.) we see the actual, historical calling of individuals being carried on. (b) The calling is in the root of ἐκκλησία=Church.]
Observe (II.) The twofold holiness: (A) a. Ideal, b. Relative; (B) Real.—(A) They are sanctified in Christ Jesus; (B) They are called to be saints. A.
1. Every great, leading Idea of Revelation, that of Holiness, like the rest, was revealed “in divers portions and in divers manners.” [So God, in the ordering of the historical, physical unfolding of His mind and purpose in creation, led up to Man by preluding hints and anticipatory forms, revealing Man “in divers portions and in divers manners,” until at last Adam stood forth the complete utterance of His thought, toward which He had been working all through the ages. Yet He had a still grander Word to speak forth, which is heard, seen, in His Incarnate Son. Perfect, ideal human nature and human life are there (Hebrews 2:8-9); a sinless Humanity in perfect fellowship with the Divine. All such subsidiary, partial revelations of God’s thoughts, as that about Holiness, follow on the same lines, obey the same law of disclosure, because they are really sub-sections of the greater disclosure. Their progressive unfolding is part of the greater progression and unfolding.] He began with a holiness of relation to Himself. “Holy” days, not physically in any way different from common days; “holy” ground, not distinguishable from the adjacent soil; “holy” garments, neither finer nor more costly than ordinary ones; a “holiness” which might belong to the firstborn produce of a flock, or a field, or a family, and even to the “brass” of the censers of Korah and his associates;—in all these the “holiness” was only separation, from common use and human ownership, that they might be devoted to the exclusive use and worship of Jehovah. [So, in the Polynesian groups, the order of a chief might make food, or property, or persons, tabu, and exclusively for himself.] In the Mosaic code such embodiments and presentations of “holiness” abounded. But this was only an elementary lesson, given to a nation which had barely passed childhood in spiritual knowledge. In the mind of God, to speak humanly, all these looked forward to, were the first steps in a path leading human thought and practice toward a real holiness. Separateness is by no means the only, and the final, meaning of “holiness,” in either the Old Testament, or (certainly) in the New Testament. “Separation is here [story of Balaam: ‘The people dwelt alone’], as throughout the Old Testament, the symbol of sanctity, the outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace, the grace which impels men and women to the pursuit of a pure and unworldly life, and makes righteousness … their chief end and highest good” (S. Cox, Expos., 1883, p. 205). [The separateness is the first, and for some time the only, thing our children can see or appreciate about, e.g., the holiness of the Sabbath. The intrinsic value and the deep meaning of the day comes long after, and only fully through the perceptions and experiences of the regenerate life. They, in fact, begin, each of them, where Israel began centuries ago, and rapidly run through and summarise in their own learning the lessons and the process distributed over centuries in the education of mankind.] “We may be made partakers of His holiness” (Hebrews 12:10) shows that separateness of a relation to God is not the only or the chief idea, but a personal quality. Historically this is the final point reached in the Revelation of Holiness; really, if we may so speak, it is the first, the full, the originating point, as mapped out in God’s purpose. Looking back over the completed series of Divine teachings, we can now see that, starting from the idea of character, a holiness of quality which is like God’s own holiness, will, in a fallen world, whose life is affected at every point by sin, inevitably work out in a separateness of conduct and of relation to God. [In what God’s holiness consists is a profound question. Is the One Absolute Right, right for all worlds, and ages, and creatures, and for their Creator—Truth; the One Absolute Wrong, for Him and them, Falsehood, or as John says, “A Lie”? Can we be made “partakers of His holiness,” in any sense in which He will be a partaker with us, except that of Love, Life, Truth?]
2. Israel was ideally a people both personally holy and relatively holy. In point of fact, the personally holy individuals were very few in any age, and their holiness was often extremely imperfect. Yet the whole nation was “separated” in a hundred ways from all other peoples. It was the “people of” Jehovah’s “possession,” peculiarly His in a world where all peoples are His. Their King repeatedly saw in them, and in them dealt with, an ideal people, rather than with the actually fickle, rebellious, faithless, idolatry-loving nation. Honours, protection, knowledge, a distinguished regard showing itself in many ways, were given to the real Israel for the sake of the Ideal, and not withdrawn, even in days of deep or widespread national unfaithfulness; not until the time had come for a new Israel, a new “peculiar people,” a new “Church” [for the old, hear Stephen, Acts 7:38], indeed for a new Race to spring from a new, a second Adam. The localisation in one special land was to pass away; the restriction to one special nation was to be abolished; not national birth (John 1:13), but “new birth,” birth “of God” [ib.], was to be the principle of succession and evolution, as between generation and generation. The new Israel has stepped into the separated position of the old, and stands in the old speciality of relationship. At its most unworthy, worldly, depressed point the Church of Christ is still the separated people of God, “sanctified” as the old was.
3. “In Christ Jesus”. As Abraham and his seed through Isaac and Jacob are for many purposes to be regarded and dealt with as a great Unit of reckoning [e.g. Hebrews 7:5; Hebrews 7:10; Galatians 3:16-18; and N. B. how Isaiah goes back to this, Isaiah 51:2], and are “Abraham” in the transaction; so “Christ” stands, a great Unit of reckoning, for Christ and His people, God’s new people, sprung from Him, their new ancestor. He and they are taken together (Galatians 3:16; 1 Corinthians 12:12). His clients are in favour, for His sake, and along with Him. Indeed, they “are not,” do not count as existing, until they believe “into Him” and live “in Him.” There is no “sanctified” Israel to-day except the persons who are “in Christ.” [The relation of Christian baptism to this relative sanctification will come up later, chap. 1 Corinthians 7:14.]
B.
1. This is great honour and great responsibility. Each member of it is called to realise in himself the separateness, the relative holiness of the whole; and to realise in his character the likeness to God which underlies the separateness, and without which, indeed, the separateness becomes a mere empty conformity to certain codified restrictions and observances, mostly worthless, unless as expressing or assisting a life within, a conformity which will not long survive the extinction of the life within. “They will go out from us,” and merge themselves in the general mass of mankind, laying aside their separateness and “sanctification,” that they may be manifest that they “were not,” or had ceased to be, “of us” (1 John 2:19).
2. The separateness for God, and so from any use which cannot conceivably be included in life for Him, will be the only sanctification of which their body is capable. It is matter, morally neutral; its powers and appetites, necessarily in themselves morally neutral, may equally well be made the “instruments of righteousness” or “of unrighteousness” (Romans 6:13). It is for them to see that tongue, or hand, or foot, or eye, or ear, are always ready for use by God, and are never employed for anything incongruous with His mind and law; always held at His service and disposal; always denied to the use of Sin in every shape. The body can only be holy as the brass of the censers was holy.
3. So, too, imagination, curiosity, judgment, reasoning powers, will, etc., may be lent to sin, or may be kept for God. “May,”—they must. “Holiness unto the Lord” must be written across them all, in all their exercise.
4. And all this not merely by means of regulations imposed from without, but in obedience to a new law of life within. The indwelling Holy Spirit will be a new life, and a new power to the will. Love to God will exert “the expulsive power of a new affection,” and cast out with growing completeness every opposing motive. The same love will carry with it in willing subjection all the exercise of every faculty, and make all tend toward God; the self-centering of life, which is the highest form of Idolatry [the “Man of Sin” exhibits his culminating wickedness in this: “Himself set forth as God,” 2 Thessalonians 2:4], will be exchanged for a convergence of every line of feeling and action upon God as Centre and Object and End. “Separated for God” will be the instinctive, inevitable, happy expression of life within.
5. This will be perfect spiritual health, “life which is life indeed,” man’s life as in the original conception and intention of God in creating Man; and there will be the perfect correspondence between ideal and fact, the perfect self-consistency and internal harmony, which in its highest exemplification is the Truth of God’s own Character and Nature.
6. The very fact, then, that a man is of the Church, and “in Christ Jesus” is “sanctified,” speaks to him, “calls” to him, reminding Him of God’s purpose, and of God’s claim upon him. The Spirit, if he will keep an open ear, will be continually reminding him of the significance of his place in the new Israel, and be offering His own instruction, and leading up to a higher and ever higher type of Christian life. [The very world, in a way, calls him to holiness; for no one is more exacting, more just, in its expectation that Christians should be holy men than they, or has a higher standard of Christian separateness and holiness than the men “of the world.”]
Observe (III.) A twofold bond of fellowship: (A) “Our brother” (the brother, Gr.); (B) “That call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, in every place, their (Lord) and ours.”—A.
1. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” were to our fathers’ ears associated with Unbelief and Revolution. Yet they are all, especially the last, ideas derived from the Gospel of Christ. They are not natural to the human heart; when its tendencies reveal themselves in simple openness, they emphasise Self and Class and Pride. The long experiment of antiquity showed that even a common manhood in the race was no native idea to the human heart; brotherhood was unheard of. The stranger in old times was, even as a point of vocabulary, also the enemy; Pascal remarks sadly on the persistency of the feeling, making this slope of the Pyrenees to be the home of “friends,” and the further slope the home of “enemies.” Shame that the preachers of Unbelief should have seemed often the louder, bolder preachers of “Fraternity,” whilst the Church of Christ, in some temporary, local embodiment, seemed to stand by the class distinction, the iniquitous privilege, the wealth as against poverty. If the Church hold its peace, the stones must needs cry out and preach the gospel of “brotherhood.”
2. “Barbarian, Scythian, bond, free, circumcision, uncircumcision, male, female, all one in Christ Jesus,” was the keynote of the new social system of Christianity. Neither sex, nor race, nor religion, nor station, carried privilege or prejudice as to status before God and access to His saving favour. In the early Church the slave and the master would sit at the same Lord’s Supper; it might even happen that the office-bearer was a slave, the private member the freeman. See how honourably prominent women are in the Roman Church, or the Philippian. Paul’s letter to Philemon, for the slave Onesimus, “the brother beloved” of his master Philemon, has always been significantly compared with a letter of Pliny the Younger to Sabinianus his friend, on behalf of an offending freed man, as revealing the utterly diverse conceptions of the relation between man and man on which the pagan and the Christian writers rest their pleading. In Philemon all hinges upon “brother.” Paul addresses his “brother.” Philemon (1 Corinthians 1:20), for his slave “brother” Onesimus (1 Corinthians 1:16). Given that a man were a Christian, early Christian literature lets us see him passing from Church to Church, from city to city, with his “letters of commendation” (2 Corinthians 3:1), receiving hospitality, finding every fellow-Christian ready to be his “host,” asking and receiving assistance in the business on which he was travelling (Romans 16:1; Romans 16:3; 3 John 1:5-8).
3. That Church is losing one of its crowning honours, and losing sight of one of the main points of that Magna Charta of the Kingdom of Heaven, upon which its existence and policy rest, which does not practically work out “a brotherhood” in its membership. Church life must be a Family life, and every member must feel at home. However men may be estimated outside, even as between Christian and Christian, within there should be no such invidious recognition of rank or wealth or education as shall prevent worth carrying a man to his true place in the brotherhood and its work and offices and honour. At the Table of the Elder Brother, above all, must all be forgotten but this, “Brother.”
B.
1. The physical and mental unity of the race lies deeper than the surface divergencies which a century ago were made to argue multiplicity of origin—many “Adams” for as many great, originally distinct races of mankind. Indeed, the evolutionary drift of most modern science so far sustains Scripture teaching as to insist strongly upon the unity which is the natural basis of “brotherhood.” Paul’s argument on Areopagus is cogent still (Acts 18:26).
2. The moral unity, the oneness of heart and conscience, of sin and moral defect, of aspiration after God, is a yet stronger ground for claiming and according “brotherhood.” The same sinful heart in similar conditions brings forth the same crop of sins. The Bible is a universal book; every age and race finds it describe their case with equally correct fidelity. The same Gospel and its remedy awaken the same response, and exhibit the same happy results, in all hearts which give it fair trial. The operation of the soul-medicine is constant in every case. Peter’s unanswerable argument justifies still the broadest brotherliness: “God gave them the like gift, as He did unto us” (Acts 11:17).
3. The “Alliance” and Unity is “Evangelical,” not merely natural. They come to the same God, using the name of the same Christ. All have their access (Ephesians 2:18) through the same door, by the same “new and living Way.” A grand unity! On both sides of “the Pyrenees,” in the tents of two opposing armies, in the council-chambers of opposite political factions, in races as widely apart as Esquimaux and Fijian, as Englishman and native Australian, are found men closer together than ever blood-relationship made kindred by nature. Throughout all ages, and races, and countries, and churches, and ranks are distributed men, women, children, with this one mark in common—they use “the name of Jesus Christ our Lord” in prayer. Indeed, they agree in this, and hardly in more than this, that they pray to this one and the same God-man, who died equally for them all, and who lives on the throne of government for not man only, but for the universe, wearing the nature which belongs to them all. Every man of them feels that his Head is Christ. [Two Christian natives, of different tribes and language, once met at a South African mission station, and found the linguistic barrier insuperable, until one with a bright thought looked up and said, “Jehovah!” The other “caught on,” and responded “Jesus!” “Hallelujah!” said the first; “Amen,” the other. They had then exhausted their stock of Christian language, but “Jesus” had proved their brotherhood.] The world is every day girdled by a succession of praying hearts, who join the Mahometan, the Jew, the Theist, in drawing near to the same God as they, but who are differentiated from even these fellow-worshippers by this, that they “call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” One Baptism, one Supper, one Prayer, one Mediator, one Object of prayer and worship—Christ. [The hymnologies of the Churches, largely common to them all, the identical experiences of all the hearts in them all, who love Christ, vindicate the Church-wide brotherhood. Let them begin to worship, let them begin to talk of the inner life, and they understand each other. Their common bond is “the Name.”] “One Christ died for us all. We all live ‘in’ the one and the same Christ. We all rely on the same Saviour. We all pray to the same God-man. We are diverse enough, to say that we are all ‘Christians’; we are not too friendly with each other; but our common convergence upon Him, our common use of His name in prayer, stamps us one; we are ‘brethren’ of that Brother, ‘theirs and ours.’ ”
Observe (IV.) The twofold blessing, with a twofold source.—A. “Grace and Peace.”—
1. “Grace” is the Greek, Gentile, secular word, originally. “Peace” is the Hebrew, sacred, Biblical word.
2. The free and spontaneous and entirely voluntary character of the bounty lay in the secular use of the Greek word, and fitted it to be a vessel capable of receiving new, Gospel contents and meaning. [Might not God almost have said to the Greek language, “Thou art a chosen vessel unto Me, to bear My Name,” etc.?] Gospel “grace” originates with God, in the mere self-suggesting love of His heart. There must be no claim upon God, and no merit belonging to man, “otherwise grace is no more grace” (Romans 9:6).
3. The whole bounty of God to Mankind is Grace. The distinction between Providence and Grace often drawn, is too sharp and at bottom unreal; at least there is no actual separation in their practical working. God is gracious in His Providence—it is mere undeserved bounty for Christ’s sake to a lost race. The purpose of His Providence in our life is not merely or chiefly temporal, immediate relief, convenience, profit, happiness, for even His children; but all these as part of a great scheme of a gracious education in holiness and “conformity to the image of His Son.” Every incident of “secular” life is in God’s view ethical, in ours is gracious.
4. Thus “grace” is one of the correlatives of “sin,” in language and in the facts of our life. It is more than bounty to need; it is free, undeserved bounty to sinners.
5. The Gift is one whole bounty; but we approach it on different sides, we draw upon its contents for the special supply of special needs of our fallen or of our regenerate life; at different stages we appreciate different bearings of its provisions upon our case; we therefore distinguish between grace which freely forgives, and grace which sanctifies, and grace which enlightens or delivers. But really the gift was given at one giving, when Christ was given. In a sense the Holy Spirit is the grace par excellence of the New Covenant; yet the gift of Christ carried this further gift within it. To give the One Comforter involved and carried with it as certain, necessary consequence, exsequence, the gift and coming and indwelling of the Other Comforter. Every operation of this gift upon a sinful heart, first and last, is grace. Every fruit of His redemption and of the indwelling of That Other, grace. All good, all Godward movement within us, from the first and faintest to the fullest and deepest going out of a saint’s heart after God, all grace. The “natural” goodness of so many children, the “natural” goodness in a few heathen, the early tenderness of conscience in those, the more or less of light and moral sense in these, all grace, the first workings of the universal gift of the Spirit for the sake of a universal Redeemer.
6. To the fallen race the grace is Redemption; to the individual sinner it may become Salvation; to the Church, at Corinth for example, what? One form of the answer will be “Peace.” No Peace, if there had been no grace; no Peace for a soul or a Church, if grace were sinned away and forfeited. The “God of all [= all forms of] grace” is for one thing the “God of peace” (1 Peter 5:10; 1 Thessalonians 5:23, etc. [where the relation between corporate perfectness and peace is very close]). Peace and Grace are “a twofold blessing,” but, more profoundly, one.—
1. What is “Peace” to a Church? When we “pray for the peace of Corinth,” what do we ask? A very pregnant word. Two Orientals to this day meet and greet each other with, “Peace be with thee.” The “Salaam,” universal in the East, becomes a word of customary compliment, like that of our own which once was “God be by you.” Peace meant all possible well-being to the man saluted. The Saviour bade His disciples cross a house-threshold with the salutation, “Peace be to this house”; and the peace was all possible family good, and all possible personal good to every inmate. Hardly needs saying that “peace” to a Church is much more than rest from foes outside and factions within.
2. Peace without sometimes a doubtful blessing. Peace within there must be, or a Church cannot prosper. Zion is always a besieged city. The siege is not always prosecuted with equal vigour, but it is always proceeding. The enemy, never far from the gate, finds his opportunity when the garrison quarrel among themselves. Nothing so much weakened Nehemiah’s hands as the traitors within the walls. In the last terrible overthrow of Jerusalem, from the moment that faction and strife amongst the defenders were added to the awful list of horrors which pressed upon the guilty city, capture by the Romans became a certainty. “As much as lieth in you live peaceably with all,” is counsel more urgent in regard to our dealings with the Church than even with the world outside. Peace within [cf. the factions at Corinth] indispensable.
3. Shall ask for peace outside, with some reserve. The infant Church of Palestine “had peace, and was built up” (Acts 9:31). The chief persecutor was converted. The active enmity and attention of other Jews was diverted by some mad doings of Caligula. The Lord of the Church chose outward peace, in view of their weakness, so that in the lull of the storm the new-made converts were instructed and grew strong. Yet when He has chosen to permit persecution and pressure, it has not been unqualified evil. A common danger has drawn men closer together. At such times the unity is more felt after, and made more evident than the diversities. The testing-time sifts out unfaithful members. Faithful ones become more thorough, as a necessity of their own safety. The walls are often built most diligently and securely in “troublous times” (Daniel 9:5). The Church may not pray for it, but many a worse thing for the real peace of a Church may happen than unpopularity or even persecution. There is no peace when the World and the Devil leave the Church alone, and can afford to do it.
4. A slumbering city by night is at peace. There is peace of the most profound in the streets swept by plague till not a living soul is left. “Peace” to Corinth must not be slumber or death, but wakeful health and life. A Church may have a peace imaged by the decorous quiet of an English town, once foremost in the country’s history and commerce, but now a stranded vessel forsaken by the changed course of the current of modern business or trade; the sluggard peace of honourable history and inherited traditions, of exceeding present-day respectability, but of slow decay. The true peace of a Church is rather the tumult and throng of busy thoroughfares; of an increasing roll of citizenship; of an eager, active population and a vigorous, honourable record of to-day.
5. The peace of a Church, as of a city, means citizens who have this “peace” at heart; of broad view, of great public spirit, of large heart; ready to put the corporate interest of the Church before their own comfort or convenience or preferences; all, in diverse ways, self-denyingly seeking the good of the whole.
6. Most deeply of all, Peace to a Church means Holiness. Its people are a holy people. Its well-being is the sum total of the well-being of them all. Sin is its, and their, weakness; holiness its, and their, well-being and peace. Wealth may pour into the treasury; influence, of a sort, may be increasingly wielded; even numbers may multiply; and yet upon a Church, as upon a man, God’s verdict may be: “There is no peace to the wicked.” For a sleeping, dead, indolent, apathetic, unholy Church there is always the peril that “the things which belong unto its peace should be” for ever “hid from its eyes” (Luke 19:42).
B. The “Father,” and “Christ.”—As the twofold blessing is fundamentally one blessing, so the twofold source is fundamentally one Divine Source.
1. In the fullest form of the Pauline salutation we have “grace, mercy, and peace” (1 Timothy 1:2). In the earliest we have “grace and peace” only, without even the indication of their source (1 Thessalonians 1:1.) An interesting piece of doctrinal development for our study; as though, with ripening years, and ever fuller knowledge and clearer insight—the Spirit of God presiding over the process of mind and heart, guiding into real, if partial, truth at every stage, adding detail, filling up the earlier outline, completing the revelation in its historical disclosure, as the letters of the apostle’s last days are written—Paul had at last found a formula which was adequate to contain all he could ask, all God could give in Christ, to His beloved “children” and converts. Perhaps, also, one may see the Spirit of God making the ripe, final, fullest form of a Christian wish, or prayer, a not uncertain echo of the threefold high-priestly formula of benediction (Numbers 6:24-26), and impressing upon it—as in some Epistles, notably the Ephesian, it is impressed upon the very form of whole paragraphs and their underlying thought—the significant threefold form, so wonderfully persistent all along the course of Revelation, and belonging to the worship of the angels and the Church in heaven also, as well as to the experience and theology of the Church on earth.
2. Yet it would be overpressing the words of Scripture to allot Grace to the Father, Mercy to the Son, Peace to the Spirit. And here the two members of the one clause do not so correspond to the members of the other clause, as that Grace should come through the Father and Peace through Christ, exclusively in either instance. The “Grace of God” and the “Peace of God” are, equally, Scriptural, guiding, terms. The Son is invoked as the source of Grace in the concluding benediction of our two Corinthian letters.
3. The old theologies spoke of an “Economical,” or a “Redemptional,” Trinity. They were endeavouring to express the all-important, much-solving truth that we see Father and Son [and Spirit] not in their absolute, internal, relationships—a veil scarcely ever lifted lies upon those—but in their united working, and distinctly apportioned departments, so to speak, in effectuating the Redeeming purpose of the Grace of God toward a lost world. The Son is carrying out the will of Him that sent Him “about His Father’s business”; He is humbling Himself to be the channel, the essential condition, through which alone the grace of God can take blessed effect upon a sinner’s heart. Communication between God and man is opened up in Christ, and in Him only. [This the true point of the “So” in John 3:16, which is not “so much,” “so greatly,” but “thus,” in this manner: “God loved the world, and loved it thus, viz. that He gave …, in order that the love might mean eternal life to every man believing in Him.” All God’s communication with mankind has presupposed His grace, His loving, spontaneous, active goodwill to them. It is in the background of every approach towards man from His side. And the grace has reached us, can only reach us, through one conduit and channel—Christ. All starts and originates in grace. Peace, like every other expression of this basal grace, has reached us through Christ.
4. If a man therefore refuse Christ, or neglect Him, he can never see peace. This not as any arbitrary, isolated decision of God in his particular case, but because he puts away the Indispensable Condition of communication between God and man. He breaks down or refuses the only bridge over the gulf between them. He shuts the only door against himself, or seeks to find or make some other rather than this. We hardly know how to say that the Son conveys to a soul, or a Church, grace which is the bounty of the Father. The very co-ordination here, the two bracketed, as it were, under one “from,” forbids that.
5. Consider the place which Jesus of Nazareth has come to take, by this early date, in Christian language, thought, life. Could we conceivably associate thus any creature, were he never so exalted, as in any sense the giver of grace and peace concurrently with the Father, Jehovah?
SEPARATE HOMILIES
1 Corinthians 1:2. A Church in Corinth: A Wonder.—
1. (a) John once gazed in astonishment upon a “Wonder in heaven” (Revelation 12:1). The “Woman” was the Church of God, in its external aspect as an historical fact, a community, out of which, midway in its continuous (Jewish and Christian) existence, arose the Man-Child (ib., 1 Corinthians 1:5). (b) That Church—in the preincarnation preparation for its Christian stage; in the fitness and the “fulness of the time” (Galatians 4:4) at which its Incarnate Head intervened in the earthly history of its growth; in the “manifold wisdom” (Ephesians 3:10) displayed in all the arrangements of God for creating a new Human Race, redeemed, saved, drawn without distinction from amongst Jews and Gentiles alike, and all finally gathered as a Church, a Family, into the House of its God and Father, every member of it a replica, even in their “bodies of glory” (Philippians 3:2), of the Head and Elder Brother—is all through the ages a Wonder proposed for the instruction and adoring contemplation of “principalities and powers in the heavenly places” (Eph., ubi supr.). (c) That Church is the standing wonder of grace, of historical origin and preservation, of effect upon the world’s life and thought, in all ages. The Redeemer, its Head, stands, not only before the throne of His Father, in the day of the thankful consummation of His triumph (as in Hebrews 2:13), but before the gaze of the successive generations of mankind, and at the bar of their judgment, and borrows the words of the ancient prophet (Isaiah 8:18): “Behold, I and the children whom God hath given me are for signs and for wonders … from the Lord of Hosts.” In the occasional, temporary, embodiment of the principle of “miracle,” the age of miracles has ceased. But, in a deeper sense, it has never ceased, for the Church of Christ is a continuous Miracle. It is a Sign (John’s word, ubi supr.), i.e. it is a fact significant of much more behind, a fact with an Argument in it. Frederick the Great’s chaplain gave a compendious argument for the truth of Revelation: “The Jews, your Majesty.” The origin and history and work of the Christian Church are a similarly compendious argument for, e.g., the verity of the Resurrection of Christ and His actual life to-day in Heaven. The Church on Earth is a Wonder.
2. A Church in Corinth is a Wonder. In Corinth, of all places! Remember (a) Its Surroundings. This was Roman, rather than Grecian, Corinth, which latter had been, even in the ancient world, a proverb of costly, highly organized, luxurious vice, but which, like the polluted Whitehall of Restoration days in England, had, a hundred years or so before, perished in the flames of national overthrow and of Divine wrath, Memmius, the Roman conqueror, like Titus afterwards at Jerusalem, being the unconscious avenger of God’s outraged holiness. But Roman Corinth was corrupt enough; it had all the vice of a seaport town, the convergent point of the traffic and the traders of half the world. Heathenism, too, tends to corruption everywhere; where it does not directly make vice into worship and a source of revenue to idolatry, it has no power or motive for restraining the crude naturalism, the animalism, to which human nature gravitates always. In almost every epistle Paul had to speakplainly and strongly against everyday, open, customary, “fleshly” sin. The very phrase, “the flesh,” is more historical than ethical in its first force and use by him. The city specially of Venus (Aphrodite) was a strange setting for the jewel of a Christian Church. Remember (b) Its Difficulties. For the members every-day life bristled with them. The most elementary Christianity meant a sharp disseverance from many most ordinary practices of heathen, and even Jewish, life. Municipal, family, social, mental, artistic, life—men touched Heathenism, Idolatry, in them all. E.g. “Meat offered to idols” was a large part of the provisions at every public, civic banquet; creating many a difficulty for a Christian citizen. Men could hardly touch anything without handling the “defiling pitch”; every step was near a pitfall. “Conformity to the world” was obviously incongruous with any inward “transfiguration by the renewing of their mind.” Yet, the wonder of it! a Church arose and grew and throve amidst such difficulties. Remember (c) Its Work and Purpose. Christ proposed by this little Church to regenerate Corinth, its morals, its faith, its life. It is a lump of the “salt,” which is to arrest further corruption, and to impregnate the whole life of the city with something of its own gracious savour. It is the housewife’s mass of leavened dough, which is to assimilate to its own condition and characteristics the whole larger mass around it. Like similar Churches which were beginning to dot the map of the empire here and there, this was the first appearance of a centre of holy fermentation, which, with the chemistry and life-processes of grace, was to break up and rearrange in healthy, renewed, order, the corrupting material around it. And yet, wonder of wonders! remember (d) Its own Material.
(1) Socially, hardly anybody of any status; slaves, artisans, more women probably than men, Roman colonists, Corinthian Greeks, and Corinthian Jews. “Not many noble, not many wise,” etc. (1 Corinthians 1:26, sqq.). A Rabbi like Paul, or the great Gamaliel, was an important personage amongst his fellow-Jews; but neither he nor his learning counted for anything with even the second-rate representatives of that aristocracy of mind which had been the glory of Greek philosophy. A ruler of the synagogue could be beaten by the Greek mob before the very tribunal of the proconsul (Acts 18:17), without the courteous Roman gentleman thinking him worth rescue or notice. Gaius, able to act “the host” to the Church, or (perhaps) Stephanas, whose household “addicted themselves” to the service of the saints, may have been a little wealthier than their brethren. But such occasional, and comparative, eminence within the Church was lost in a dead level of social insignificance when looked upon by the great people outside and above them.
(2) Then, personally, factious, proud, boastful, suspicious; the Greeks among them intellectually vain, without real knowledge to support their pretentions to be philosophically minded, and worst of all, hard to wean from the heathen evil of their old lives and of the surrounding world. Of such a people God is about to make a Church, and with such Churches to save the dying, or dead and corrupting, ancient world!
3. The Coming Wonder is the success of God’s method. Such Churches did save the world, and infuse into it a new life. It has never been God’s method, nor must it be ours, to wait vainly wishing for material and systems and workers, such as are ideally necessary or desirable, before attempting anything for Him; still less to do nothing unless our personnel, and doctrine, and methods commend themselves to human reason or the natural human heart. “The best” may in that way be “the enemy of the good.” “Imperfect” characters, “imperfect” work, “unreasonable” doctrine,—we will find the best we may,—with such much real work for God may be done, and has been done. The difficulty was, not the surroundings of the Church, nor the conditions of society, but the evil within the Church. “If the salt lose its savour, wherewith shall ‘the world’ be salted?”
4. A Church, a Christian, could live in Corinth, and might be a “saint” there; was “called to be a saint” there, and nowhere else. Obadiah can live in the court of Ahab, if need be. “Saints” may live saints in even Nero’s household. In fact, in greater or less degree, every steady, consistent, persistent, Christian is “a sign unto his generation.” He is sometimes a very Jonah kept alive in the dark “belly of hell.” If there is an Apology for Christianity in the continued existence and success of the Christian Church, there is as true an Apology for it in the life and faithfulness of the individual Christian, in Corinth, or elsewhere. He also is “a fact with an argument in it.” Of the same flesh and blood, of like passions, with the same liabilities and dangers,—what is it makes him so different, calm under trial, patient under persecution, able to forgive his enemies, fearless in the presence of death, and, not least, “keeping himself unspotted from the world,”—what is this Religion, what is there in it, that it can work this continuous miracle of fifty, sixty, seventy years of a holy life? Christians are “men greatly wondered at” (Zechariah 3:8).
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 1:1-10
A. “To me to” write “is Christ.”—So we might make Paul say, almost on the strength of this paragraph. George Whitefield once said, toward the end of a letter to some correspondent, on some indifferent or business topic, “I must have something of Christ in all my letters,” and thereupon proceeded to subjoin some religious talk. How these verses bristle with “The Name” (3 John 1:7, R.V.). The lines are embroidered, wrought throughout, emblazoned, with the name. The Epistle closes in a white-heat of passionate, intolerant devotion to Christ (1 Corinthians 16:22). Here we might not have supposed that Paul had yet “warmed to his subject.” But he never needs “warming” to this subject. He is ready at a moment’s notice, not only to break out into thanksgiving (1 Corinthians 1:4), but to mention his Master’s name. Or without notice, for it is the instinct and habit of his thought. The page is emblazoned with “The Name,” and indeed with the names. Paul is an ambassador (2 Corinthians 5:20) introducing his business with a proudly solemn and stately announcement, in all due and ceremonious form, of the style and titles of the King who sends him. Paul is the bearer of the mind and will of a Son—God’s Son,—a Son unique of this sort,—whose full name and style is, “Jesus—Christ—His Son—His Only Son—Our Lord.” “Take notice of my Master’s name!” [“My God,” in comparison with the stately array of names and titles of his Master, seems quite homely, and touchingly, trustfully, familiar.] No wonder that the clever wit-mongers, the Antiochians, hit off so happily in their nickname the characteristic of these Nazarenes. Their preachers were ever talking of some one known amongst themselves and their hearers as “Christ”; you could not listen long to their uttorances before His name occurred in their discourses. Did men overhear two of these strange people conversing together in the street, or anywhere else, they were sure before very long to bring in His name. [Cf. the Rabbinical rule: “Let not two Israelites meet and separate without a word about the Law.”] He seemed always a topic welcome to their lips. What should they be called? The Antiochians would surely not let them go long without a sobriquet; it would be a reflection on the reputation of their city to let these people slip by unnamed. “Call them ‘Christians’!” Here Christ is in all; touches all; the whole Church, each individual member; every gift; all the fellowship; and gathers up to Himself all hope and desire. Past, Present, Future, all are linked with Christ.
B. I. The Past was full of Him.—As they look backward along the perspective of the Past they see that with Him all the lines of present life and blessing have originated. He is their radiant point. From the first, all the “grace” and gifts which now so enrich them, that they “come behind in no gift,” were all long ago given “in Him” (1 Corinthians 1:4). Potentially every gift was in that first Unspeakable Gift” (see under 2 Corinthians 1:20).
II. The Present is full of Him.—
1. He is the basis and bond of their fellowship.—Besides the great, deep cleft yawning between Jew and Gentile, there were divisions of race dividing Gentile from Gentile; divisions of sex; divisions of station, slave from master, poor from rich: but out of this medley material a new Unity was being created, a new Communion, “The Fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.” Outside of Him they may either be separate and independent units, or may group themselves on other lines or round other nuclei of opinion or object in life. Their common relation to Him gives them a relation to each other. “Friends of the same Friend are friends of one another” here, though on all other grounds they be strangers from the ends of the earth. Only in the One whose manhood was, in the truest sense, of no nationality, though He sprung from one special branch of the great human family—only in the One who was so entirely “The Son of Man” that no race, no sex, no rank, no age, has ever felt Him a Jew, or alien from itself—could there be a basis for a world-wide fellowship. Only such a Brother and Redeemer of all men alike, could draw together and hold together the diverse elements which were included within the sacred circle and family bond of the “fellowship.” Take the Second Adam away, the new Race, the new Humanity, the Church, resolves itself into its units again, with their isolation and perhaps their antagonisms. Their fellowship is realised as they worship. The world over, prayer and praise are going up to God, the Great Object of worship; but Christian worship converges to the throne through one Door and Avenue of approach—Christ. The differentia of Christian worship, its “note” of unity amidst all its diversity, is that “all in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.” Christian worship, all Christian intercourse with God, passes through Him. He has made it possible.
2. He is the beginning and the continuance of their holiness.—They were sanctified “in Him,” with a relative holiness, from the beginning, and all realisation of this ideal, all their “confirmation” in their holy status, is distinctly His work (1 Corinthians 1:8). And this stands closely connected in fact with another “confirmation”, that of “the testimony of Christ.” The strength is from no outward support merely or chiefly, but from within. [The weak spine may be “confirmed” by the iron supports strapped on outside the patient’s body. The best “confirmation” would be that within, the strengthening of the spine itself.] They stand strong, four-square to all blasts, firm amidst all assaults, until “the End” (1 Corinthians 15:24, perhaps), not alone, nor most of all, because He directly and from without upholds them, but because within them “the testimony is confirmed.” Every point of the witness, both of the Holy Spirit and of Apostles, concerning Christ is verified in their experience. They know that He is a Saviour, and Divine, for He is that to them. There is no promise, implied or expressed, whose root is in Him, which they may not prove, and are not proving, to be true. They stand “confirmed” because they take Him to be “Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification, Redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30). In the fullest sense they find the pledges of His very Name, “Jesus,” abundantly redeemed, and are kept with a continuous Salvation. The external testimony answers point by point to the internal experiences. It is “confirmed in” them by the very same facts of grace which together make up their “confirmation” also. There is no believer in Christianity like the man in whom its great facts have become experiences. Ought we to say that there is no real believer in Christianity except such a man? And the testimony is “of Christ.”
3. What Paul and his fellow-workers had to offer to Corinth and the world was a “testimony.”—They were witnesses, not philosophers; reporters, not authors; they handed on what was first given to them, and did not propose for acceptance what they had themselves in any sense devised. It is true that the testimony has passed through their own mind; each of them puts his own individuality upon the form of delivery; each of them is entrusted with only part; to some is given more than to others, but to each probably just that which he could naturally best appreciate. [The burner gives its own size and shape to the jet of burning gas which it passes. The jet of the fountain also gives shape to the stream of water issuing from it. A group of burners, passing out the gas from one common supply-pipe, will give each its own shape and size of flame, whilst contributing to the one light. (Such illustrations are of course not to be pressed far).] Yet they are witnesses, and no more. As to the great fundamental, historical facts in which Christianity rests, they speak as bearing testimony. When they preach doctrines which are the superstructure upon or the consequences of, the facts, these are not their own inferences, or deductions, or speculations. They are reporters of what the Spirit of God has told them. This narrowed range of work and function—simply witness-bearing—was their strength; as it is still the strength of the preacher and worker. Every great religious awakening affords many examples of the power of testimony, even when that testimony is nothing more than the story of the speaker’s conversion and his “present experience.” It has often been from rude lips a mighty power with cultured people. The facts of the Gospel story, told with freshness and reality, and with the power of the Spirit of God, have, from Pentecost onwards, been very effective preaching,—the most effective. Christian speculation has its time, and place, and value. There is a philosophy of Christianity. But the working force, the real lever-power, of it lies in its “testimony.” That “confirmed” “confirms” Christians. Noteworthy is the summary of all Apostolic messages: “the testimony of Christ.” Comparing this with 1 Corinthians 2:1, “the testimony of God,” we are guided to the conclusion that in the latter case God is regarded as the Proprietor and Source, in the former Christ is regarded as the great Subject. Indeed, as the One Subject; for He summarises the Gospel. All its topics are “broken lights” of Him. He is the Topic. A scheme of doctrine, a sermon from a Christian pulpit, which does not clearly show the relation of any and every topic to Christ, is not a Christian scheme or a Christian sermon. [That is no Christian religious life in which He is not central.] As a matter of notorious, and often verified, result a “Christianity” (if it borrow the name) whose Christ is not Divine, and therefore not the dominating Name and influence a Divine Person must of necessity be, is not a Christianity that moves the world, though for a time it may give satisfaction to a few. The men who move the masses and “confirm” the Church are “witnesses,” and witnesses who report what they see and know in Christ. They exhibit Him. He is the great Subject of all that preaching which is the instrument of strengthening the religious life.
III. The future is full of Christ.—
1. He is the convergent point of all the perspective of the years to come.—At the end of the vista of the personal life, His people see Christ. They “depart and are with Christ.” And the end of the vista of history is to them the blaze of the glory of His “revelation,” and the dread solemnities of His “Day.” The “call” of the Past was into fellowship in Him. The “confirmation” of the Present is in Him. The “waiting” for the Future turns toward Him. [Is the “Revelation” for His people, His “Day” for His enemies?] The “Day of Christ” is, most broadly stated, a period with its historical contents, extending from His first Coming to His second. Within it are several subsidiary “days of Christ,” each of which reproduces in miniature the features of “the Day” on the largest scale. Hence what is true of the whole “Day of Christ,”—which is also a continuous “Revelation”—was true of the historical Advent and its day, which began the larger “Day”; and will be true of the “Day,” specially so called, which closes the period. In the course of it are episodes, special incidents or events, each of which is a real “coming” and “revelation” of Christ, and marks a “day of the Son of Man.” His “revelations” and “days” have all of them three characteristics: Scrutiny [“The thoughts of many hearts shall be revealed,” (Luke 2:35)]; Judgment, i.e. judicial discrimination of, and verdict on, character and conduct, inevitable in, and from, the moment that men, or churches, or nations, or systems, come into contact with Christ, their touchstone [John 9:39]; Sentence, a feature only slightly emphasised as yet, but to be the prominent one of the latest “Day of Christ.”
2. To His people His “revelation” is a Dawn.—There are mysterious, perplexing hints of a darkest hour before that dawn. [E.g. Luke 18:8; 2 Thessalonians 2:3.] It is confessedly difficult to arrange the scattered intimations in Scripture as to the sub-final days of the present Age, into any coherent, consistent programme; as difficult as it would have been for even the prophets of fullest knowledge and largest illumination in Old Testament days to have drawn up from the body of Old Testament intimations any programme of the First Advent of Christ. We are in their position: “Searching what or what manner of times the Spirit … did signify” when He gave the New Testament prophetic indication as to the future, the “Revelation” and the “Day.” The relation between even these two great facts is obscure. If the problem had not been as yet insoluble, the pains and learning spent upon it would long ago have resulted in some solution in which all, or most, expositors would have been agreed. Practically the Church has, age after age, “waited for the revelation,” as the individual waits day by day for death. It is an event certain, but the time of it unknown. A constant preparedness for it is cultivated, and, this made sure, the man—and the Church—go steadily on with the daily tasks, “doing what the hand finds to do,” and doing it “with their might.” The end, whether to the man or the Church, must be reckoned with as of urgent present importance, even though in fact it may only come after long delay. It is ever impending, though it may be long before it falls; and this not only keeps a helpful fear awake, but keeps hope and expectation and desire in active exercise. The “waiting” has all these elements in it. The sinner may well stand in dread at the resistless, untarrying, sure approach of “the Day”; like the wretch in the condemned cell “waiting for” the day of the executed sentence. The Christian man “loves the Appearing” of his Lord. His eye is ever turning to the quarter from which his help shall come; he is ever—as the Church also has been doing for ages—looking with eager gaze for the first sign of the breaking of that day, when the glory of His revealing shall burst in upon the unbelieving, persecuting, daringly blasphemous, world [2 Thessalonians 2:8], and the Lord and His people shall together stand revealed in their true and native glory as “sons of God.” All his highest aims and work will then enter upon their eternal fulfilment; all his best hopes will then begin their eternal realisation. No wonder they “wait.”
3. No wonder that “the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” is Paul’s strong ground of appeal.—The common hope, the common Lord, make them more closely one than does any other bond which holds men together. They understand each other with a deep, quick instinct, such as no other, no natural, community of sympathy and interests creates. There is no rallying point like this; none like Him. Speak His name, and it should awaken the harmonious response of heart to heart, where all are first tuned to respond to It. “Brethren, do you split into your parties? Do you cherish and foment your antagonisms? Brethren! BRETHREN! Do you forget that you are all His together, that you are all together pledged to Him; that you are looking forward together to His ‘revelation’? You to be divided, who are redeemed by the same blood of the same Lord Jesus Christ? You, who are together ‘sanctified in’ the same Christ, ‘enriched in’ Him; who ‘call’—as none others do—‘upon His name’; you, whose whole life, through and through, is ‘Christ’?” Surely to mention “The Name” ought to hush all party clamour, ought to make them close up all party rents and schisms, and “join them perfectly together in the same mind and the same judgment.” If the spell of The Name do not act, nothing will. If it be the uplifted banner, then round it should gather a compactly united host; too earnest, too thoroughly one, for even partisan “sparring in the ranks.”
HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS
1 Corinthians 1:9. God is Faithful.
I. God’s character.—To use a homely word, “reliable.” Like His “faithful sayings,” in the Pastoral Epistles; as He is, so is “every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” “By every (such) word doth man live” (Deuteronomy 8:3). Here His character is the great basal fact on which rests the fulfilment of “shall confirm,” (1 Corinthians 1:8). The “confirmation” of “the testimony” (1 Corinthians 1:6) was but the means employed by this “faithful God.” It is an admirably suitable and efficient instrumentality, but chiefly because it is in His hand. [Cf. the same link of thought in a Fijian’s boast to a missionary (known to H. J. F.), “This is a good gun, but I carry it.”] Promises, the arrangement of the “plan of salvation,” everything in Gospel and in grace, for all worth to us, ultimately come to this, that behind them, directing them, employing them, is the “faithful God.” All faith ultimately finds its way to Him. “Have faith in God.” He is reliable, and may be counted on, to an utter certainty.
II. An argument for our heart, resting upon it.
1. His character is pledged to us. “He cannot deny Himself.” He cannot turn His back upon the Self whom His people have always known. He cannot do anything which is incongruous with His past character and dealings. He will never “begin again,” on some new and unexampled line of conduct. We may plead “For Thy Name’s sake,” and feel that we there have a strong hold upon Him. His “Name” is involved.
2. When He called us, He promised, so far as depended on Him, to finish His work by bringing us “unreproveable” to “the day of Jesus Christ.” The beginning was, quâ His intention and desire, a promise to finish. It committed Him to finish His work, if we will not thwart His purpose. He desires to redeem the pledge of His “calling.”