CRITICAL NOTES
1 Corinthians 1:19-20.— Isaiah 29:14 (nearly as LXX.), and a free imitation of Isaiah 30:18. For.—Sustains the general drift of 1 Corinthians 1:17-18, not any particular clause. “The cessation of Rabbinical wisdom was to be one of the signs of Messiah’s coming; and that this was foretold in Isaiah 33:18 was believed among the Rabbis. (So Stanley.) Also, “The heathen oracles are dumb,” silenced since Christ came. Remark, “age” and “world” used together here (in the Greek).
1 Corinthians 1:21.—Difficult; but probably, “In God’s wise ordering of the history of the world and of human thought, the result of all their experiment and inquiry is this: ‘An unknown God.’ ” Paul came fresh from his address at Athens (Acts 17:23) to Corinth. Still, worth considering this reading: “By means of and from the wisdom of God displayed in ‘the things that are made’ (Romans 1:20) the world did not arrive at knowledge of Him; He now therefore will propose what the world thinks the folly of His Gospel of the Cross. Will they know Him through that? They who believe will, and do, and the knowledge is salvation.”
1 Corinthians 1:22.—Notice, “Jews,” “Greeks,” q.d. men of the Jew-type of mind and heart, and of the Greek-type. There are such in all races, religions, ages. Signs (from heaven) suit the Oriental, the childlike, emotional type; wisdom the Western, harder, manlike, logical type. The Jew wanted to see the finger of God; the Greek wanted to explain all by philosophic theory.
1 Corinthians 1:24—Power for the Roman; wisdom for the Greek. Power and wisdom, meeting the moral weakness and moral darkness of the fallen humanity. The age-long experiment of the Jew ended in the knowledge of man’s moral helplessness; that of the Greek race, his moral ignorance.
1 Corinthians 1:26. Your calling.—Choose between, (a) “they who called you,” and (b) “those who are called.” Probably the latter. But both are true, and both are included, as particular embodiments of it, in the great fundamental rule which God has followed “in His manner of calling you,” viz. “not many,” etc. Not many.—Always a few, as Crispus. Can almost count, however, the exceptions in the New Testament on one’s fingers, and hardly any of them counting for much in the world’s estimation.
1 Corinthians 1:28. Base.—Of no special honour of birth. Are not … are.—“Nonentities,” “entities” (Evans).
1 Corinthians 1:30. Are ye.—Q.d. “Now were, and still are, nothing and nobody, in the eyes of the world. But before God, and in Christ, you are indeed something and somebody, with a life of important, eternal reality.” (See Homily).
1 Corinthians 1:31.— Jeremiah 9:23.
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Grouping the topics of the paragraph around 1 Corinthians 1:29, we have:—
I. A great principle of God’s government consistently carried out. God alone must be exalted.—
1. In threefold reiteration here. “That no flesh should glory,—or literally, “that all flesh should not glory,”—“in His presence” (“before God,” better reading, 1 Corinthians 1:29); “He that glorieth … in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:31); and the triumphant laugh in the face of the world’s wisest ones, “Where is the wise?” etc. (1 Corinthians 1:20). Paul stands by the cross of “the Lord of Glory,” and casts his exultant glance around. The Cross of Christ has been planted, like God’s Royal Standard, in the midst of the battle-field. Now the field is clear. Beaten, discomfited, discredited, by God’s “foolish” method, the competing “wisdoms of the world” have vanished, or are vanishing, leaving the cross of Christ in possession! [So in the Day of Questions, the last day of the Lord’s public ministry, every typical world’s-wise-man assailed Him. But He held His own, and one after another slunk away beaten, until at last He Himself completed the rout by turning questioner, and finally silencing every opponent with His problem about David’s Lord and David’s Son (Matthew, 22).]
2. The Old Testament origin of Paul’s quotation, here and in 2 Corinthians 10:17 (from Jeremiah 9:23-24), carries back the principle into the earlier dispensation, and shows that the Spirit guided him with a sure and right instinct to lay his hand upon a great and perennially valid principle of all God’s rule and administration of His government; one that must obtain wherever there are creatures capable of knowing Him. In no world can it be conceived that this great law should not be in force. He is the One and Only Being who can make Himself the centre and object of all intention and activity, and who can claim that all other life than His own should converge upon Him as its Object and End and Goal. In us such self-centering is of the very essence of Sin; it is our root-rebellion against our God. It is a prime and simple necessity of His position and character and very Being. To ask less, to permit less, to man or to any other creature, were to abdicate His position as God. The Bible sets Him forth abundantly full, full to the overflow, of love; His mercy is eagerly ready and “forward” to bless; the first advance to union between Himself and sinners has always come from His side. His ear is always open to the cry of the feeblest, bowing Himself to the man of contrite and trembling heart; indeed, loving to “dwell with” such a man (Isaiah 57:15; Isaiah 66:2). Yet the condescension is never exhibited at the expense of the majesty. “He is God and none else. His honour will He not give to another.” To compare great and small, and with all reverence: men hear from time to time of our Queen performing acts of kindly condescension and of simple womanly kindness, to the sick and poor and aged. But if any presumed upon this to exercise undue familiarity as to an equal, she would be the first to draw back. To allow another on some state occasion to occupy the throne in her presence, would not be condescension, but abdication. The Creator and the creature can never with His consent even seem to change places. The world’s “wisdom” is rooted in the pride of human nature in itself and its powers of discovery. No field can be supposed beyond its exploration; no height, or depth, or vastest extension of truth, but it can take in all. If God hide Himself, then there is no God; this wisdom can find none. If His ways pass its systematisation, or do not commend themselves to the world’s judgment or “moral sense,” they are evil or folly. Over all that pride of intellect He must win a victory. To men the perpetually attractive temptation is, “Ye shall be as God, knowing.…” Human intellect must lower its high-borne pennon in the presence of the Royal Standard of God’s wisdom. The proud intellect which will acknowledge neither limitation nor error, the proud heart which will own no weakness or sin, must alike bow in the presence of God. It is true of the whole arrangements for the spread of the Gospel; it is true of the provisions in the Gospel for the salvation of the individual sinner.
II. Seen in the arrangements for the spread of the Gospel.—
1. Hardly necessary to point out the once current, customary misconception of Paul’s words, “the foolishness of preaching.” Even an English reader of the R.V., with its margin, may now see that the “folly” lay in the matter of the preacher’s message, and not at all in that particular method of delivering it (1 Corinthians 1:21). Vivâ voce instruction and appeal is one of the aptest methods of winning attention and securing conviction. For appeal, whose aim is to secure immediate results, whether of conviction or action, the living voice of the man speaking face to face with his fellow has better prospect than the writer, whose written or printed page lies cold and silent before, perhaps, a listless eye. Every true preacher is, first of all, a public speaker; the natural basis upon which is superinduced his special grace, is the same as that of the speaker upon any secular theme, the lecturer, the parliamentary orator, the very demagogue. He will cultivate it, as part of its consecration, and will learn his very art in order that he may the better win the ear of his listeners, and thus find for his Master a way to their hearts. God has often glorified Himself by using “very poor speakers” to deliver His message. Wisdom of “words,” if made by preacher or hearers a thing aimed at for its own sake, or for the applause it may bring and the pleasure it may give, may “make the Cross of none effect” (1 Corinthians 1:17). Yet foolish preaching is no thing to praise or value, or (as it were) to cultivate. The speaker will seek to be at his best, for God. But all this is quite away from any thought of Paul here. Any supposed “poor preaching” is not, in itself, one of the illustrations of God’s method which he adduces.
2. The message itself seemed foolish.—“Jews” and “Greeks” (1 Corinthians 1:22) are not only historical names, but generic and typical. There are always “Jews” and “Greeks” amongst the men to whom any Paul addresses himself, in every age, in any country. They are two variants of the natural mind, under the influence of the natural heart. And we “who are called” (1 Corinthians 1:24), and have made the “call” a reality [see the tense, as compared with that in 1 Corinthians 1:2], both from our memory of the old days in our own life, and from the very nature of the case, can see how “foolish” the “preaching of the Cross” must seem to such. Here is proposed for man’s acceptance a system of “truth” whose Teacher is a man hanged publicly on a gibbet, on a thing whose whole associations were those of our gallows, but aggravated in their painfulness and shame. “We are being saved” by it (1 Corinthians 1:18), and know its “wisdom” and its “power.” To us they are worthy of God; they carry their own credentials. But “to those who are perishing” such a story may well seem “foolishness.” Apart from the power of the Holy Ghost in it (1 Corinthians 2:4), it would be a message with which to send men only on a fool’s errand. To tell the Roman masters that the hope of the world was in a Jew, rejected by His own people, hanged publicly on a gallows by a Roman quaternion and their centurion, at the instigation of Jewish religious authorities,—Gallio well reflected the temper with which the best of them would receive such a tale. He cared nothing indeed for the rioting; he could afford to ignore a petty Jewish squabble, though under his very eyes. But the same lofty, “gentlemanly,” if not supercilious, contempt would have been his answer—a Roman answer—if the “preaching of the Cross” had been fairly submitted to him for his judgment. The Jew was stung to the quick when Pilate’s “title” seemed to offer to the nation a crucified peasant of Galilee as its King and Messiah. The “Jew” of all ages who wants “signs,” who demands, in order to belief, unmistakeable self-disclosures of the Unseen, Supernatural, Order, who wants to see his God, will hardly bear to be pointed to Jesus of Nazareth crucified. “Such foolishness!” The “Greek,” looking for his Ideal Man, feeling after God, requiring of everything proposed to him for acceptance that it shall fit into some beautifully ordered, symmetrical, closely articulated scheme of philosophic thought, was hardly to be won to attention by this story of a Divine Man dying on a gallows. That the supreme revelation of God? That the supreme form of the Beautiful, the True, the Good? On Mars’ Hill attention ended in an explosion of mocking laughter (Acts 17:32). “Foolishness!” Sensible men, not to say philosophers, to give serious attention to such a story! Not even the learning of Paul, or the eloquence of an Apollos, could make such a story anything else but a “folly” and a stumbling-block. If it kept the field, then, and drove out all competitors, there must be something in it not of man. The most successful preacher “may not glory in His presence.” “This is the finger of God.”
3. Look at the men who bore it.—(For they are fairly included in the unfinished sentence of 1 Corinthians 1:26. R.V. margin is not too broadly comprehensive. What was true of the first converts was true also of the first preachers.) They were not reclaimed reprobates, indeed; nor by any means wanting in native common sense or shrewdness. Their “baseness” (1 Corinthians 1:25) only means that they had no advantage from what with men gives prestige. Yet manifestly they were not the men whom human wisdom would have chosen to confront the “scribe” of the Jew, or the “disputer” of the Greek market-place (Acts 17:18). Men would not have chosen the equivalent of a little company of Whitby or Peterhead fishermen, with a farm labourer or two, and a subordinate collector of Customs, even though joined afterwards by a graduate of the theological school of a small and uninfluential sect, to be the men to clear away religions deeply rooted in the popular life, or consecrated by hoar antiquity. Paul was the best educated of them all, yet his strictly “Hebrew” home (Philippians 3:5), though in the Greek city of Tarsus, would not permit to him much acquaintance with any ordinary secular literary knowledge, and his learning was mainly in that Rabbinic lore which seems to us, as it would to his Gentile contemporaries, so largely trivial, and indeed often contemptible. Humanly speaking, he was by no means the man to put forward as the best representative of the new faith, to discuss it on Mars’ Hill, or in the Agora of Athens, with the heirs of the philosophy of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. From the standpoint of human prudence, it would have seemed to be the very best method of handicapping the message and lessening its chances of reception, to commit it to such men as its apostles and promulgators. Precisely. But God’s foolishness was God’s way. Such “weak” and “base things” put the world’s wisdom and strength and prestige to shame. The success justified the method, and justified the use of such messengers of the cross. And the method obviously secured this end, that “no flesh”—certainly not the successful messengers themselves—“should glory before God.”
4. Look at the first converts.—In Corinth even the “chief ruler of the synagogue,” the Crispus whom Paul had the joy of receiving as a Christian, soon after he had transferred his labours to the house of Titus Justus, was a man of no account except amongst the Jewish community. The Gentile mob dragged before Gallio his successor in office, Sosthenes, with very scant respect. A few converts may have been won from the descendants of the Roman colonists with whom the city had been repeopled. But, as usual, the artisan and the slave, the small trader and the sailor, would form the bulk of the Corinthian Church. It is just one of the touches of “foolishness” in God’s plan that, though the “noble, the mighty, the wise after the flesh” need the Gospel of the Cross as much as do the “foolish, and weak, and base,” its reception has seemed to be made distinctly more difficult for them than for others. The exceptions in the New Testament to Paul’s statement are few. In Philippi the first to be won for Christ were a purple-seller and a gaoler, not the magistrates. Jerome boasted in after years (on Galatians 3:3), “Ecclesia Christi non de Academia, et Lycæo, sed de vili plebecula congregata est” (Farrar L. of Chr., i. 197). But it was long a standing matter of scorn that the adherents of the new faith were almost exclusively from lower grades of society. Not that the Gospel has any republican prejudice against, or dislike for, the rich or the aristocratic. [“Not many,” but always some. “How I thank God,” Lady Huntingdon used to say, “for the letter m! If it had been ‘not any’!”] The exceptions to Paul’s statement in the New Testament can almost be counted upon one’s ten fingers. But the exceptions are there. [And possibly the percentage of the “wise and noble” has been as great as that of the far more numerous lower classes.] The Gospel met the case of Nicodemus; of Sergius Paulus, the proconsul of Cyprus; of Dionysius, a judge of the sacred court on Areopagus; of Erastus, the city-treasurer of Corinth itself (Romans 16:23); and these were but the precursors of a noble few, who are nobler because position or wealth or learning were consecrated to the service of the Gospel of a crucified Jesus. But these were not saved because of their social standing; as it was no prejudice to them, so it gave no advantage; and they joined a company of people, humble and often rude, who could impart no social consideration, and in company with whom they lost that which they already had.
5. And yet these arrangements of God’s plan have been crowned with success.—The foolishness of God is wiser than men; the weakness of God is stronger than men.” Here is plain matter of historical fact. Such preachers, bearing such a message, winning mainly such converts, “have turned the world upside down.” Such messengers have evidently no ground to glory in their success, as if it arose out of their own qualifications or abilities. To win such converts brought no glory in the eye of the world. The converts themselves could not suppose that anything in themselves drew out any special mercy of God towards them. To join the “sect everywhere spoken against” brought no credit. Looked at on any side, the arrangements for the spread of the Gospel were such as to debar all pretence of “flesh” glorying in the presence of God.
5. All this not only historically, but generally, true.—All Christian workers—and by no means preachers alone—need to remember that God proceeds on the same lines still. The “wise” and the “scribe” are not extinct. Their judgment is that of the natural heart always. They would say: “Convert the men of influence among the Roman masters of Corinth. Catch Gallio, and the whole city will go with him.” [It was a bad day for the world when, not of Christ, but of Constantine, it could be said: “The world is gone after him!” (They who said this so bitterly of Christ, knew not of the glorious fulfilment of their words symbolised in the very next verse, when “the Greeks”—the first “ears” of the harvest of the Gentiles—came to “see Jesus,” John 12:19-20).] “Convert a philosopher or two, or a rhetorician, amongst the Greeks; these will carry their disciples with them.” The critic will dishearten the Christian Church as he points out that, in the mission-fields of the world, or, indeed, in the Churches at home, the bulk of the converts and membership belong to the middle or the working and lower classes. The divorce between Culture and Christianity is distressing, but it is not novel. It is nothing new or surprising if a Church reaps a more abundant harvest amongst the pariahs or the aborigines of India than amongst the Brahmins. God always has lighted His fire from the bottom, [and first ignites the slight material!] He began with the fisherman, and the fallen woman, and the publican, and the slave. Often does He begin with the servant maid or the child to-day, when He saves a family. “The poor have the Gospel preached to them,” whilst it does reach and save culture and birth and wealth. These need “to become fools that they may be wise” (1 Corinthians 3:18). “That no flesh should glory.”
6. No man may be a successful winner of souls who disregards this rule of God’s procedure.—If God have “given the tongue of the learned,” that he may know how to speak “a word in season to him that is weary” (Isaiah 50:4); if to natural gifts have been added opportunities of culture; if the ready tongue and warm heart are used to win many to the story of the Cross; if the Spirit of God make his gifts nobly auxiliary to the work of pulling down strongholds, and bringing hearts to the obedience of Christ; then he needs to remember that these are gifts, and that he is only an instrument. The axe may not complacently dwell upon its temper or edge, nor count up proudly the stout trees it has been used to fell. Every victory must be laid simply at the feet of the Lord of the battle. In the day that God’s labourers begin to “glory in His presence,” in that day will they be laid aside. “Things that are not,” they will revert to their original nothingness.
7. The humble may hear hereof and be glad.—The “weak” and the “foolish” are the very instruments God can best employ. He will have no joint saviours of “them that are perishing.” He wants men and women who will be content to offer themselves, and all the glory of any success, to Him.
8. So also the message must not be tampered with. The Gospel is significantly summarised as “the preaching (the word) of the Cross” (1 Corinthians 1:18).—To conciliate the pride of unsanctified intellect, the Sufferer on the cross must not be hidden behind the Babe in the manger, and still less behind the gentle, tender Healer of disease, and of the Teacher who—account for it, and for Him, as we can—spake as never man spake. [Calvary, and not even Bethlehem, is the true Kiblah of the Mecca of the pilgrimage of a sinful world, in search of rest to heart and conscience. Even on Christmas morning, the Christian preacher will also say, “Let us go even unto Calvary.”] The message must be characteristically, whatever else it includes, the word of “Christ, and Him,” too, “(as) crucified.” As a simple matter of often verified experiment, “foolishness” though this be, it has satisfied the needs of human hearts better than any “other Gospel” (Galatians 1:9). All great revivals of the life and vigour and progress of the kingdom of God in the world, have been in the closest association with this specific type of teaching; they have demanded it, and have produced it. It may be “a stumbling-block” (also in Galatians 5:11); but it may not be dispensed with. As matter of experiment it has been the foundation stone, of “God’s own power and wisdom,” on which effectual teaching and practical holiness of life have age after age been securely built. Try anything else, whether upon the world’s “wisdom,” or upon its sin and misery; the result will only be another verification of 1 Corinthians 1:20; if the Church will confront the world’s wisdom with the like worldly wisdom, God will make even His own people’s effort to end in manifest “foolishness” The “argument of the Cross” [so Evans, bringing into close connection with the same word in 1 Corinthians 1:17] best secures that “no flesh should glory before God,” and it therefore best succeeds.]
III. Seen in the provisions of the Gospel for the salvation of the individual sinner (1 Corinthians 1:30-31).—(See also Separate Homily.)
1. For the overthrow and shaming of the imposing “entities” of the world, God has chosen to take and use “non-entities,” “things that are not,” have no existence [making His new creation out of “nothings”]. And, as truly, for their own salvation He has taken care that, if “they now are” at all, and are anything, or have anything—“wisdom, righteousness, holiness, redemption,” every man shall “glory only in the Lord.” Only “in Christ Jesus” have they, or are they, anything. “He is made” all these things to them. Apart from Him they are foolish, guilty, unholy, lost—nothing!
2. In this fact, that the Gospel does nothing to conciliate either the intellect or the proud heart of man, does it stand very sharply distinguished from all other religions. In varying form, but with substantial unity, these exalt human nature, not abase it; if in any degree it needs elevation or recovery, the sufficient force is said to be within the man himself. In Stoicism man could be his own saviour; he must be self-reliant, and independent of all men and all things in his struggle after good; pride was indulged on principle. And in this it was but a special and philosophic formulating of the thought and feeling of human nature, even at its best, everywhere. That Gospel can hardly be of human origin, which even conceives of attaining success in a totally different direction. It tells a man that of himself he has nothing to recommend him to God; that he can do nothing to win His favour; that, whether “by wisdom” (1 Corinthians 1:21), or by works, he can attain to no knowledge of God; that all he gets is “of God,” purely and simply, and for the sake of Christ; that even in the faith which lays hold of all, there is no merit—it is exercised in the strength of grace. As the Gospel has been seen above to be “a stumbling-block” to the natural understanding, so it is also an offence to the natural heart. All is of grace. Men, even the “Jew,” the “Greek,” the “wise,” the “scribe,” the “mighty,” are “perishing” together. There is now only one fundamental classification: “them that are perishing,” “us who are being saved.” No matter how high may rise the edifice of a Christian’s life and holiness, at the foundation of all, lies the fact that the grace “of God” “in Christ” has in the first instance made him who “was not” into a saint. After long ages of heaven’s perfected “redemption,” it will still remain true that Christ Jesus is “made redemption” to him. He is in that world only as a man “redeemed” “of God” “in Christ.”
SEPARATE HOMILIES
1 Corinthians 1:18. The Preaching [the Word] of the Cross.—Observe the connection between this and the preceding verse. Paul is jealous over himself as a preacher, and over his hearers, lest he should lay himself out to use, and they should desire to hear, “the wisdom of words”; he is jealous lest “The Cross should be made void.” For “the Cross” is the summary, and the very heart, of another “word” which God has spoken; the very strength of it, and the secret of its effectiveness, are there. It is God’s “argument,” set over against man’s “arguments.” [So Evans.] Its whole force lies in the fact that it is not a theory, or a philosophy, but a fact; and that fact a “Cross.” Christianity, the Gospel, God’s latest revelation of Himself, alt gather themselves up around this startling sight, a Cross and a Crucified One. The effectiveness of this “Word” must be guarded at all costs; therefore the “wisdom of words” must be watched or banished altogether. Observe then—
I. A wonderful fact about Christianity: the prominent place given in it to “the cross of Christ.”
1. The Russian painter Verestchagin a few years ago in his exhibition of paintings hung side by side three pictures: A Russian Nihilist being executed by hanging, in a thick-falling snowstorm; Several wretched sepoys of the Mutiny of 1857, writhing helplessly, and in terror, as they stood bound to the muzzle of the guns whose discharge was to execute the sentence upon their revolt or treachery; The crucifixion of Christ. Three executions! The realism of this last was exceedingly great. No doubt it was very true to what was to be seen outside the walls of Jerusalem on a certain Friday morning of April, in the year 30, by one of the visitors come from foreign lands to keep the Passover. No doubt an execution, the execution of a strange man of Nazareth, of whom there had been a good deal of talk in the country for some three years past, was what was discussed at the gatherings for the Supper in upper rooms in Jerusalem that evening. If there were, as an early Christian apologist asserts, an official report from Pilate to Rome, it would be the matter-of-fact report of an execution. How comes “an execution” to be the central argument of God’s message to mankind? Why is this crucifixion of the Author of the new religion so vital to it? One of the preachers of the new faith, Peter, was himself crucified, like the Master whom he served. But the cross of Peter has never affected the world’s religion and civilisation and history like the cross of Christ. Why not? Of the hundreds and hundreds of Jews who were crucified by Roman hands outside and upon the walls of the city in the day of its capture and destruction, not one has left his name, or by his death made any such perceptible mark on the world’s life and thought, as this other crucified Jew has done. Nobody would die for Peter because Peter was crucified. Thousands of spectators are year by year profoundly stirred by the pathos of the Oberammergau dramatisation of the scenes of Calvary; yet the emotion stirred by the intense realism of the death of Josef Meyer is of another older altogether to the stirring of hearts all over the world caused by even the mental contemplation of the dying of Jesus upon His cross. Why? If any heart is really “blessed” at Oberammergau, if by chance any life is changed by a real conversion in consequence of what is seen and felt there, manifestly it is not the crucifixion of the man Meyer which has effected the change, but the cross and death of Christ, which perhaps then was made for the first time to have any reality, and so any power of appeal, to the spectator’s heart.
2. The relation of the death of Christ to His Gospel is close, and uniquely close.—The death of Peter might have been, like Paul’s, by decapitation, for all that it would have mattered to the substance of his teaching and to the issue of his life’s work. It is an accident of history merely that Socrates died by the poison-cup, rather than by any other method of execution. Neither the fact nor the mode of the death of Buddha or Confucius is of any importance to their system of doctrine. Pascal lays his satirical finger upon the fact that, whereas the plan and the success of Mahomet meant the death of others, to the plan and success of Christ His own death was essential. [So Talleyrand’s well-known reply to Le Reveillière Lepeaux, who had read before the Institute in 1797 an essay upon the re-establishment of Theophilanthropy. “I have but one observation to make. In order to found His religion, Jesus Christ was crucified and rose again. You ought to attempt as much” (Guizot, Meditations, Philippians 1:2).] It would be impossible to exhibit Christianity, except in a mutilated form whose identity had become doubtful, if no stress were laid upon the fact that Christ was crucified, or, above all, if that fact were left out altogether. As Christ identifies Himself with His Gospel, and with Truth, so here Paul brings into solitary prominence this one fact, “the Cross,” as practically the sum and substance of Christianity. Without the story of the crucifixion of Christ, or with it, if that be only an accidental fact of the history; if that death were only an unfortunate, unintended, premature conclusion of the ministry of Christ—of Jesus; then His work and His works would perhaps long ago have faded into indistinct history or myth. At any rate, His teaching would at the utmost have been a beautiful code of ethics, the most beautiful the world possesses, but hanging, as it were, in mid-air, and weak, just as all the noblest systems of morals are all weak, in having no adequately efficacious working power. He would have been just one among the world’s greatest and choicest names; the best loved of them all, perhaps, but not the present-day personal power He is, not only to a few cultured people who can realise the past and be influenced by it, but to the masses who must live, and must be raised, and must be saved, in the present.
3. The guilty conscience and the burdened heart feel and know why Christianity meets them with a unique helpfulness and sufficiency.—Whatever be the reason, the fact is certain that it is the Cross which makes Christianity the religion of every heart. John Bunyan was not merely casting Puritan or any temporary phase of theology into the form of a story; he was not merely generalising from his own experience; he was summarising universal experience; when he takes his Christian to the Cross, and there, and not till then, makes his burden fall off, and the man set forth with a new freedom and lightness of heart. The sight of the Cross made the burden fall. So say all guilty souls. They push on past the manger of Bethlehem; they have no ear for the name “Immanuel” until they have been to Calvary. When their heart has there been disburdened of its load, then first is that heart at leisure to come back to Bethlehem and learn the lesson of the holy manger. But the profundities and mysteries of condescension and love in the Incarnate Babe need a heart to understand them which has first seen the Crucified One “made sin for us.” No New Testament writer, not even John, contributes more than does Paul to what light we have on the Incarnate Son; but the centre of gravity of Paul’s scheme of the Gospel, “my Gospel,” as he calls it often, will be shifted, if the Incarnation and the Birth become, more than the Death and its Atonement, the objects of attention, the subjects of preaching. It is a glorious Gospel, truly, which lies in the very name “Immanuel,” God with, instead of against, us; it has in it all the possibilities of life (Romans 8:31). The race now is made up of “men of God’s goodwill. “But how? Why? How is the individual, conscious of guilt in the past record, and more deeply conscious still of an inward, deep-seated heart aversion from God and from gôod, to enter into the Name “Immanuel”? Has the word reached him too late, since he has sinned, and is a sinner? The answer is at the Cross, or it is nowhere. It would not be fair to make the Incarnation merely one step in a chain of arrangements leading up to the Cross, and existing for its sake. Really each is in some points for the sake of the other. It is plain that if the Incarnate Babe exhibits and proclaims the reconciliation, the Cross makes it. “He hath reconciled us … by the death of His Son” (Romans 5:10). We can date the death on Calvary within narrow limits. We cannot date the true Reconciliation; we read mysterious things of “a Lamb slain before the foundation of the world” (1 Peter 1:20). But when God would make plain His heart to guilty, lost man, He chooses to emphasise the word of the Cross, not “the word of the Manger.” Reconciliation is the first step back to peace. Christian speculation on the meaning of the Incarnation, and its possible relations to the whole creaturely universe, has been fruitful in noble thinking. But Christian preaching which is to touch even “the base things,” in the most unworthy sense of “base,” has always, as matter of experiment, found in the Cross a better help for souls, and the best appeal for the use of the winner of souls. At the Cross he has found his ποῦ στῶ, from which to lift the world.
II. “The Cross” is a summary of Gospel preaching.—Of course the interpretation of this phrase of Paul will depend on our whole reading of the entire New Testament. It is one of those single words into which is condensed, and in which is assumed, all the customary belief and teaching of a man’s lifetime. “How much do you mean by ‘the Cross,’ Paul?” “How much? Ask them which hear me constantly, ask them who read me most closely; behold, they know what I mean!” But at least it is manifest that Christ Himself made it central to His Gospel. The Gospel lies within an ellipse, of which these are the two foci (and the two are fundamentally one, the central Truth of a circle):
1. A cross for the Master;
2. A cross for each of His disciples. Midway, or thereabout, in the course of His three years’ ministry, in the few days of retirement to the neighbourhood of Cæsarea Philippi (Mark 8:27-38), for the first time did Christ speak definitely to His disciples about death as the issue of His ministry, though not as yet precisely specifying that this should be by crucifixion. The news, so startling to a Jew, that this should be at the hands of the revered and representative men of his nation, and so saddening to a loving disciple, Peter was for hushing back, and, indeed, would have had His Master entertain no such gloomy thoughts: “Be propitious to Thyself, Lord (Matthew 16:22, literally); be kinder to Thyself than that!” Quick and sharp the cry broke forth from Jesus, “Behind Me, Satan!” Had the Adversary himself retained Peter on his side, the disciple could have said nothing more thoroughly according to his mind. Such a suggestion—to delete the cross from the programme of the Saviour’s earthly sojourn and its work—was the very desire of the Devil. [It had been his proposition long before that the King should make a “short cut” to His kingdom, avoiding the cross, Matthew 4:8-10]. The voice was Peter’s voice; the thought was the thought of Satan. There must be a cross for the Master, or His work would go undone; there would be no Gospel of redemption. A few days after, as the little company, Jesus leading the way, the twelve “coming after Him,” were slowly moving through some village of the neighbourhood, the villagers stood gazing at the little company of strangers, and Jesus stopped, and calling them to Him, said “unto them all” (Mark 8:24; Luke 9:23), what Peter was not for hearing even for his Master, “Every man must take up his own cross”—as I do Mine; “daily”—as from the first I have done Mine. What Peter would not hear of for his Master, he and every disciple must hear of for himself, else there can be no discipleship. The whole Christian host, the Captain and the rank and file, all carry their cross. There is no Christian who does not. To himself and to his Lord the Gospel is “the word of the Cross.”
1 Corinthians 1:21. Seeking and finding God.
Introduction.—Some striking and suggestive turns of phraseology here:
1. “The world” is seeking “to know God.” Of the “believers” who are brought to the goal which “the world” misses, it is not said that they “know God,” but, what at first seems a very much smaller thing, that they are “saved.” “Is that all?” “Yes; and a very glorious attainment too. It is, in fact, the reward and goal of the world’s search.” “To know God” and “to be saved” were long before closely linked (John 17:3). “In knowledge of whom standeth [consisteth] our eternal life.” (I.e. as in the ancient collect, “Quem nosse vivere est.”)
2. The world seeks for God by the way of “wisdom.” They who find this salvation which is the knowledge of God, find Him by the path of “believing”; another path altogether, which nevertheless justifies itself as the highest wisdom (1 Corinthians 2:6) to those who are brought by it to the goal.
3. Are we to press the distinction between “in the wisdom of God” [taking the customarily accepted turn of thought as that of Paul] and “it pleased God”? Perhaps not too strongly or too far. Yet it is true that it is no “good pleasure” of God to see His world groping after the knowledge of Himself in vain. [Acts 17:26-28 is very explicit: “He hath made … that they should seek … if haply they might find Him.”] It may be His “wisdom” that they should not “by wisdom find Him out”; but He loves to be found and known and loved. We have, then,
I. The world’s inquiry.
II. God’s answer.
I.
1. The heart and the intellect of man do inquire after the knowledge of God.—Man’s mind and heart will not be forbidden to inquire after God. Of no avail to throw doors open—invitingly open—and to solicit exploration, in directions to which admittance is given by gates inscribed “To Science,” “To Music,” “To Philanthropy,” “To Truth and Right,” and to shut up Religion-gate, or to build up the door leading out towards the road “To God.” This fact in itself goes some way towards, and has someworth as, an answer to the question, “Is God knowable?” It were strange if the instinctive, or at least the ever-recurrent, inquiry of mind and heart, “O that I knew where I might find Him!” were a mere lying, deluding impulse, driving men to search endlessly after what could not be found, or after One who did not choose to be found; or if the idea of a God were only an ignis fatuus leading into mere bottomless bog and darkness. There can be no demonstration of Him, as there can be no demonstration that there is no God. But if the very constitution of man’s mind be not a contradiction and a lie, then the unceasing quest after God witnesses to a possibility of a real knowledge of Him. Not a complete one—that is out of the question, by universal consent; but a real, if incomplete, knowledge, sufficient, moreover, for regulative [though not merely regulative] purposes. [The child “knows” the father, even though the man’s life, and the particular character of its own parent, be in their whole round far beyond its present comprehension.
2. Man is morally a strange contradiction in this matter.—The natural heart is averse from God, “and desires not the knowledge of His ways” (Job 21:14); yet the famous sentence of Augustine is the summary of the universal human experience: “Tu excitas, ut laudare te delectet; quia fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.” (Conf., I. i. 1.) “The fool says in his heart ‘No God,’ ” but, as Bacon quaintly puts it: “It is not said, ‘The fool hath thought in his heart,’ so as he rather saith it by rote to himself, as that he would have, than that he can thoroughly believe it, and be persuaded of it; for none deny that there is a God, but those for whom it maketh that there were no God” (Essays, “Atheism”). It is a lesson which the “fool” must say over and over to himself, to be quite sure: “No God, No God, No God.” David never heard of an atheist by professed creed. [Another David, David Hume, avowed at the table of Baron d’Holbach, that he had never met with an atheist. “Allow me,” said his host, “to introduce you to thirteen,” indicating his guests.] Long ago Cicero pointed out that no nation of atheists had ever been found (De Nat. Deor., i. 16). It is another thing, and capable of ready explanation, that now and again peoples have been found, few in number and low down in the scale of civilisation, in whom the very idea of worship seemed almost or quite extinct, and their life and thinking reduced to the narrowness of the animal existence. Yet the vague sense of a supernatural is hardly ever absent, and the idea of a God can always be called out again in even the most imbruted and degraded. Every man is capable of it, as no noblest animal is. As matter of history, belief has ever been before disbelief; belief has seemed natural, disbelief and denial have been induced, and matters of education. Man “cries out after God, after the living God” (Psalms 74:2). “This inquiry and search after God is the origin of all religion, and the truth even of heathenism” (Luthardt). And yet man is a prodigal who “goeth into a far country,” where his Father may be out of sight and out of mind. It is the dislocation of God’s order seen everywhere in His creation; man, like the rest, is “out of joint,” as the result of a moral confusion in God’s “very good” world and its order.
3. The intellect starts on its quest on some four great lines of argument, four great highways, as it hopes, to the assurance that there is a God and to some knowledge of Him. A few, capable of such thinking, have argued that, because man can have the conception of a Perfect Being, there must be somewhere a reality corresponding to the conception; that there must be an Infinite Substance, of whom [or which] Time and Space must be “accidents”; that the ideas of the Infinite, the Absolute, the Eternal, must have their root and basis somewhere; “the thought of God implies the existence of God.” Often discredited, argued out of court, criticised or refined away, dismissed, buried, but with a wonderful resurrection power about it, the “No effect without a cause” argument has been a path along which a far larger class of minds—“practical people”—has set out to find God. Wider still in the field of its appeal, a broad way at which many—most—have gone in in their search, is the argument from Design, which is not really affected even if modern “evolutionary” science makes good all its claims, and turns every hypothesis into certainty; it would only be a revolutionising of our knowledge of the method, by which the Creator had effectuated and carried out His design; however the result has been brought about, He is still there, directing the processes, guiding the whole, from inception to conclusion. [Said Newton: “Hæcce compages solis, planetarum, et cometarum et stellarum, non nisi Consilio et dominio entis cujusdam potentis et intelligentis oriri potuit.”] “Every science without exception shows that the order and [concurrent] adaptation and harmonies of nature are such as to make the chances no less than infinite against the supposition of Chaos, or the absence of the designing intelligence.” Said Bonaparte in Egypt, after listening to the atheistic talk of a group of officers and savans, gathered at his tent door under the lustrous stars of a sub-tropical night, “All very well, gentlemen; but who made all these?” [There is even in the Sublime and the Beautiful in Nature, secured as so much of it is by the very same properties of matter—mechanical, chemical, or other—and their combinations, as secure the more utilitarian results of Design, a concurrent “design argument,” which leads many minds towards the Mind, towards God. (See this popularly accessible in Pres. Day Tracts, No. 20, R.T.S.] The common agreement of the vast majority of the race, account for it how men may, has always been to some a promising line of quest after God. “Where all the world have turned their steps, surely in that direction He is to be found.” So men have said, nor without justification.
4. The heart and the moral nature have contributed to all the inquiry. The heart, as well as the intellect, has had its own “wisdom” by which it has sought “to know God.” And its wisdom has been the wisest. It has, indeed, affected the search after Him, in every line of quest. Very much according as their heart and moral condition have been, so have the inquirers valued or disparaged the paths by which the reason sought after Him; so have they hoped or feared that the path might lead them to His throne; so have they been urged onward by desire or dragged forward with reluctance, towards the place where perchance He might reveal Himself to the searchers. But the moral nature of man reaches out groping hands after Him. The sense of wrong and right has looked eagerly if it might see a Supreme Lawgiver somewhere behind “Right” and “Wrong.” Conscience has intimated a moral world and its Ruler. The personal manhood has given supreme testimony to a Person with whom it may have fellowship, and the sense of dependence has reinforced the argument. “The same heart in man which trembles before an Authority above him yearns to be able to trust in Him.” And the inquiry of the heart after God is the more earnest when the sense of guilt, so strange, so unreasonable, so inexplicable, and yet so completely justifying itself to the man who passes through its experiences, presses home the question: “How may I find God? If I find Him, what kind of God shall I meet? Will there be any pity, any mercy, any pardon, any love? Can there be? Can He show any?” Man can give no satisfying peace. The sinner has no authority to speak peace to himself. Nature is not without analogies which may suggest forgiveness; she has healing herbs for wounds and diseases, occasioned by violations of her own laws. But the guilty heart wants to know the Lawgiver, and His mind towards itself and its sin.
5. Abundantly clear from the history of human thought, philosophical or theological, that by any of these roads, or by all combined, the race has never come to any satisfying certainty about God. “His eternal power and Godhead” have not always been understood by the things that are made (Romans 1:20). All these arguments have always been open to all, to study and use. They none of them depend upon Revelation. The wisest wisdom of this world has exercised itself upon them. Yet there is not one of them which is so demonstrative in its force as to compel assent or to give certainty. [There is not one which may not be frittered away by over-subtle criticism; not one from which the intellect cannot find a way of escape, if sore pressed by it in controversy.] There is not one which brings absolutely and infallibly to God. Phenomena and the Finite have not necessarily suggested an Infinite Subsistence. The unity of design is as consistent with the operation of one of two, or of one of many, workers left to do as he wills, as with the operation of One Only Worker. He must be very and sufficiently wise and powerful, but not of logical necessity all-wise, all-powerful. “Is number finite or infinite?” asked a believing French savant of some atheistic men of science. “Finite.” “Then the universe had a beginning.” But the argument does not of necessity shut men up to a Creator. Men of “wisdom” have, in fact, held an Eternal Matter, or a self-originated Universe. Endless have been the ancient and modern, Oriental and Western, variations upon the Pantheistic theory of God and the world. A personal God, who is Creator, has not always been a God of providential rule over, and care for, His creation. Polytheism has been the belief of large sections of the race in all ages. The inquiry of mere wisdom has always, in point of fact, left men without just views or settled convictions. “The various apprehensions of wise men,” said Cicero long ago, “justify the doubtings of sceptics, and it will be time enough to blame these when others agree, or any one has found the truth” (De Nat. Deor., i. 10, 11. See Note at end of Homily). “(The wisdom of this world) does not deny Divine existence, though a good many persons are coldly doubtful and ‘agnostic’ on the subject. But as in the first century any effective conception of God was wearing out of thoughtful minds [Emperors, not only like Augustus, but like Tiberius and Nero, were deified. On the other hand, all the vilest, meanest, Oriental or African gods and cults were being welcomed at Rome], … so now there are mere vague and high-sounding phrases about the Almighty current among the worldly-wise. He is a force—personal or impersonal, no one knows; where seated, why operative, how directed, none can tell. Or, He is a dream of Ineffable Beauty, and a fountain of Ineffable Pity; but how to reconcile this with the more severe aspects of nature and life baffles all the wisdom of the world. The sages are puzzled; the multitude know not what to think; and so ‘the world by wisdom knows not God’ ” (Dr. Donald Fraser). “Anima naturaliter Christiana,” cried the old apologist; but his word is both true and untrue. The anima Christiana truly finds reason enough to believe that in the design of its Maker it would “naturally” have known God. But there has been a blinding of the eye that looks for His traces; it cannot read aright the teachings of (say) nature. [It is “the pure in heart” now that alone “see God.” The Sir Galahads, not the Lancelots, see the Holy Grail.] In some lines of argument the evidence also has got confused; it cannot be read with absolute confidence; [the pieces of the puzzle have got jostled, and some perhaps are lost; it is not easy to discover the design which would lead to a Designer]. The altar “to an unknown God” in Athens is confessedly a symbolical fact in a representative city; man’s wisdom with all possible advantages avowing a result so incomplete as to be a defeat of any search “by wisdom” only. The wisest minds need God’s pilotage if they are to reach Himself. Science does not find man in man’s body, nor God in God’s world. The most modern thing is to take the confession of failure and wear it as the badge of superiority: “Agnostic, we!”
6. And this was “in the wisdom of God.”—The whole moral history of earth and mankind may probably be a great object-lesson in sin, its meaning, its mischief, its misery, and in grace, its manifold wisdom, and infinite fulness, for the teaching of other worlds and other races. The failure of mere fallen, darkened reason, even in its wisest, mightiest, most industrious examples, to “come at” God, “though He be not far from any one of us,” may not be the least instructive detail in this great Didactic of the story of our race. However that may be, with regard to “principalities and powers in heavenly places,” and however the question may be decided whether, if sin had not darkened man’s reason and perverted his heart, and confused and blurred some of the clearest evidence for a God, man might then “by wisdom” have known God, [if, indeed, he would then have had any need to search; man is seeking now a lost vision and knowledge]; as things are, this world-wide, age-long result all falls in with the great principle of 1 Corinthians 1:29; 1 Corinthians 1:31, that all pride of human intellect should be utterly excluded, made impossible by its utter failure to “find out God” (Job 11:7). The knowledge, when it comes, is to be through a “Salvation,” and salvation is for “those who believe.”
II. God’s answer.—
1. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in” the midst of Israel, so God has “lifted up” His Son upon a cross in the midst of mankind, groping with blind eyes, and outstretched hands, and yearning heart after Himself. The central Figure of history is Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God. The central Fact of the history of the Christ is the Cross. [The wise men from the East asked, “Where is He that is born King of the Jews?” Thirty years after Pilate gave the answer, putting upon the cross, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”] The world for ages had been asking, “How, where, may we find and know God? Is there a God to know and find?” The answer given by the “preaching” of Paul and his fellows and their successors is, “Look at Jesus Christ, and above all at Him crucified, and see and know God.”
2. All we need to know, perhaps all we can be made to know, about God, we hear from Jesus of Nazareth; indeed, more truly still, we see it in Jesus of Nazareth. “He that hath seen Him hath seen the Father.” [As we say of a boy whose father is unknown to an inquirer who, nevertheless, is acquainted with the lad, “Well, he is his father over again.”] What He said and did, and above all, the reasons, the principles of judgment and action, which underlie all He said and did,—we may transfer them all to God, and say, “Thus and thus does He act and judge.” His relation, e.g. to prayer and to sin, is exhibited in Christ. His requirement of faith in Himself in order to sight and health and blessing, is a revelation of God in this respect. We have a record, attested by historical evidence, sufficient when the nature of the case is taken into full account, of a Person and His character and teaching, starting with which we gain, at the least, a crucial and probative instance that there is a “supernatural” Order, which in that one case at least has broken in upon, and manifested itself in the midst of, the natural. The world of God and of things spiritual disclosed itself in Him, His life and work. It is an ascertained fact, and level to the apprehension of the simplest. And when, moreover, it is understood that the whole Written Word is the word of Christ the Revealer, then all its teachings about God become those of Christ. And, as matter of fact, the only certain and satisfying knowledge of God has been that which is given in the Word of God; the Written and the Incarnate are for this purpose one.
3. But Paul singles out again and again the Cross as the central point of the revelation. A knowledge of God is, in his view, given there which does not even come through the three years’ ministry. [When Moses pleaded, “Show me Thy glory,” and God made His goodness to pass before His servant, it was not even a partial refusal of his request. His “goodness,” “pardoning iniquity, transgression, and sin,” is His “glory” to sinners’ hearts (Exodus 33:18 to Exodus 34:7).] It is interesting in the last degree to hear the confession of even secular students of history that the cross of Christ is the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the modern; that all ancient history, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, all led up to it and converged upon it, whilst all the life of the modern world radiates from it; interesting to see how typical was the simple fact that in the very inscription on the cross were gathered up all the best history of preceding ages,—Hebrew, Greek, Latin—Religion, Wisdom, Law—Worship, Speculation, Government; profoundly interesting to see how Christianity meets the “Jew”-type, “requiring a sign” of the nearness of the Supernatural [“for outward, visible wonders”], and of the “Greek”-type, asking for the True and Beautiful and Good [“for inward completeness of system”]; meeting the one in the failure of his moral quest, and the other in the failure of his intellectual inquiry. But the “base” and “despised” and guilty want first and most urgently an answer for the conscience. And, once more it may be said, that the Cross has, age after age, given a satisfaction on this point found nowhere else. “Theories of the Atonement” have not always been consistent or wise, or duly considerate of all the facts; the analysis of the way in which the holy Justice of God was displayed at Calvary, as well as the Mercy, may sometimes have been mechanical and overdone. Much of all this has, moreover, been beyond the mass of seeking souls. And, apart from it all, by “believing” they have at the Cross come into a “salvation” which has meant “knowledge of God.” Their faith in Christ has been crowned by a gift of the Spirit, whose indwelling has restored more and more perfectly spiritual vision and judgment and power. They have been put by Him en rapport with spiritual things. There has come a “demonstration of the Spirit,” which has given evidence and proof and certainty. God reveals Himself to their “spirit.” They understand the reason of the failure of the search “by way of wisdom.” “Wise” or “foolish” after the mere intellectual standard of “the world,” the “saved” “know,” and they are saved at the Cross by “believing.”
NOTE.—Plato complains how hard it is to discover the Father of the universe. Socrates held it to be the greatest possible happiness to know the will of the gods, but did not believe this discoverable by principles of reason, and recommended divination [Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Chr. Belief, pp. 78, 79. He, with others, says further:] Men never found God as personal, as holy, as Creator. Plato’s God oscillates between Nature and a Divine Idea. Aristotle made Him personal, but limited by primordial matter, and only a Demiourgos. The utmost attained to by the race was an intermittently shining, half-obscure presentiment, but not that God is and can only be One.
1 Corinthians 1:30. Christ our Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification, Redemption.
I. Wisdom.—In two senses. Not even in Paul’s, or in God’s, could we be “wise” if there were no Christ to know, and unless He helped us to know Himself. He is the great Fact to know which is Wisdom. He gives the faculty for knowing, and the Spirit who exhibits Him to our awakened perception. He is Himself the Revealer, the Sum of all Revelation, and the giver of the “Spirit of wisdom and revelation” (Ephesians 1:12). Like the “world” at Corinth, the “world” to-day makes no account of such “wisdom.” But “knowledge” and “ignorance,” “wisdom” and “folly,” are all relative terms. Measured by one standard, placed in one set of circumstances, judged by one purpose, a man may be wise. With no change in himself, but with another set of conditions, in other circumstances, for another purpose, he may be a fool. To be really wise he must have the knowledge just then required and must know how to apply it. On a certain voyage, for example, so long as all went well, the ship’s surgeon was the wise man of the company. Besides his medical skill, he knew everything which could make the tedium of life on shipboard pass agreeably away. He easily carried the palm for popularity, and for being the universally clever man. The ship was wrecked on a desolate island. It became a question of finding shelter, of finding and cooking food, and here the many-sided man was utterly at fault. The common sailors, with their experimental knowledge of a thousand-and-one odds and ends of practical convenience, despised the doctor as a helpless hindrance. There was a curious reversal of the position. He had been a hero, a little god, on board; now he was a fool who wanted feeding and could find no food. The only wisdom known to the Book of God is Divine knowledge, and that is all bound up in Christ. No Christian will wisely undervalue mere natural wisdom or culture. The wide knowledge of the facts of the universe and their laws—Science; the wide mastery of the facts of the past and the great principles underlying them—History; the full-stored knowledge of the human mind, and of its laws—Philosophy; literary lore; the accumulations of the linguist; all these are noble and ennobling possessions, elevating, widening, as well as furnishing the mind which is enriched by them. All due honour even to the “wise man after the flesh.” All highest honour to such Wisdom when she becomes the handmaid of Divine truth. But all this is only fair-weather knowledge. The storm is coming, the wreck of the present order of things; the day of peril and of judgment, when the great question will be Eternal Life or Eternal Death. Even now all mere human knowledge is of things that “vanish away.” Knowledge and the objects of knowledge both are in ceaseless flux; a shifting, ever-changing knowledge of a shifting, ever-changing world, a partial knowledge perpetually under revision, correction, or enlargement. The one unchanging Fact is God in Christ. When, in “the new heavens and the new earth,” our science, history, literature, language, art, shall have been made obsolete, or shall have become mere curious memories, the knowledge of God will abide, true as ever, important as ever. “Can you tell me about God?” is a question which somehow the human mind cannot let alone. “Tell me about man, about myself. What is the meaning of the strange conflict always going on within me, between a higher and a lower self? What is the voice I sometimes seem to hear within me? and why is it so often a voice of self-reproach?” And then, when sin is understood, come the great questions: “Tell me whether there is any way of peace with myself and with God? Is He good? But that only makes me the more sadly wrong. Do not tell me what you hope, or think. Has He spoken? What are His terms of restoration?” Up to Paul’s day the wisest man of this world never answered such questions with any finality of satisfaction. The world’s wisdom has no final answer to-day. The very simplest Christian has an answer—an answer which, in ten thousand instances, has “worked” well in practical life. He believes he has reached certainty, where the wisest thinkers who disdain the help of Revelation go, groping and guessing, over the same wearisome ground of human ignorance; he certainly has learned to solve moral questions in practical living, as they are never solved elsewhere. He has learned a wisdom on these topics which will have abiding value in the dissolution and vanishing of all other knowledge besides, and will avail even at the bar of God. The Christian man’s theory of life and morals, his doctrine of God and of creaturely existence, are in fact a complete philosophy, which centres for him in Christ. All we can know, certainly all that we need to know, of God, for regulative ends, is exhibited in Christ. We hear from His lips a revelation of God; but we do not only listen, we look and see what God is, in His own holiness. Every great principle of His dealing with petitioners and with sin may be traced out in, and often lies upon the very surface of, the works of Christ. Said Augustine: “The works of Christ are themselves words of The Word.” The Bible is through the Spirit the revelation of Jesus Christ; and thus again He is “made to us wisdom” on the great topics of the inward moral schism, its meaning and origin and remedy. At His cross is the only definite word anywhere found about the pardon of guilt. And all the “wisdom” is one into which they have lived their way. It is verified knowledge; it is the knowledge of Life. God and Conscience and Sin—they understand these by the teaching of the Spirit of Christ. The way of peace with God, they know it, they have availed themselves of it—it is Christ’s work. Peace within themselves instead of the old moral discord—they have learned the secret of that also. And everything which is really wisdom, before God, and in the presence of eternity, they are being taught by the Spirit of Christ. The Revealer is Christ, the great Prophet of God.
II. This passes over into Righteousness and Sanctification.—We should once more have expected “power” to be linked with “wisdom.” But no, something better—“righteousness.”
1. These to be taken together.—They go together, in fact, as closely as in the grammar of the text. To a heart which learns Paul’s dialect they become almost a familiar two-worded unit of his customary thinking, as they are used in the vocabulary of Paul. Righteousness and Sanctification cover the whole career of the Christian life from pardon to glory. They are one work; one salvation; one glorious life. [Romans 8:30, “them He glorified,” began to be true from the moment of “them He justified.”] Not the same thing: the one the first step; the other the whole subsequent course. [In the illustrative language of Psalms 40:2, the Righteousness is located at the point where the foot is first set firmly upon the rocky brink of the “horrible pit”; Sanctification is the progressive departure farther and farther from the pit, with “goings” which are more and more “established.”] The one the work of pardoning, the other of the purifying, grace of God; in modern phraseology, blessings respectively objective and subjective; in old theological language, relative and real; imputed, imparted. The one restores His favour, the other His image. Apart from all technical phraseology, the fashion of which may change from teacher to teacher, from Church to Church, from century to century, the distinction is a real one and an inevitable one. The righteousness is the result of an act of pardon; the sanctification is the result of a process. It is one thing, and a simple one, to “justify” a man from his past debts; it is another and a longer, greater matter to cure him of thriftless or extravagant habits; yet both combine, and are needed, for complete help for the debtor. Something must be done for men, very much in men, if the work of redemption is to be accomplished. [The “Jews” were not only delivered from their captivity in Babylon; they were cured by it of the love of idolatry which had brought the captivity upon them. In the unvarying symbolism of Scripture the “blood” deals with guilt, the “water” with impurity. The “water and the blood” are the credentials of a complete Saviour (1 John 5:8).] A man who is “safe” in regard to the guilt of the past is “saved,” but in a very elementary sense only. That does but clear the way for a “salvation” which is larger, and complete: “Sanctification.” The man who is forgiven must go on to be holy.
2. Christ is our sanctification.—Not at all as though there were in the Gospel any vicarious holiness belonging to His work, such as will excuse the man who believes in Christ from seeking and working out a very real personal holiness. There was truth in the out-of-fashion and discredited phrase “Imputed Righteousness” (meaning “imputed holiness”). But it was only true to those who are aiming at realising their holiest in practice and attainment. Imperfection will cling where it brings no guilt. In Christ they are judged “holy” by a law which for His sake is interpreted in evangelical grace, and is reckoned as fulfilled by love. But God desires to have His “righteous” ones really “sanctified.” And the grace which sanctifies is secured for them, as pardon was, by the work of Christ. With Him was freely given the Spirit who makes them holy—Christ is the model and the means of their sanctification. It is the work of the Great Priest of the Gospel order.
III. Redemption is the crown of the work of Christ.—The word is here used in its highest and noblest sense. In a lower, narrower use it is the foundation of salvation; men could not be “saved,” if they had not been first “redeemed.” The redemption of the race is the basis and background of the salvation of the individual. But, looking forward, we see salvation fulfilled, culminating in redemption. Man is not only soul and spirit, “but body, soul, and spirit.” The body was redeemed by Christ [not Ephesians 5:23; but 1 Corinthians 6:20]; and as it has shared in the ruin and curse wrought by sin, so it will share in the deliverance wrought by Christ. [It is part of the “creature,” Romans 8:21-22.] It must wait longest for, and must receive latest of all, its part in the redemption of our complete manhood by Christ; but He wore it Himself, and still wears it, in a glory which is an earnest and pledge to the very body that He will not reckon His redemption complete until His people stand by His side before His Father [“Behold, I and children which God hath given Me” Isaiah 8:18; Hebrews 2:13], the last trace of the fell work of sin gone from every part, even the humblest, of their nature. The body will rise because He has risen, body and all. It will appear in glory, as, and because, He appears in glory. The vista of New Testament revelation leads up to a House in whose courts there move about, as if “to the manner born” [they have been “new-born” to it], a glorious Family, every one of whom is “conformed to the image of God’s Son,” “the firstborn amongst many brethren” (Romans 8:29). He is the pattern whose reproduction in them accounts for the strong “family-likeness” in them all. This is their “good” (Romans 8:28), up to which “all things have been working together”—Grace, Providence, even History in its worldwide, age-long course. The “redemption of the body” (Romans 8:23) will be the latest element in a redemptive process which at last puts every man who is in the new Race, whose Head is the Second Adam, beyond the reach of sin or death. As an Idea in the mind and heart of God—to speak humanly—the beginning of this whole Redemption is dateless, “before the world was.” Historically, its unfolding anticipated Calvary. But in a true sense the initial moment was when He cried in death, “It is finished!” And its completion will date from the moment when the Divine-human Redeemer looks for the first time upon the gathered, completed company of His own, and sees His own victory over Sin and its work, Death, realised in His people. The King and Deliverer will then cry once more, “Finished!” His people will say, “Thou art made unto us Redemption!”
HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS
1 Corinthians 1:20-21. Human Wisdom.
I. Challenged,
II. Confounded,
III. Superseded, by the Gospel.—[J. L.]
1 Corinthians 1:20. “Where,” indeed!
I. What have they not attempted?
II. What have they not promised?
III. What have they achieved?
IV. How are they brought to nought?—[J. L.]
1 Corinthians 1:30. Christ is made [cf. John 1:14 (another tense of same verb), the great primal wonder, of which this is one purpose and outcome. See Appended Note] Wisdom to us.
The true culture is the conforming of our manhood to the ideal in Christ. “Is it not a fact that a certain superficial refinement of manners, some acquaintance with the forms of good society, a little stock of ordinary phrases, and the fact of having seen or heard something of the best known products of literature, together with a fashionable style of dress, is, in the opinion of most, a sufficient claim to the possession of culture.… Only look at the simple-minded man, not possessing much outward culture, but animated by the Spirit of Christ, and by sound piety; what a sense of moral fitness, what correct tact, what sound judgment, especially as to the ethical value of any person or action, do we find gradually produced in him. In such a case the educating influence of Christianity is frequently shown in a most surprising way.” (Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, pp. 40, 43.)
1 Corinthians 1:30. Christ is made unto us Redemption.
I. By an atoning sacrifice (Galatians 3:13).
II. By infusing the spirit of a new life.
III. By abolishing death as the penalty of sin. There was evidently death, violent death, in the pre-Adamic geological ages. But the “violent” death may have been painless, for aught we know. If not, it may have been that there would have been no death for the crown of creation, man. Or if there had been death for him, it would have been only dissolution, natural, happy. Sin, indeed, turned dying into Death. It is Death because it is not only the penalty of sin, but it is the physical anticipation and adumbration of the true Death—“death that is death indeed”—the abandonment of the soul by God Who is its Life. Sin links fear with the thought of death, for to an innocent moral nature, one might as reasonably hope as fear, before the presence of the unknown future. Now in Christ death is once more only dying; decease, departure, falling asleep. The one thing which now the dying of a Christian is never called is “death.” He hath abolished death; it practically counts for nothing to His people. He has abolished its bondage of fear (Hebrews 2:15).
1 Corinthians 1:30. Christ made to us … Righteousness, Sanctification, Redemption.
Stanley brings out three pairs of correlatives.
I. Subjective.
1. Righteousness.
2. Holiness.
3. Freedom.
II. Objective.
1. Acquittal.
2. Consecration.
3. Deliverance.
APPENDED NOTES
1 Corinthians 1:21. Seeking God.—To be blessed by God, to know Him, and what He is, that is the battle of Jacob’s soul from sunset till the dawn of day. And this is our struggle—the struggle. Let any true man go down into the deeps of his own being, and answer us, what is the cry that comes from the most real part of his nature? Is it the cry for daily bread? Jacob asked for that in his first communion with God—preservation, safety. Is it even this, to be forgiven our sins? Jacob bad a sin to be forgiven, and in that most solemn moment of his existence he did not say a syllable about it. Or is it this, “Hallowed be Thy name”? No! Out of our frail and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the earthlier hours of our religion may be this, “Save my soul”; but in the most unearthly moments it is this, “Tell me Thy Name.” We move through a world of mystery; and the deepest question is, “What is the being that is ever near, sometimes felt, never seen? That which has haunted us from childhood, with a dream of something surpassingly fair, which has never yet been realised? That which sweeps through the soul at times as a desolation, like the blast from the wings of the Angel of Death, leaving us stricken and silent in our loneliness? That which has touched us in our tenderest point, and the flesh has quivered with agony, and our mortal affections have shrivelled up with pain? That which comes to us in aspirations of nobleness, and conceptions of superhuman excellence. Shall we say It or He? What is It? Who is He? Those anticipations of Immortality and God, what are they? Are they the mere throbbings of my own heart, heard and mistaken for a living something beside me? Are they the sound of my own wishes, echoing through the vast void of Nothingness? Or shall I still call them God, Father, Spirit, Love? A living Being within me or outside me? Tell me Thy Name, thou awful mystery of Loveliness! This is the struggle of all earnest life.”—F. W. Robertson, “Sermons,” i. 45, 46, “Jacob’s Wrestling.” Cf. “In Memoriam,” cxxiv., “The heart’s refusal of Atheism.”
1 Corinthians 1:21. The Foolishness of the Preaching.—If Christianity had been an “idyll” or a “pastoral,” the product of the simple peasant life and of the bright sky of Galilee, there is no reason why it should not have attracted a momentary interest in literary circles, although it certainly would have escaped from any more serious trial at the hands of statesmen than an unaffected indifference to its popularity. But what was the Gospel, as it met the eye and fell upon the ear of Roman Paganism? 1 Corinthians 1:23; 1 Corinthians 2:2. Here was a truth inextricably linked with other truths equally “foolish” in the apprehension of Pagan intellect, equally condemnatory of the moral degradation of Pagan life. In the preaching of the Apostles, Jesus Crucified confronted the intellectual cynicism, the social selfishness, and the sensualist degradation of the Pagan world. To its intellect He said, “I am the Truth”; He bade its proud self-confidence bow before His intellectual Royalty. To its selfish, heartless society, careful only for bread and amusement, careless of the agonies which gave interest to the amphitheatre, He said, “A new commandment,” etc. (John 13:34). Disinterested love of slaves, of barbarians, of political enemies, of social rivals, love of man as man, was to be a test of true discipleship. And to the sensuality, so gross, and yet often so polished, which was the very law of individual Pagan life, He said, “If any man will come after Me,” etc. (Matthew 16:24); “If thine eye offend thee,” etc. (Matthew 18:9). Sensuality was to be dethroned, not by the negative action of a prudential abstinence from indulgence, but by the strong positive force of self-mortification. Was such a doctrine likely, of its own weight and without any assistance from on high, to win its way to acceptance? Is it not certain that debased souls are so far from aspiring naturally toward that which is holy, elevated, and pure, that they feel toward it only hatred and repulsion? Certainly, Rome was unsatisfied with her old national idolatries; but if she turned her eyes toward the East, it was not to welcome the religion of Jesus, but the impure rites of Isis and Serapis, of Mithra and Astarte. The Gospel came to her unbidden, in obedience to no assignable attraction in Roman society, but simply in virtue of its own expansive, world-entrancing force. Certainly, Christianity answered to the moral wants of the world, as it really answers at this moment to the true moral wants of all human beings, however unbelieving or immoral they may be. The question is, whether the world so clearly recognised its real wants as forthwith to embrace Christianity? The Physician was there; but did the patient know the nature of his own malady sufficiently well not to view the presence of the Physician as an intrusion? Was it likely that the old Roman society, with its intellectual pride, its social heartlessness, and its unbounded personal self-indulgence, should be enthusiastically in love with a religion which made intellectual submission, social unselfishness, and personal mortification, its very fundamental laws? The history of the three first centuries is the answer to that question. The kingdom of God was no sooner set up … than it found itself surrounded by all that combines to make the progress of a doctrine or of a system impossible. The thinkers were opposed to it; they denounced it as a dream of folly. [He quotes Tacit., Ann., XV. 44, “Exitiabilis superstitio”; Suetonius, Nero, xvi., “Superstitio nova et malefica”; Celsus’ comparison of the worship of Christ with the Egyptian worship of cats, crocodiles, etc.] The habits and passions of the people were opposed to it; it threatened somewhat rudely to interfere with them. There were venerable institutions, coming down from a distant antiquity, and gathering round them the stable and thoughtful elements of society; these were opposed to it, as to an audacious innovation, as well as from an instinctive perception that it might modify or destroy themselves. National feeling was opposed to it; it flattered no national self-love; it was to be the home of human kind; it was to embrace the world; and as yet the nation was the highest conception of associated life to which humanity had reached. Nay, religious feeling itself was opposed to it; for religious feeling had been enslaved by ancient falsehoods. There were worships, priesthoods, beliefs, in long-established possession; and they were not likely to yield without a struggle … It was a time when the whole administrative power of the empire was steadily concentrated upon the extinction of the Name of Christ What were then, to a human eye, the prospects of the Kingdom of God? It had no allies, like the sword of the Mohammedan, or like the congenial mysticism which welcomed the Buddhist, or like the politicians who strove to uphold the falling Paganism of Rome. It found no countenance even in the Stoic moralists; they were indeed amongst its fiercest enemies. [In foot-note he adds, “Who can marvel at its instinctive hatred of a religion, which proclaimed a higher code of Ethics than its own, and which, moreover, possessed the secret of teaching that code practically to all classes of mankind? (See next Appended Note, a.)] If … it ever was identified by Pagan opinion with the cœtus illioiti, the collegia illicita, with the moral clubs of the imperial epoch, this would only have rendered it more than ever an object of suspicion to the government. Between the new doctrine and the old Paganism there was a deadly feud.”—Liddon, “Bampton Lectures,” III. iii. 3 (β).
a. Appended Note to above: “Most men, being incapable of understanding logical arguments concerning truth, need instruction through parables; thus those who are called Christians derive their faith from the parables of their Master. They sometimes act, however, like those who follow true philosophy. There are some among them who, in their zeal to control themselves, and to live honourably, have succeeded in becoming in nothing inferior to true philosophers.”—Galen (the physician); from a lost work on Plato. Quoted in Luthardt.
1 Corinthians 1:23. The Cross and its Victory.—To the ancient world the cross was the symbol of shame; to us it is our joy, our comfort, and our boast. There is nothing which can possibly be more opposed to all our natural ideas than the cross. We can understand a God of majesty; we can comprehend a manifestation of God in the great interests of humanity; but nothing could be more directly opposed to our every notion than that the death on the cross should be His supreme manifestation. “To the Jews a stumbling-block, to the Greeks foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:23). And so it is still. And yet it was just the preaching of the Cross that conquered the world. In proportion as concessions are made to the repugnance of the natural reason to the cross is Christianity weakened and its efficacy lessened. It is only the Christianity of the cross which is the victory over the world. And it has conquered. A few years since a drawing representing the Crucified was found upon the walls of the ancient palace of the Cæsars in Rome. The rude sketch speaks to us from the midst of the times of the struggle between Christianity and heathenism, and is a memorial of the manner in which the minds of men were then stirred. Some heathen servant of the emperor is taunting his Christian fellow-servant with this contemptuous sign. The relic belongs to about the year 200, and is by far the most ancient crucifix we know of. But this … is an ironical one. It is a caricature of Christ, before which a Christian stands worshipping, and it bears the inscription, “Alexamenos”—the name of the derided Christian—“worshipping his God.” We see that the Crucified Saviour and the preaching of the cross were the scorn of the world; and yet this conquered the world. In the great struggle between heathenism and Christianity the cross was the sign of victory. Whether the story is true or not that Constantine, before his decisive battle with Maxentius, saw in the clouds of heaven the appearance of a cross, with the inscription, “By this shalt thou conquer,” even if it is a fiction, it is yet truth in the form of fiction, for the cross was the victorious power, and such it will remain. If Christianity is to conquer the world, it will only do so as the preaching of the Cross, and not by concessions to the natural reason. It is contrary to all natural logic that God should humble Himself to such an extremity. That death upon the tree of shame should be His supreme revelation is contrary to all the logic of the natural reason. But it is the logic of love; and love can hold its own against the logic of the mere understanding, for it has on its side the higher logic of truth.—Luthardt, “Saving Truths,” 136–8.
[The caricature referred to, known as the Graffito, was on the plaster of the wall of one of the guard-rooms of the Pretorians, the body-guard, the household troops, of the Emperor, in the ruins of the Imperial Palace on the Palatine. The head of the Crucified One is probably that of an ass. (It was a common popular slander that the Christians worshipped an ass.) The worshipper is most likely a Pretorian, like the draughtsman of the caricature. A readily accessible engraving and description of the Graffito may be found in “Italian Pictures” (p. 55), Religious Tract Society, Pen-and-Pencil Series.]
1 Corinthians 1:23. The Victory of the Cross.—Everything seemed to conspire to render its victory utterly impossible. Its origin was against it; it seemed but a Jewish sect. Its advocates and followers had nothing attractive about them, and belonged for the most part to the lower and uneducated classes. Its doctrine was a “stumbling block”; it appeared a most vexatious “foolishness.” Its reverence for God, too, was suspected, for the Christians, using no images of the gods, were taken for atheists. The worst and most immoral things were said of its mysterious rites. Public opinion was prejudiced against them, philosophy assailed Christianity with intellectual weapons, whilst the authorities opposed it with brute force. And yet it triumphed. So early as the reign of Nero it was, as Tacitus indignantly asserts, very widely diffused. (Multitudo ingens, Ann., xv. 44.) Nor did it avail to arrest its progress, that Nero, in order to divert from himself the guilt of the great conflagration of Rome, executed vast numbers of Christians; not so much, as Tacitus says, because they were guilty of this crime, as because they were hated by the whole human race. (Tac., ut supra.) Nevertheless, Christianity continued to spread. An interesting letter of the younger Pliny, governor of Bithynia, to his friend the Emperor Trajan, written about seventy years after the death of Christ, is still extant, distinctly pourtraying the state of the Christian cause at that time in the places which had been the scenes of St. Paul’s and St. John’s ministries. “This superstition,” writes Pliny (Epp. v. 97), “has spread on all sides, in towns, in villages, and in the country; the temples of our gods stand deserted, and sacrifices have now for a long time ceased to be offered. I arrested a few girls called deaconesses, and put them to the torture, but discovered nothing besides excessive and pernicious superstition.” … And a century later, Tertullian, in his Apology (c. 37), could say to the heathen, “We are but of yesterday, and yet we have taken possession of your whole country—towns, islands, the camp, the palace, the senate, the forum; we have left you only the temples!” Nor could the great persecutions—of which ten may be enumerated—ever hanging over the Christians arrest the triumphs of Christianity. No age, no sex, was spared; all the strength of the empire was put into requisition; certain of the most energetic of the emperors, such as Decius and Diocletian, considered it their special duty to root out Christianity from the world, because the very existence of the Roman Empire depended upon its extirpation. But the arm of the executioner failed before the fidelity of the Christians. Diocletian was obliged to give up his work; he retired from the stage, but Christianity remained, and in the person of Constantine ascended the imperial throne, and has since governed, even externally, the Roman world.—Luthardt, “Fundamental Truths,” 267–9.
1 Corinthians 1:23. The Victory of the Cross over Heathenism.—“As Heine puts it, while the gods of Greece were assembled at the feast of the immortals, and Hebe tripped round with her goblets of pleasantest nectar, and infinite laughter rang round the happy banqueting board, and the feast was at its fullest, the music at its sweetest, suddenly there came gasping towards them a pale Jew, dripping with blood; a crown of thorns on His head, bearing a great cross of wood on His shoulder; and He cast the cross on the high table of the gods, so that the golden goblets trembled and fell, and the gods grew dumb and pale, and ever paler, till they melted in utter mist.”—From “A Lay Sermon” by Gerald Massey.
1 Corinthians 1:30. Christ … Wisdom to us.—“Verse 30, viewed apart from its connection, is a great text, and great in the greatness of its mystery. Became, not was made. This verb denotes a transition from one state or mode of subsistence to another, e.g. ‘the Word became flesh,’ i.e. being God, the Word passed into a mode of subsistence in which He was man as well as God. Similarly we are said (2 Corinthians 5:21) to ‘become the righteousness of God in Christ,’ i.e. to pass from our low estate of sinful humiliation to the high level of God’s perfect righteousness. Thus, according to 1 Corinthians 1:30, the Son of God, when He entered into human nature, entered also into the Divine scheme of wisdom, and translated it into life. For unquestionably the substance of that scheme of wisdom was the union of the two natures in the Person of God’s Son, together with the manifold benefits flowing from that union. Of this hidden counsel of redemption, which was willed and planned before Creation itself, Jesus Christ was in His Person the embodiment, and in all that He wrought and suffered, the historical manifestation and pleroma. Thus He became wisdom from God; not ‘became from God’; the order of the Greek is against that view. Again, as the Father in heaven was the first cause or fountain of this wisdom, … so Christ on earth may be regarded in His work as a cistern gradually filling with this wisdom, and after His ascension overflowing with it from heaven into the larger cistern of His Church below. This overflow commenced on the Day of Pentecost. Thus He became wisdom to us from God, i.e. wisdom from God for us to receive. But this abstract counsel or wisdom of the Father, which was planned by Him before the ages were made, and which in the sphere of time became concrete in the Incarnate Son, what was it? What it more precisely was, both in its embodiment in Christ and in its relation to us men, is further defined in three heads. The eternal purpose is drawn out of its secret depths, so to speak, like a telescope of three lenses, in three evolutions, each in its own place:
1. Righteousness;
2. Sanctification;
3. Redemption.
1. Righteousness of God the Father imputed, not the righteousness of Christ, for that is nowhere in the New Testament said to be imputed. It is the proper fruit of Christ’s obedience unto death, and the imputatation of it to believers on earth approaches by degrees to assimilation precisely as progress is made in the inner life of sanctification. Indeed, the “both and” indicates this mutual correlation. Of the absolute Righteousness God is the giver because of Christ’s meritorious Passion, and in it the saints, after the Resurrection, are set indefectible. The last link in this threefold chain of wisdom is redemption, i.e. of the body together with the soul and spirit in the resurrection of the saints at the Parousia. In brief, the whole means this: God—He alone is the first and efficient cause of your union and fellowship with Him who became flesh and translated into life and made actual in time the ideal plan of eternity, mediating for us the threefold benefit of that Divine counsel, righteousness imputed, holiness imparted, redemption consummated.—Evans, “Speaker.”