CRITICAL NOTES
1 Corinthians 15:20. Hath.—Emphasis here, not on “now” or “Christ.” Over against their doubts, and speculations, and “impossibilities,” Paul sets the one conclusive fact. Firstfruits.—Read in the light of Romans 11:16; James 1:18; Revelation 14:4; Matthew 27:52-53. With a variant figure the thought is in Colossians 1:18; Revelation 1:5.
1 Corinthians 15:20-23. By man … by man.—Resurrection actually comes “by man”; we may almost say must so come, and so He became man. He the Judge also because “the Son of Man” (John 5:27). All … All.—How wide is the second “all”? Is the verse to read,
(1) “All (men) … (we believers) all”? Not exegetically very natural. Is it
(2) “(We believers) all … (we believers) all”? True; but the first member of the sentence is narrower than the fact, and scarcely worthy of the race-wide view here taken of the two Adams and their connected “posterities.” Urged, from Augustine downwards, that Paul’s argument throughout has only those “in Christ” in view [true]; that the Resurrection existence of these out of Him is never called “life” [true]; also that 1 Corinthians 15:23 limits the argument to believers. The Greek fathers [Ellicott] read 1 Corinthians 15:22 of physical quickening, and make the verse,
(3) “All (men) … all (men)”; and bring in the limitation of the scope at 1 Corinthians 15:23. [One obvious qualification of “all die” is found in 1 Thessalonians 4:17.] [“The great resurrection chapter is, as it were, an expansion of the Lord’s own word, ‘Because I live, ye shall live also’ ” (Pope).] See Homiletic Analysis. The resurrection of the unsaved is asserted, on the highest authority, in John 5:28-29.
1 Corinthians 15:23. Order.—Quite another detail as to “order” in the Resurrection is revealed in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17: “first … then.” Order here is “troop.” The race defiles before us, an army in three divisions: First Division—The Lord (Hebrews 12:2); Second Division—The Church of the Redeemed, some following Him already nearly two millenniums in the rear; Third Division—The rest of mankind (Evans). At His coming.—Note the (exegetical) comma. See Appended Note.
1 Corinthians 15:24. The end.—Derived perhaps from Christ’s words, reported in Matthew 24:13. “What [this] may signify cannot be determined; alii alia; in all likelihood ‘the end’ is its own [and only] interpreter.” So, wisely, Evans, who adds, with most: “It seems probable that the kingship will be handed over by the Incarnate Son to Him who is God and Father; but the kingdom of His own founding, in its contents of citizens, … Philippians 3:10, will continue; so that ‘His kingdom shall have no end’ (Daniel 7:13-14).” “The only expression about which there may reasonably be some doubt is kingdom. That it is more inclusive than the ‘regnum gratiœ’ in its ordinary acceptance, and that it may have some reference to the millennial kingdom, is probably to be inferred from the wide horizon of this holy revelation. This kingdom the Eternal Son … delivers up to the Eternal Father, not as though He were Himself thereby divested of the kingdom, but as a sharer in it for evermore.” (Ellicott.) “Then” viz. “when,.… (or, again) when.” All the consecrated words re the Second Advent are found in 2 Thessalonians 1:7; 2 Thessalonians 2:17: Parousia, Epiphany, Apocalypse. The kingdom.— Revelation 19:15-16. Put down.—, “abolished,” as in 2 Timothy 1:10 (A.V.). “Not total destruction, but absolute subjugation.” Favourite word of Paul’s; nine times in this Epistle, with various shades of the one meaning: “to reduce to such practical unimportance, or non-importance, that it may be left out of the account altogether.” Rule, authority, power.—Abstract, for personal concretes, as in Ephesians 1:21; Ephesians 3:10; Ephesians 6:13; Colossians 1:16; Romans 8:38. He.—Viz. Christ.
1 Corinthians 15:25. He … He.—Christ … the Father (1 Corinthians 15:27, end).
1 Corinthians 15:26.—Observe the present tense of a dateless event that is, as it were, seen to be happening.
1 Corinthians 15:27.—Combine in exposition Psalms 2:6-9; Psalms 8:6; (Hebrews 2:8); Psalms 110:1.; (Hebrews 1:13); Matthew 22:44; Acts 2:34-35; (Psalms 45:6). Observe the margin, “shall have said,”—a solemn announcement to the listening world, by God Himself, parallel to that of Pa. 1 Corinthians 2:7-8, the “decree” of the Son’s investiture with His mediatorial royalty.
1 Corinthians 15:28. All in all.—Cf. Colossians 3:11, an anticipatory, suggestive fulfilment of the idea.
1 Corinthians 15:29.—Very obscure to us; obviously well known to, and understood by, the Corinthians. An ad homines argument entirely. Q.d. “You deny or question the resurrection; I take you, then, on the ground of your own practice: why, then, do you baptize?” etc. There is some patristic tradition, but of uncertain value even to the Fathers who report it, of a practice of baptizing a “representative” of a man who, as yet only a catechumen, had died without baptism, lest he should for want of it be lost. [Some say putting the living man under the bed, and letting him give answers to the usual questions, addressed to the corpse!] A question is raised whether this very expression of Paul’s did not in some cases occasion such a practice. [Certainly no fair homiletic use is to be made of these words in any sense of appealing to the survivors in a Church to come forward and seek a new baptism of the Spirit, that they may fill the place, and do the work, of some who have died.]
1 Corinthians 15:30.—Another ad hominem (or ab homine) argument, but this time of abiding, real value. We.—Primarily the apostles (2 Corinthians 1:8-10; 2 Corinthians 4:10, etc.); but all Christians, sooner or later, had a taste of peril.
1 Corinthians 15:31. Your rejoicing.—As text. Q.d. “I say emphatically, brethren—and to you of whom I so constantly make my boast, should I be likely to say anything but what is the simple fact? You will believe me—I die daily.”
1 Corinthians 15:32. After the manner of men.—I.e. “With no better hopes or prospect of the future, than ‘natural’ men, and men without even the Gospel revelation, have when they endure risk, and face conflict and danger.” The converse case is put in 1 Corinthians 15:58, “Wherefore,” i.e. “Seeing you have such hopes,” etc. Fought with beasts.—Cf. the unrecorded, perhaps identical, peril of 2 Corinthians 1:8. All one word in Greek; no specialising of literal “beasts,” such as the English suggests: “I was like a beast-fighting gladiator in an amphitheatre.” [Precisely similar idealising of the fact in Psalms 22:11-13. Also, Ignatius writes of his guards (“leopards,” he calls them): “All the way from Syria to Rome (on his way to martyrdom) did I beast-fight by land and sea.”] Observe the varying connection by punctuation in A.V. and; either good, A.V. better. Quotation from Isaiah 22:13, of Jerusalem profligacy when Sennacherib was at hand.
1 Corinthians 15:33.—Perhaps the fall into immorality in the Church at Corinth had been facilitated by a weakened faith in the Resurrection.
1 Corinthians 15:34. “Arouse yourselves,” as if from the sleep after the orgies of Isaiah 22:13, “and show yourselves, and bear yourselves, righteously.” Well expounded by 1 Thessalonians 5:2-8. “I speak this, in order to your shaming.” (So 1 Corinthians 6:5.)
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 15:20-34
The Divine Goal of Creation History.
I. Contrasts.—This section divides at 1 Corinthians 15:29. In the one half and in the other we are at two levels, in two worlds. [Cf. Raphael’s “Transfiguration,” where literal truth is sacrificed to the higher truth of the nearness and close relation between the upper, mountain-top world of calm, light, heaven, glory, and the lower world of scoffing Pharisees, bewildered disciples, and demon-possessed humanity.] In 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 we are amongst the most sublime disclosures of all the Christian Scriptures—disclosures which with their very excess of glory almost cease to disclose anything. They are sublime almost to being obscure. The horizon is so bright, and the facts are so far away and so low down towards it, that we can scarcely make out anything. We hear such words as 1 Corinthians 15:28; we repeat the words; but we can scarcely do more than let our hearts ponder, and reverently and soberly imagine; we can make nothing precise. Paul is borne up and along in soaring flights of confident strength, where we can hardly follow, even with our eyes. On the other hand, in 1 Corinthians 15:29-34, we are on a very earthly level indeed. There is mystery here, but only such as wraps around an obscure, superstitious practice of a few half Christianised Corinthians. The rest is plain enough! A Paul in the midst of men who are like the very “beasts” of the amphitheatre. Corinthians sinking into a drunken sleep of unrighteousness, from which he seeks to “awaken” them to “righteousness,” or, at the least, to “shame.” [Such revelations to be first given to the world in a letter to such “Christians”! “Kind to the unthankful and to the evil” indeed (Luke 6:35).] So near, also, are the two worlds always. The evil closely enfolds the holy. Or is it the holy which enfolds the evil? The salt is—just where it is wanted—in the midst of what but for it would be corruption. We live in both worlds. In the seclusion of the mountain-top sometimes; oftener at the mountain-foot amongst the enemies and the demons, or in the arena amongst the beasts. Happy if the memories of the upper level are our strength down on the lower. Happy if such truths as are in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 may keep our souls from the infection of “evil communications,” or from the “sleep” of the intoxication of scepticism or sin. So, again, are the two worlds near together, the two levels not very remote, in the inner life of the soul. Glorious revelations; miserable superstitions. Soaring hopes of victories; battles for very life with the “beast” within our nature. Standing by the side of our Lord, with our foot placed where His has first been, on the neck of some foe of our soul’s Life; sinking into the perilous, criminal sloth or torpor induced by an atmosphere of “evil communications.” And thus we knit together the two ends of the paragraph. “Now is Christ risen.” Spite of all the theorisers and speculators and keen creators of “insuperable” difficulties, the fact is sure. Paul stands by the slothful, sleeping, drunken-souled Corinthians, and shouts his cry into the drowsy ear: “Christ is risen! Do ye arise; awake; shake off your sleep; arouse yourselves and be righteous! Righteous! Why you are past shaming. You have not the knowledge of God.” I.e. they are back again in, and of, the “world which knew not God” (1 Corinthians 1:21). If Regeneration was an upward development, there has now been Degeneration; these men who “knew God” were only a variation wrought and sustained by Grace. They have now sinned against grace; in them nature has “reverted to type.” “You have not the knowledge of God.” [Observe the close connection between unrighteousness and the loss of the knowledge of God. Cf. Romans 1:18-23.]
II. Christ.—Like the Russians and Greeks on Easter morning, Paul is ready to go up and down, saying with a holy cheerfulness of salutation to every fellow-Christian, “Brother, now is Christ risen!” This is a perpetual Easter-morning age for the Church of the Risen Christ. Every Christian may look every other in the face with the glad cry, “He is risen.” But why should not He be simply treated as an isolated case? Why should we not believe in His rising, whilst disbelieving or doubting any other, or our own?
1. Because He is another “Adam”—The race is not made up of aggregated units. There is a solidarity in the history and fortunes of mankind. Contrast the angels. So far as we know, they are each one an independent creation; probably they have been contemporaries in age from the first; each living a natural life complete within itself, dependent only upon God. But any one generation of mankind owes life to the preceding, and these to another preceding them, and so on till “Adam” [= Adam + Eve] is reached. The angels are an aggregate of individuals only. Each might stand or fall alone. The human race is a unity; it is a tree, where branch springs out of branch in periodic succession. [It is a Vine, a wild vine.] The old theologians called this a federal principle. There is a law of dealing with great Unities in God’s administration of His rule over our race. “Abraham” means for some purposes Abraham and his descendants; “Christ” means Christ and His people; Adam stood for himself and mankind. And so the authorised, official, inspired, “prophetic” exposition of history here given makes it clear that the human race may be summarised in two “Adams.” Or, to change the aspect of the truth, without affecting its substance, there are two Mankinds, each with its Adam, each with its close-knit unity and continuity of life, each with its solidarity of history and fortunes. But the link which forms the unity is in the one case a physical derivation and succession, in the other a spiritual unity and succession. [A real sense in which the Christians of any one age are the descendants of, and owe their life to, those of the next, and all, preceding.] The first, dying Adam involved a race of natural descendants in his death—in all its senses. The Risen Adam includes in His resurrection victory another race in whom His Spirit is the link of continuous, corporate life, quickening even their “mortal bodies.” No man stands or falls alone; isolation, independence, is not the “law” of the history of Humanity. The Christ did not die or rise alone; that is not the law of the new Humanity, of which he is the new “Adam.” To change the figure again,
2. Because He is the Firstfruits of the harvest of rising humanity.—“Sown” through long ages, in all nooks and corners of earth’s field. The field is full of its human seed. The seed is waiting for the touch of the Eternal Springtide. The call of Spring yearly awakens sleeping Nature into bud, and flower, and fruit, and harvest. That other Spring shall come with a “trumpet” call,—
[“Tuba mirum spargens sonum,
Per sepulchra regionum”],—
and every buried seed shall start forth into perfect and eternally mature life. The “firstfruits” says that there is a harvest behind; it promises a harvest; it pledges a harvest; it “samples” the following harvest; the offering of the firstfruits consecrates the coming harvest. [As in another application, the firstfruits of the week, the Sunday, is no quittance paid to God that then we may claim and use the six remaining for ourselves, as if our own. The firstfruits of the week thus given to Him acknowledge that all the days are His, all to be spent as He will approve, whilst He lends us six and keeps only one exclusively for Himself.]
3. Captain of a host.—
(1) Hebrews 2:10 [which is in closest connection with the quotation here given of Psalms 8:6] makes the “perfection” of our “Captain” to lie just here, that He is not isolated as He leads the host, but has been partaker with them of “flesh and blood” and “sufferings.” Else would they who follow look forward “where their Chief precedes them” with a feeling that the Captain knew nothing of the life of the common soldier, that He alone of all the great “sacramental host” had never known the fighting and the “roughing” of their lot. Here the “partaking” looks forward into the future. The great host defiles in glorious resurrection review; each company and rank passes in its “order” before the throne of God. (See the review illustration followed somewhat further in the Homiletic Analysis of whole chapter.)
(2) If no resurrection, it has been seen (1 Corinthians 15:16-19) that, hoping to be partakers with Christ, we wake up to find ourselves partakers of nothing! No. “Now is Christ risen,” and we are partakers of His victory. Our resurrection is part of our victory. We rise, that so in that fact the finishing stroke may be given to the dominion of death over our redeemed human nature. A mortal body was the last fetter of death, the last token of our sometime bondage. We rise, that so the last fetter may be stricken off. No part of our nature, spirit, soul, body, that is not delivered. It is part of His victory. We now dare, every one of us, to put our foot on the neck of Goliath, when our David has first brought him down, and planted His victorious foot upon our foe and His. This particular victory is part of a larger victory, by which is regained a lost lordship belonging to mankind. In Psalms 8:6 the opened eye of the prophet sees into the heart of things—into the inner secret of the order of Creation as it existed in the mind of the Creator. The geological history of the earth leads up to an earth fitted to be man’s home. A palæontological history can be made out, whether it be an ideal sequence only, or an historical and physical one, leading up to man. And when the home was ready, and the tenant was ready, the investiture of occupancy ran, “Let them have dominion,” etc. (Genesis 1:8). Thus he who was the goal of all the earliest history, the climax (and indeed the summation) of all the series of animate creaturely structures, the crown of creation, was also its King. [Perhaps also its High Priest, voicing the praise, the thanksgiving, the prayers, of the mute, unintelligent creation, which found in Him a brain and a heart and a voice.] Yet even this royalty is not the thought of God in its furthest reach. We speak of ascending from this to a higher. Yet it would be the truer order to work backwards and downwards, from the higher to this; as God did. We ascend from the earliest creature-life to man, the ruler of all; nor do we stop there, but go forward and upward to the Son of Man. But though we reverently so shape our thought, God began there, began with Him. He is the mediation between God and the creature, between Spirit and Matter. He is the Link. “In Him all things were created.” Man’s original royalty was but the adumbration of His. As the lower creatures had shadowed Man forth, so did he shadow the Son forth. After all, he was not the last link, but the last but one, in the chain which led up from some quasi-eozoic form to the Incarnate Son. [The Gospel is Creation’s order over again. “All things man’s. Man is Christ’s. Christ is God’s.”] But sin entered. Creation’s course had so far gone true and straight to man; now, when it should have gone true and straight through him to God, it swerved aside and was sinfully deflected. The race “missed its mark.” The race no longer rose to the Son; the Son’s garment of royalty no longer descended on man. But, ever since, slowly, piecemeal, has the lost dominion, the forfeited position, been recovered by all those who are “in” the Second Adam. The first note of the recovered victory is in the Protevangelion (Genesis 3:15); fulfilled most gloriously in the Wilderness and the Garden and at Calvary, no doubt; yet even there only anticipating the last crowning triumph of a long series of triumphs for our Captain. And with a heel sore wounded, very often does each Christian soldier step upon his foe and go on to conquer, with the heartening word ringing in his ears, “God shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly” (Romans 16:20). There is an enemy within him, whose dominion is broken [in closest connection with his Lord’s resurrection once more (Romans 6:10-11)]: “Sin shall not have dominion over you” (ib. 1 Corinthians 15:14). The very world with all its trials, difficulties, opposition, is a subject thing to them who are in the Man Who has never lost, who has more abundantly fulfilled, the Royalty of Man. “In jeopardy every hour;” “dying daily,” yet “all things work together for good” to men. The world is “under their feet.” [Nor need there be hesitation in seeing more than merely the relics of the original dominion, but a real mediatorially-recovered dominion, in the growing mastery wielded by man over the physical forces of the natural world, subjecting all to his daily service. Certainly in the power of Christ over even His pre-resurrection body, making it vanish from amongst His foes or walk upon the waters,—a power which was once even communicated to Peter,—we get a little opening, giving us largest views into a world of vast, dim possibilities of the power of man’s spirit, itself enfranchised from the dominion of sin, over even the material world.] There is a “last enemy” for him, as for the race,—Death. “Death is his” (1 Corinthians 3:22) already; it comes to him conquered by his Captain, and made to run on his Captain’s errand, and bear his Captain’s summons to him to a more glorious life. He is delivered from the bondage to its fear: the fear is “put under his feet”; when at last he meets it, he finds that he has but to deal with a “stingless” serpent, on whose head he can “put his foot” boldly. He is meeting nothing but the Shadow of a great Name, the Shadow of a great Dread, a thing whose substantial power is “abolished,” “destroyed.” And this detailed victory of His dying people, in succession, is part of His own (cf. Luke 10:18), which by-and-by shall be consummated in one grand public demonstration of His triumph, in the day when even the very bodies of His people have death’s yoke struck off and death itself underfoot. “All things under His feet.”
III. Consummation.—What is this “end” and the subjection of even the “Son Himself”? Answer as one did who was asked, “What is heaven like?” “I will tell you when we meet there.”
APPENDED NOTES
1 Corinthians 15:23-24. “The coming; the end.”—This “coming” of Christ is not, merely or exclusively, to establish His kingdom, but to judge the quick and the dead … (compare 1 Thessalonians 2:19; 1 Thessalonians 3:13; 1 Thessalonians 4:15; 1 Thessalonians 5:23, al.). Whether any, and, if any, what interval is to be supposed to exist between this “coming” and “the end” of the following verse—in fact, between “then” and “then”—the sober interpreter cannot presume even to attempt to indicate. This only may be said, that the language seems to imply a kind of interval; but that there is nothing in the particles or in the passage to warrant our conceiving it to be longer than would include the subjugation of every foe and every power of evil, and all that may be immediately associated with the mighty “end” which is specified in the succeeding verse.… It must be carefully remembered that the Apostle is here dealing with a single subject, the resurrection of the dead, and not with the connected details of eschatology. These must be gathered from other passages and other portions of Scripture.… The great difficulty in Christian eschatology is the exact position which all that is specified in Revelation 20:4 is to be supposed to hold in the sequences of the unfolding future.… Perhaps all that can be safely said is, that neither here nor in 1 Thessalonians 4:16 does the Apostle preclude the conception of a resurrection of the just (compare Luke 14:14)—possibly gradual; that in some passages (consider Romans 11:12-15) he does seem to have looked for a “flowering time” of the Church prior to the close of human history; and that here he distinctly implies a closing conflict with all the powers of evil (compare Revelation 20:7; Revelation 20:15) immediately prior to the end. That the millennial binding of Satan is to be dated from the death and resurrection of our Lord has been recently urged, … but to the detriment, as it would seem, of the distinctive idea of the millennium.—Bishop Ellicott.
1 Corinthians 15:23. “His coming.”—Parousia, indicating that when He comes He will always be present; the time of His absence will have passed away for ever.… His presence, which will then be so different from what it is now that the change from the one to the other is no less than a coming again.—Pope.
1 Corinthians 15:24. “The end.”—There will be an end and beginning of the Redeemer’s Kingdom, as it is a kingdom of grace translated into glory.
I. The mediatorial economy will cease in its relation to the Triune God; the redemptional Trinity which introduced the economy of subordination in the Two Persons will be again the absolute Trinity. The Son Incarnate will cease to mediate; as Incarnate He will be for ever subordinate, but there will be nothing to declare His subordination: no mediatorial rule over enemies, no mediatorial service or worship of His people. The Triune God will be seen by all mankind in the face of Jesus Christ, and the mediation of grace will become the mediation of glory. The Intercessor will pray for us no more, but will reveal the Father openly for ever.… The prayer of our Lord (John 17:21) will then have been fulfilled, “one in Us.” Man taken up into the Us of the Triune God will need a mediator no more.
II. The kingdom will cease because its ends will have been attained. “Then cometh the end” … to the Father as the Representative of the Trinity; “when He shall have put down.” … The process of His victories is declared in the Apocalypse: first and last, the Anti-Christ, which is a spirit of infidelity, Against Christ, having many forms, such as the Beast and the Man of Sin, and also a final personal manifestation; every description of heathenism to the ends of the earth; the corruption of Christianity, exhibited in Babylon and the Second Beast and the Harlot; and finally Death, the last enemy that shall be destroyed. In all these conflicts the Church is the fellowship of companions in “tribulation,” etc. (Revelation 1:9). We are one with our Lord, and He is one with us, in this progressive warfare and final victory. It is as “Head over all things to the Church” that the Redeemer exercises now and will end then His rule; nor is any other supression of authority alluded to than that which opposed the designs of His mediatorial kingdom. Moreover, there is nothing said of the destruction, only of the putting down of all hostile authority and power.
III. The kingdom will have a new beginning: new as the kingdom of the “new heavens,” etc.… The Spirit of Christ will be the immanent bond between Him and us, between us and the Holy Trinity (1 Corinthians 6:17). The Incarnate Person will then be glorified as never before; His personality as Divine will be no more veiled or obscured by any humiliation, nor will it be intermittently revealed. God shall be all in all, first in the Holy Trinity and then through Christ in us.—Pope, “Compend. of Theology,” iii. 425, 426.
1 Corinthians 15:27. “He hath put all things under His feet.”—It has often been asked whether David, in ascribing such dignity as he here does to man, was speaking of man in his present condition, degraded from his supremacy by the fall, or of man as originally made in the image of God and gifted with dominion over the lower creation. Now the language of the Psalm certainly points to the present. There is no trait in it of any difference between man’s original destiny and his present condition, between the ideal and the actual. Man is king of this lower world; though, because he has cast off his allegiance to the King of kings, his own subjects have renounced their allegiance to him, so that he rules by force, or manifold arts, rather than by right acknowledged and respected. But were there any higher thoughts in David’s mind? Was he thinking of man as redeemed and restored in the second Adam to his rightful supremacy?… We, who read these words in the light of the Incarnation, may see in them a significance which to his own mind they would hardly have possessed. Twice in the New Testament passages of this Psalm are applied to Christ: once by St. Paul rather in the way of allusion than of direct quotation (1 Corinthians 15:27), where he teaches that what was said by David of man is in its truest and highest sense applicable to Christ as the Great Head of Mankind; and, again, by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews (1 Corinthians 2:6-9), who, arguing that the words [of our verse] have not yet been literally fulfilled of man, declares that their proper fulfilment is to be seen only in Jesus … “crowned with glory and honour.” He does not say that the Psalm is a direct prophecy of Christ; but he shows that man’s destiny as depicted in the Psalm is not and cannot be accomplished out of Christ. He is the true Lord of all. In Him man recovers his rightful lordship, and shall really be in the new world of Redemption what now he is very imperfectly, God’s vicegerent ruling a subject creation in peace and harmony and love.—Perowne, “Psalms,” Psalms 8.
[Much also of the following passage is illustrative of 1 Corinthians 15:27 :] “The use made of this Psalm in the Epistle to the Hebrews proceeds on the understanding that it describes ideal humanity. Where, then, says the writer of the Epistle, shall we look for the realisation of that ideal? Do not the grand words sound liker irony than truth? Is this poor creature that crawls about the world, its slave, discrowned and sure to die, the Man whom the Psalmist saw? No. Then was the fair vision a baseless fabric, and is there nothing to be looked for but a dreary continuance of such abortions dragging out their futile being through hopeless generations? No; the promise shall be fulfilled for humanity, because it has been fulfilled in one man, the Man Christ Jesus. He is the realised ideal, and in Him is a life which will be communicated to all who trust and obey Him, and they, too, will become all that God meant man to be. The Psalm was not intended as a prophecy, but every clear vision of God’s purpose is a prophecy, for none of His purposes remain unfulfilled. It was not intended as a picture of the Christ, but it is so; for He and He alone is the Man who answers to that fair Divine Ideal, and He will make all His people partakers of His royalty and perfect Manhood.”—Maclaren, “Psalms,” Expositor’s Bible.
Who does not know how the tone of evil has communicated itself? Worldly minds, irreverent minds, licentious minds, leaven Society. You cannot be long with persons who by innuendo, double meaning, or lax language show an acquaintance with evil, without feeling in some degree assimilated to them, nor can you easily retain enthusiasm for right amongst those who detract and scoff at goodness. None but Christ could remain with the impenitent and be untainted.—Robertson, “Expos. Lectures,” on 1 Corinthians 5:6.
SEPARATE HOMILIES
1 Corinthians 15:33. “Evil communications corrupt good manners.”
I.
1. Hasty, crude thinking would say: “But that is not Scripture, though it is in Scripture. That is a verse from a heathen poet; not an inspired saying at all.” [As might similarly be said of the letter of Claudius Lysias (Acts 23:26-30).] But wherever an architect gets his materials, from whatever quarry he gets a stone, and whatever therefore be its varying quality or character, if he puts it into his building, he makes it his own. It becomes part of his embodiment of his design and idea. He is responsible for its selection and presence and use. He is the author of the whole structure and of every part of it, whether he obtained the constituent parts “ready made” to his hand and purpose, or had to find them in the rough and fashion them himself. This sentence, like the pillars of St. Sophia at Constantinople, the spoils of many more ancient temples, is fetched from another earlier building, where it had its fitness and its strength. This is a stone from a heathen quarry. But the wise builder, Paul, working at the growing, and nearly completed, structure of Revelation, under the direction of its Divine Architect works it into the fabric, and when it is once there the Directing Mind is responsible for it; He has made it His own; it serves His purpose of conveying with authority His mind and will to men. [No knowledge—not even of heathen proverbs—comes amiss to a Christian teacher; everything may be made available. All the quarries, all the kingdoms, of the earth belong to our Christ. He will guide His servants how wisely to lay toll on them all!]
2. Whatever be its origin, the saying is truth. He who said it formulated the bitter experience of many a benevolent social reformer, of many a parent filled with the sorrow of hopes for his children blighted into worse than failure, of many an amiable theorist starting with some “natural goodness of human nature,” only to find that his theory is no cadre into which he can fit all the facts. [Take only a limited amount of mental luggage; pack away into the portmanteau of your theory just a few selected facts—just those you need—and you may walk away comfortably, triumphantly, in your path of hope and endeavour. But] take entire, universal human nature; take entire, universal experiment and its results; and human nature is not to be trusted to love and follow and struggle for Good. It may approve it, applaud it, love it with a very platonic sort of devotion; but it is divided against itself, and what seems, unhappily, the stronger part gravitates too easily toward evil. There is not even an even balance; the scale turning for evil is loaded.
3. Classical literature has its many familiar confessions of the innate downward drag of human nature. Indeed, never had every experiment that man could suggest for man’s elevation been more exhaustively tried, and with larger advantage of conditions for the experiment, than in Grecian and Roman society in the centuries just before Christ. Philosophy, art, government, material refinement, and cultured civilisation, had practically done all that has ever been possible to do; later ages scarcely do more than go the round of the old experiment; man had done his best for man; and the universal consent of those who know best the age of the world into which God thrust the leaven of the Gospel of Christ is that never was the failure more complete, never were the world’s “manners” more utterly and hopelessly “corrupt.” Every man who repeats the experiment upon himself comes at last to the same result, and to the same sorrowful confession (his pride may not always suffer him to make the avowal aloud), that man unaided by grace cannot keep man pure. He finds that human nature in itself has its affinities, toward evil, not good, nor God; that it has a ready assimilative power for evil; that the evil leaven soon enters, and spreads widely, whilst God’s leaven of a new life is slowly admitted, and finds resistance more probable than reception and assimilation. “The dyer’s hand is subdued to what it works in.”
4. Yet no man very readily believes in the affinity of human nature for, and its inclination toward, evil; in himself, at any rate. Or if he half admit this, he will not consent to count himself in peril. His unformulated, unspoken thought is that he, at all events, is independent of the influences of his surroundings; he can stand firm; he can keep himself from corruption. From gross and open acts of evil he perhaps may; force of character and of will, pride, shame, self-interest, and the like, may enable him to keep free from, or to break off, acts and open habits. But sin is deeper seated in his nature; its presence is more subtle in its diffusion; the susceptibility is throughout. The graver danger is from subtle and pervasive evil; sin is most dangerous where it is only an influence, an environment, always present, unceasing in its deleterious power. It is most perilous as an atmosphere producing a languor, a torpor toward good, and predisposing the enfeebled spiritual life to receive the infection of disease. It is oftener a poison in the cup than an open wound in the battle. It speaks fair, smooth things, when its “communications” are most full of corruption and deadly mischief. Man will not believe it of Man; the parent will not believe it of the “nice” child; the man will not believe it of himself, spite of many a sharp, disappointing, disheartening lesson. Paul says, “Be not deceived.” All the marvellous, fairytale records of modern science as to the assimilative powers of living things in the presence of any particular environment, have their analogies in the facts of the spiritual realm. As the surroundings such—naturally, and but for the grace of God—is the man. “As the man thinketh in his heart so is he,” no doubt. The root of all evil character is ultimately within. But it may be held in check by a holy environment. “Holy communications”—especially between the soul and its Saviour—“sanctify evil manners” into good. But more commonly, and with greater facility, “evil communications corrupt,” etc. Let no man flatter himself that he shall be any exception. The best weapon of the adversary is the “deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13). Therefore—
II. Mind what company you keep—
1. No doubt the grace of God can keep Obadiah in a court where Jezebel is queen, and in a place where a Nero follows a Tiberius, a Caligula, a Claudius, “saints” may be found. But even these need to be on their strictest guard. The very physician who goes into the midst of spiritual disease needs to have a care of his own health. Only One Physician had absolute immunity from danger. [All who do “rescue” work should keep within a full spiritual vigour, a heart that “hates even the garment spotted by the flesh” (Jude 1:23).] A Christian in worldly or distinctly evil company is a red-hot ball of iron in the midst of blocks of ice. No doubt he may melt them; there is grave danger lest they chill him.
2. For the average Christian; worldliness is a more real peril than open, shocking, repellent wickedness. It is also the more ordinary liability. The surface discrepancy between Christian and non-Christian is not perhaps great; non-Christian life is in many ways affected, shaped, restrained, by the moral standard obtaining, in a general way, in a Christian land. But there is a deep chasm of separation in all their underlying principles. The “counsel of the” non-godly can never coincide with the “law of the Lord” (Psalms 1) which is “in the heart” of the Christian man. Their lives may overlap, but they revolve in different circles, struck from distinct centres.
3. E.g. the whole standard according to which persons, motives, conduct, are habitually discussed and estimated in the home, is according to man, not according to God. “God is not in all their thoughts;” they may formulate no system of morals and philosophy, but their ethics of business and their view of life in the daily talk at the table and around the fire are practically without God. The interests consulted for, and by which are regulated the planning and execution of their life-work, lie within the narrow range of the horizon of the earthly life; they know, and care to know, nothing of the readjustment of values and proportions which is inevitable as soon as life is seen running on in unbroken continuity into an eternal duration. E.g. in the education of their children, or their placing out in life, in their marriages, the soul and its interests have no consideration given to them; society interests, good prospects, natural congeniality and affection—however high and worthy the type of these may be—are all. The Christian visitor in such a home is struck, not so much by what is said or done, but rather by what he misses from the customary talk and action and judgments of the family. They are on another, a lower, plane; they are in in closest daily association with him; but they and he live in different worlds of thought and feeling and judgment.
4. He may “endure as seeing Him Who is invisible” (Hebrews 11:27). If he begin each day by getting into very real rapport with the Unseen, and if, by often intercourse with it during the progress of the hours, he keep his windows open towards it—keep the eyesight of his soul keen and clear to see it—he may pass through unharmed. But the danger for the young, of half-formed principles, or of no definite principles whatever, is that their world should contract to the narrow limits of that of those around them; that their eye should lose its keenness of vision, or that the world’s smoke and mists should besmirch their windows until they cannot see out into the Infinite, nor can the world of the Infinities, the Eternities, the Divinities, reach through to them. The danger is that the standard of judgment, the scales by which they weigh persons, character, motives, aims, should receive—by slight, but continually repeated contacts and impressions—an unhappy, ungodly adjustment. It is natural, and far easier, by little and little to fall into worldling ways of thinking and speaking and action, more than the Christian man is aware; until one day some sudden arrest of circumstance, or some more glaring, startling discrepancy between the worldly and the godly habit and standard, “pulls him up,” and reveals to him how far he has travelled, and how widely he has diverged from the love of the law of God and of the ethics of the Gospel of Christ. To the Christian man, who of necessity must spend much of his time with the people of the world, the text comes as a warning lest his spirit catch the infection of their spirit, lest with a fatal plasticity his conscience take their impress and mould. He must keep the resilience, the resistant power, the rigidity, which comes of indwelling grace. “ ‘Be not deceived’; do not be ‘liberal,’ ‘broad,’ till you become a true worldling in temper and spirit and habit and judgment. ‘Evil communications’—not least the daily talk (ὁμιλίαι); which goes on around you, in the office, in the street, in the house—‘corrupt good manners!’ ” (See Appended Note from Robertson.)
III. Mind what books yon read, and what literature.—
1. In a word, mind the mental companionships you form, or allow to yourself. Openly vicious literature will scarcely come in the way of the bulk of decent, ordinary English people. If it did, the first dose would probably create nausea and moral revulsion—though, unhappily, even this may pass away with use. Here again the peril is rather from the literature which the Christian instinct does not so much condemn for what is present as for what is missing. The literature of the world, at its best, “says in its heart, No God.”
2. The Puritan code and the practice of the men and women of all the Churches which felt, and still feel, the impress of the Evangelical revival of the eighteenth century, were strict, “narrow”—for themselves and for those whose opinions and habits they could control—in the range of literature they permitted for ordinary reading. They found that to “glorify their God below and find their way to heaven” [by no means forgetting that, whilst the living stream is making its pure, bright way to the Ocean, it needs to be, and cannot help being, a joy and a blessing to all the dwellers along its banks and course] needed all their best energies and all the help they could obtain. At their best, the novel, the play, most of the poetry, of their day demanded the time and gave no help. Their intensely serious view of life was the basis of adjustment for all their standard of permission and perusal. The very newspaper was often looked at askance. The reaction is upon us, in our time, and is carrying Christian people quite far enough in the direction of freedom. All the fields of literature are not full of food-bearing, health-producing growth; yet the tendency is to throw them open to the free range of even the youngest, most inexperienced readers. And without keeping up the old strictness of prohibition, the Christian readers of to-day need to hear, “Be not deceived, evil communications,” etc.
3. In fiction, for example, the social code, the valuation of men and character, is seldom that of the New Testament; in some, widely read and favourably reviewed, it is hardly Ten Commandment morality. The masters of fiction, or the great playwrights, are not found working on distinctively Christian lines; they never have done. The relations between man and woman in (say) a masterpiece of art like Middlemarch are not according to Christ’s law. Vanity Fair is drawn by one who is himself a stall-holder in the Fair—so far as its code for character shows. The Christian of strong, “spiritual” instincts, in whom is answered the prayer of Philippians 1:9-11, is not at home in his mental company, as he reads. He is in continual mental and heart protest against what they say and do, and still more against their principles of action and judgment. And the danger is analogous to that of actually living in such an atmosphere and such company; the danger of adjustment little by little, of assimilation by almost imperceptible degrees—only recognisable in their total result—to the standards and practice and heart of those around him. [“Some (poets) will tune their harps to sensual pleasures, and by the enchantment of their genius will well-nigh commend their unholy themes to the imagination of saints” (Edward Irving, Div. Oracles, Oration I.).]
4. Most of the reviewing press, most of the influential literary judgment, is at its best non-Christian in its motives and its standards of appeal. The younger, the unstable, the ill-instructed Christian reader needs be on his guard, lest he “be deceived”; lest he be swept away by the strong set of the prevalent current into habits of judgment and esteem which would not be those of “life in Christ.” Beauty, masterly workmanship, in art or poetry must not excuse or glorify moral evil. To a Christian instinct art cannot be non-moral; as a fact, it is not. The master-workman of the modern world, Goethe, is a great heathen. Shakespeare, colossal in his power, embodies, like his mistress Elizabeth [see Green, History of the English People, ii. 499, “a brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child of earth and of the Renaissance”], the spirit and code, not of the Reformation, but of the Renaissance, in his attitude towards the moralities; it needs a strong, clear, healthy, spiritual tone to read him without some moral soil, and even some of the insensible mental adjustment which is the great peril. The young heart needs to read with Paul’s caution even in the ears, “Evil communications,” etc. Breadth, liberality, which cultivates “toleration,” indifference to all such aspects of literature, and appreciates and approves all equally if only power be there,—these belong to a life which lives and moves in another world than that which is circumscribed by the sacred limit: “in Christ.” The “man in Christ” needs in even his mental companionships to be on his strictest guard when he passes into the “world” beyond. It is apt to be “corrupt” and “corrupting.” [Similarly the evolutionary exposition of the facts of the natural world has so got possession of the press, emphemeral and more permanent alike; has so got current in the speech and thought of the leaders of the mind of the world to-day; has so boldly been carried through as a working explanation of the facts dealt with in mental and moral science; that it is difficult not to escape the infection of what, in its extremest interpreters, is a materialism without a God; difficult to come back to, and keep, one’s position at the Great Teacher’s feet, making His words, “My Father worketh hitherto,” the key to one’s interpretation and system of Nature. Facts are welcome, whoever discovers, reports, systematises them. The interpretation of the facts needs watching lest it “corrupt” the habitual, instinctive thought of the heart, which like Christ sees a world whose “laws” are simply God’s rules for His own ordinary, orderly action and government; whose “Force” is ultimately will force—that of His will; a world full of a personal God.]