CRITICAL NOTES
1 Corinthians 3:21-23.—See Homiletic Analysis. Note the unexpected turn of phrase; not “Christ is yours.” “Rise to the plane of His life and your relations to Him, then you are a possession, not owners. You are feudal holders of your estate, but the baron himself was the ‘king’s man.’ ”
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 3:21-23
Our Estate and our Title: “All things yours.”
I. Incidental illustration of this in the occasion of the paragraph.—
1. “All things work together for good to them that love God.” Corinthian Church a saddening spectacle to an observer, especially to one having Paul’s close personal interest in its welfare. Sad even at this distance of time to see the state of things in a Church hardly more than two or three years old, and endowed with gifts—many of them miraculous—beyond any other of that age. Members split into factions, party spirit running high. Some living in immorality “not even named amongst the heathen” around them (1 Corinthians 3:1); some defending such sin; others suffering “rationalising” scepticism to sap the foundations of their faith, and, which always follows, to eat away the vitality of their Christian life. One is sick at heart at the meanness and virulence of their personal feeling against Paul, the man to whom they owed their Church existence, who had “spent himself” for them, only to find that “the more he loved them the less he was loved” (2 Corinthians 12:15). Yet to this condition of things we owe these two letters to Corinth; of all his longer Epistles the most human in their interest, and coming nearest to the every-day life of house, market, citizen, church. 2. Especially do we owe to this the many passages, of which this is a specimen, of greatest weight and importance. How again and again, in the midst of passages of rebuke or direction concerning the temporary and sometimes trivial points submitted by the Corinthians to Paul for his decision, do we find his pen guided to such passages of solemn or glorious truth as, e.g., 1 Corinthians 7:29-31, or as this paragraph. As the casual blow of the pick of the lucky miner strikes upon the precious nugget embedded in the rock of quartz, or as many a fair flower grows so strong and so fair out of, and because of, the very corruption with which its roots are fed; so out of the foolish and wicked party spirit of the Corinthian Church grows this glorious title-deed to the Universe and its contents, the estate of the Christian. The very parties in Corinth are “ours”! [How is the preacher to put all the estate, “all things,” into one homily? He and his people can but walk over a part of it, noting the things which lie next the path on either hand, or can be seen afar off in large outline. No matter in what direction they strike out together a path over such an extent of possession, new “views” open on this side and that, new “finds” of pleasure and profit lie close to their way! Before starting across in even one direction, let them look over their Title. “All is God’s; all is Christ’s, His Son; all He has is yours, His brethren.”]
II. The title by which the estate is held by the Church and the Christian.—At each link in the above chain of successive “conveyance,” from God to Christ, from Christ to His people, the ground of possession, the nature of the ownership, varies.
1. “Of, through, unto, God are all things” (Romans 11:36). They have being because He willed it; they are what they are, and as they are, and they continue, at His will. All the creatures, and pre-eminently Man, find in His glory the aim and end of their being. Sin would destroy this order. The germ, not only of heathenism but of all sin, is that “they worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). The members of the Church have come again into harmony with the Creator’s design, and glory with David as he stood amidst his people’s offerings to God’s Temple on earth, bowing at our Creator’s feet with the homage, “All that is in the heaven,” etc. (1 Chronicles 29:11). All the voices of the universe were meant to be and ought to be in harmony with the cry of the four “living ones” and the four-and-twenty elders who, self-discrowned, bow before the Lord God Almighty in the temple of heaven, saying, “Thou hast created,” etc. (Revelation 4:11). He is Lawgiver to His universe. The “laws” which we laboriously make out, are nothing but expressions of His will, the ordinary, orderly methods according to which He is pleased to govern His great Kingdom. All is His, in virtue of His Creatorship; all is subject to Him; all at His disposal.
2. But there comes in between Him and His Created Universe His Son; between, not as a separation, but as a link; as a Mediator, not only between God and man in Redemption, but as between Creator and Creature in Creation and in Providence (John 1:1; Colossians 1:16). Even in the days of His veiled glory He once said: “All things that the Father hath are Mine”; and the writer of the Hebrews (1 Corinthians 1:1-3) allows us to see this “Son appointed Heir of all things, … sitting down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.” And “all things” are His, subject to His power and at His disposal.
3. Then comes in the astounding revelation that He is all this, and has all this, for the sake of the redeemed race of man. [Note the force of Hebrews 1:3-4, “Being the brightness, etc., … sat down … when He, who was all the while this, had by Himself purged our sins.” The “purging” of our sins and the after-session “on the right hand,” etc., are “projected,” as it were, on the background of His abiding, continuous dignity as “the Brightness” and “the Image.”] Whilst He thus has all things for Himself, He has linked Himself with man, has taken flesh and come down to us, that He might lift us up with Himself to God, and join us with Himself in a possession as wide as His own ownership. The very heart of the argument of Hebrews 2 is here. Yonder sits One Man in whom all the dominion of Psalms 8:4-6, ascribed to man, is actually fulfilled; the only one wearing our nature in whom that dominion is as yet realised. But His enthronement and dominion carry the principle of Man’s restored dominion. His royalty is representative as well as personal. His people are so “partakers with Him” that they already enter into a life of rule rather than of subjection, and their ultimate and complete glory is sure. “Ye are Christ’s” carries with it an answer to the old question, “What is man?” such as was never dreamed of by him who asked it. The creature physically lost in the vastness of the universe, dwarfed into a point by the heavens, the work of God’s fingers, doomed to suffering and to death, in bondage all his life to the fear of death, and in that respect lower than the “cattle” and the humbler animated creation (Psalms 8), is already beginning, so our paragraph says, to realise that along with and like the Representative Man “he is crowned with glory and honour”; all things are put under his feet, and serve him; he is to become conqueror of death; angels are his servitors. Indeed, there is nothing, there is no being, in the whole contents of God’s creation-realm, that is not at His orders to serve the interests, and advance to its perfection the life, of those whom Christ has made His clients and His brethren. “He is head over all things to His Church” (Ephesians 1:22 [a paragraph thoroughly parallel to the thought of our present section]). Each member of His body—of His very Self—may say, “All things that the Son hath are mine.” The Lord of all that is or that begins to be, of all that happens in the unfolding of events, of all the forces and contents of the universe in all their capabilities and combinations, is making all ceaselessly contribute to and converge upon the interests of His people and of each single individual of their number. [May illustrate in homely fashion thus: The mere caller at a house is shown into one room; there stays, and only stays; takes nothing, uses nothing, of what is in it. The visitor in the family has the use, the “run,” of all in common use by the family, and of those set apart specially for him; but he feels that many are closed against him. In a very restricted way does he feel free to use what is at his disposal and service. But the child of the house has the free “run” of the house. Nothing is shut against him; in submission to his father’s wishes, all it contains may be called into requisition for his use and comfort and welfare.] The home belongs to the brethren of Christ. The estate is His; but, we may almost venture to say, not its smallest value to Him is that He can make His brethren sharers with Him in its possibilities of blessing.
III. The estate and its contents of good.—In a word, “everything.” There is nothing in the physical or the spiritual world; in the present, in the future; persons, circumstances, changes of condition,—nothing of which the Christian is not master instead of servant, and which cannot be made to issue in and contribute to the service and advancement of all his best interests.
1. The matter immediately in hand is the ministers and order of the Church: “Paul, Apollos, Cephas.” With fervid, slavish, personal devotion the Corinthians were ranging themselves very obediently as the adherents of this man and that. Indeed, they were fiercely contending for their favourite, under whose yoke they were eager to put the neck of their judgment and will and heart, almost as if their party-head had been crucified for them, or they had been baptized into his name and not Christ’s. No man contended more stoutly than did Paul (e.g. chap, 9) for his Apostolic rights and all due recognition of his status. But the place which some at Corinth would have given to him or to other apostles, was one which belonged to Christ (1 Corinthians 1:13). Such exaltation of an apostle into lordship over their own head and heart, was an inversion of the true order. As he looks at the humblest man in Corinth, ennobled by his brotherhood to Christ, he says: “Remember, the apostle is for your sake, not for his own glorification. The Church; its arrangements; its officers and their qualifications, exist for your salvation and sanctification, and not at all for their own advancement or glory. You are not theirs, not mine. Paul, Apollos, Cephas, we are yours!” There is no one pattern of “excellence” in the ministry, as there is no one pattern of need or character in the people. Every man is the “excellent” minister to somebody! The expositor of the Word, or the declaimer of theses on the topics of the day; the man who excels in pathos, or in historical word-painting, or in satire and shrewd analysis of character and its foibles; the man who “cannot preach,” and the man who can preach but who cannot organise; the man who is at his best in a sick-room, or that other who is a born ruler of men;—through all their infinite variety of gifts, there is no faithful minister of Christ who is not and has not something which somebody wants, or at some time will want. Each man will have his own aspect of truth to present and teach, the aspect which he sees most clearly, into which he enters most fully; and all are wanted, Paul and James, Cephas and John, Jude and Apollos, to give the whole round of truth. A many-sided, many-gifted ministry is not the smallest part of the wealth and rich heritage of the Church. Let the Christian man see what he can find for himself in each type of man. There is something. Let him not be so wedded to any one type, that he cannot enjoy, or find help from, or even think kindly of, a man who is not after the pattern of his own “best,” the style of minister who most helps him. And, similarly, first stands the interest of the individual soul, and next the form of Church organisation and administration. No form is worth anything which never was, or is no longer, of use towards helping those who belong to Christ. Any form, as any man, who does this, is to be recognised and to be utilised as part of the endowment of the people of God.
2. Then Paul’s view widens. His words grow broad in their range, even to indefiniteness. “World yours! Life yours! Death yours!” Then “the world”—and its predominantly ethical and evil significance need not be excluded from it—is no mere necessary evil, which must be endured and perhaps survived. There is no “must be” which ordains that life, with its business, its sorrows, its trials and conflicts, its unfriendly or uncongenial men and women, its strange perplexities and obstacles of circumstance, shall be of necessity a hindrance to growth in grace; putting the break on, even if it cannot quite stop all progress, as if a Christian could not hope to be thorough in service or enjoyment so long as life in “the world” lasts, and as if the one thing most to be desired was to “shuffle off this mortal coil” and be done with it all. Paul’s words in our paragraph say rather: “You are not to succumb beneath life’s burdens like that. You are not to acquiesce in a low type of spiritual life, because your circumstances and whole location in the world are not favourable to growth. The world is not to be master like that. Evil as it is, its evil is under the rule of your Christ. ‘God shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly’ (Romans 16:20), and you may begin to enter into your victory and have your foot even now upon the power of evil; and then all the good there is in life and in the world may be set in motion and utilised for your enjoyment and help. The trials, the difficulties, the very temptations, are not to be met simply as the bulrush bows its head before the storm, praying that the storm may soon be over, and that you may not be uprooted utterly by its passing violence. Rather, like your Master, ride the storm, in His strength. Every hurricane obeys laws—His laws—and blows as He listeth, towards His goal and for His purpose towards you. The water outside will carry the well-found ship; admitted within, it will sink it. Keep the world outside your heart, and the world is yours, to use and rule and lay under contribution to your growth in grace.” Trials may teach. Crosses may lift nearer. [“Even so,” and in no other way, “must” every “son of man be lifted up!”] The very necessity of the strife and of unremitting watchfulness against evil will drive a man so often and so near to Christ his Source of strength, that he emerges from every specially severe testing-time with new knowledge and a new power in prayer. The very weight of life’s burdens will have forced him to find a Friend in Christ, whose strength and faithfulness the world has forced him to test and experience, as he would never otherwise have had occasion to do. He is a fine specimen of manhood, who has taken his place in the world, and felt its storm, and fought it when it assailed him, and after all is not hardened or “secularised” or soured, but is trained to patience and sympathy with others, and to a more perfect reliance upon his God. The fire will brighten and purify what it cannot burn. In “the world” it is true that the soldier is in an unfriendly country; but even the enemy’s country can be requisitioned for what will enable him to carry on the campaign. [The darkest days of life have often been the most fruitful in permanent advancement to the soul. The cross has had a jewel hidden beneath it which has repaid for lifting the cross. A true parable in a German Legend: A famous egg of iron was given by a prince to his bride, who flung down in displeasure so unworthy a gift. The concussion started a spring in the iron case, and revealed a silver “white” to the egg. Curiosity examined this, and found again within a “yolk” of gold. In this lay hidden a tiny ruby-set crown, whose circlet concealed a marriage-ring for the union of bridegroom and bride! So, at the very heart of the most forbidding experiences of “the world” and “life,” the soul has many a time found the pledge of new love and a closer union with the Christ who rules “the world” and “life,” and who gave the painful and hard experience, etc.]
3. Nothing seems more utterly master than “Death.” The natural heart often stoically looked life in the face and defied it; or sometimes sullenly, doggedly, went onward to meet its changing fortunes and crushing sorrows as the Inevitable. But reckon death a possession, part of one’s wealth? No; it must be submitted to! In all literature, except what is Christian, or at least Christianised, Death is the great Conqueror; knocking impartially at the door of palace and hovel, calling as imperiously the king from his throne as the beggar from his rags and wretchedness, and calling them at his own caprice; playing havoc with all men’s plans and work, breaking these off at most unlooked-for and unfortunate times; mocking the tears of affection over sundered bonds; defying all efforts to arrest his progress or stay his hand. On the contrary, they who are Christ’s see that He has conquered death, and they share in His victory. They already “have everlasting life.” Death has become dying only, simply an incident—no more—in the course of an “eternal life” which began when faith united to Christ, and which stretches on in victorious continuity through the important, but still accidental, change of surroundings and abode and conditions which dissolution occasions. They do not tremble at any capricious shooting of His arrows. The Lord of Life makes every arrow of Death to carry His message attached to it. He “has the keys of Hell and of Death” (Revelation 1:17). The realm of the “departed” is part of His dominion. His people enter it as possessors, not as prisoners. They are only advancing into another section of a life which is all theirs. Its doors are opened by Death when He wills, and at His bidding. And so far from putting an abrupt and inopportune end to the execution of their life’s purposes, or thwarting them, they are only by death advanced a stage nearer to their completion. Salvation is put out of peril; for the first time do the majority of His people then see their Lord. To wake up into the blessedness of that first moment, when their eyes at last see the Christ they have heard of, and trusted, and loved, and have tried to serve—Death which brings that is no dread, no enemy; it is a hope, it is their own.
4. Nor does anything seem less their own than the future. “Things to come” may unfold in such terrible possibilities, and may involve such unforeseen contingencies, as may set at nought all their wisest planning and blight all their brightest prospects. No dawn so clear but the noonday may be shadowed over with clouds which never lift again long as life’s day lasts. Men seem working life’s problem with a quantity unknown, incommensurable, when they must needs take the future into their reckoning. Masters of the future? No, not even its prophets! Rather its sport! “Things to come are yours.” What these shall be, He is deciding. They lie within the domain which is being ruled by the Son, and ruled by Him for His Church and for the individual Christian man. Even here He used to speak of the unseen world and its facts as one to whose foot the other side of the veil was as familiar ground as this side is to us. In like manner the future lies mapped out to His eye as clearly as, more clearly than, the past is to ours. For instance, some man will one day cross my path who will materially affect my whole after-life. Christ, the Ruler of the future, has His eye upon the point of convergence; and upon the path which that man, perhaps as yet altogether unknown to me, or far from me, in perhaps another hemisphere, is traversing, and which will bring him to the meeting-point by-and-by. When the moment arrives there is the man, just when, and just such as, my life needs. The present is being so guided into the future, and the future is being so fitted on to the present, as that the life of a man who is Christ’s, is in its whole stretch and extent one perfect harmonious whole (see Homily on 2 Corinthians 1:10). Somewhere in the whole round of His universal possession there is the very help and deliverance he will someday want; it will be brought out and forthcoming at the proper time, “in His times” (cf. 1 Timothy 6:15). As each stage of the earthly series of “things to come” is reached, relays of help [like the relays of fresh horses awaiting the travellers at each successive posting-station in the old “posting” days] will always be awaiting him. “My times are in” Christ’s “hand.”
HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS FOR A COURSE ON 1 Corinthians 3:22
The World is Yours.
I. To lodge in.
II. To study.
III. To use.
IV. To enjoy.
V. To conquer.—[J. L.]
Life is Yours.
I. As a daily gift of God.
II. As a period of discipline and instruction.
III. As a season of enjoyment.
IV. As an earnest of a more glorious life.—[J. L.]
Death is Yours.
I. To consider.
II. To terminate your sorrows.
III. To effect an important change.
IV. To unfold the mysteries of eternity.
V. To introduce you to eternal happiness.—[J. L.]
Things Present are Yours.
I. The dispensations of providence.
II. The provisions and arrangements of the Gospel.
III. All the supplies, agencies, and experiences of time.—[J. L.]
Things to Come are Yours.
I. The future of time.
II. The coming of Christ.
III. The resurrection of the body.
IV. The day of judgment.
V. Heaven.
VI. Everlasting life.
VII. God, who was, and is, and is to come.—[J. L.]
APPENDED NOTES
1 Corinthians 3:11 sqq. Since it was by preaching and teaching that Paul laid the foundation of the Church of Corinth, the builders must be different kinds of teachers. Since the matter taught is the material the teacher uses, this must be the gold, silver, wood, straw, etc. The results produced by the teacher in the hearts and lives of his hearer are the building he erects. He may produce good results which will last for ever and be to him an eternal joy and glory. Since these results are altogether the work of God, and are revealed in their grandeur only in the great day, they are a “reward” given by God in that day for work done on earth. But a teacher may produce results which now appear great and substantial, but which will then be found utterly worthless. He may gather round him a large number of hearers, may interest them, and teach them much that is elegant and for this life useful, and yet fail to produce in or through them results which will abide for ever. If so, the great day will destroy his work and proclaim its worthlessness. But he may be said to build upon the one foundation, Jesus Christ. For he is a professed Christian teacher, and people go to hear him as such. He may be a sincere, though mistaken Christian believer, and therefore be himself saved. But his work, as a teacher, is a failure. Now the permanence of a teacher’s work depends upon the matter taught. The soul-saving truths of the Gospel enter into men’s hearts and lives, and produce abiding results. All other teaching will produce only temporary results. We understand, therefore, by the wood and straw whatever teaching does not impart or nourish spiritual life. The three terms suggest the various kinds of such teaching. It may be clever or foolish, new or old, true or false; but not subversive of the “foundation,” or it would come under the severer censure of 1 Corinthians 3:16 sq.… We have Christian examples in many of the trifling and speculative discussions which have been frequent in all ages. We also learn that even of the teaching which produces abiding results there are different degrees of worth; in proportion, no doubt, to the fulness and purity with which the teaching of Christ is reproduced. In both cases the results are the results, lasting or transitory, produced in the hearers’ hearts by the use of these materials; results which are in some sense a standing embodiment of the teaching.—Dr. Beet.
“By Fire.”—
1. It may be homiletically useful to cast into orderly shape the Bible use of “Fire.” Needless to say that the Bible is not pledged to any such unscientific piece of obsolete antiquity as that Fire is an Element—one of four. It is content to take the visible fact, and its palpable effects, as a serviceable illustration, apprehended readily by the child or the heathen, and perfectly good as an illustration, whatever be the scientific revision of our knowledge of the state of the case. For teaching purposes Fire is Heat and, still more, Flame. Flame is now understood to be gas so highly heated as to become in some degree luminous, and generally made more luminous by being loaded with incandescent particles, whether of carbon or other matter. That is nothing new to the Divine Author of Scripture and of Nature; nor was it unworthy of Him, or untrue, that what was to be the popularly apprehensible phenomenon should in the original planning of Nature be so adjusted and adapted as to lend itself well to teach moral truth. Indeed, the devout students of Nature find that both the superficial, phenomenal facts and the deep scientific “laws” are alike parabolic and didactic Nature is full of man, and of truth which man wants. Creation is didactic. “Creation is redemptive.”
2. A convenient starting-point is Hebrews 12:29: “Our God is a consuming fire.” Closely connected with “God is Light.” The difference is here: Light is what God is in Himself; fire what He is in relation to (sinful) mankind. Hence frequently the chosen symbol of His self-manifestation,: the Bush, Exodus 3:2; the Pillar, Exodus 40:38; Tongues of Pentecost, Acts 2:3; Sinai, Exodus 19:8; Exodus 24:17; Deuteronomy 4:36; Vision of God’s glory, Ezekiel 1:4; Exodus 24:9-11 (N.B. Nadab and Abihu), Daniel 7:9; Revelation 4:2. In Isaiah 4:5 we have three manifesting symbols of God combined—light, radiant splendour, burning fire. Still more frequently the accompaniment of His self-manifestation: e.g. “After the earthquake a fire,” 1 Kings 19:12; “fire goeth before Him,” Psalms 97:8. Loosely connected with all this are the fiery Chariot and Horses sent for Elijah, 2 Kings 2:11; fiery Chariots round about Elisha, 2 Kings 6:17. This last and the Pillar over Israel, or the Shekinah in its midst, are gathered up in Zechariah 2:5.
3. Hence when He accepted, “took,” “ate,” appropriated, a sacrifice, it was by a fiery manifestation. E.g. at the Ordination of Aaron and the Inauguration of the priestly system and ritual, Leviticus 9:24. So at the Dedication of Solomon’s Temple, 2 Chronicles 7:1-3. And in less important instances: Carmel, 1 Kings 18; on Araunah’s threshing floor, 1 Chronicles 21:26; Gideon’s sacrifice, Judges 6:21. The Burnt Offering, as distinguished from the Sin and Peace Offerings, and as symbol of an entire surrender on man’s part and an entire appropriation on God’s part, was (as its name says) burnt with fire. And this links on the foregoing to the twofold employment of the symbol as exhibiting the active relation of a Holy God to sinful man.
4. All that could, so to say, be volatilised went up purified and in perfect acceptance; all that was gross and earthly was left behind, to be cast out. Hence, “Baptized with … fire,” Matthew 3:11; Malachi 3:2 brings out the action of the refiner’s fire upon metals. So Isaiah 4:4, “Purged Jerusalem by the Spirit of Judgment and the Spirit of Burning”; “in that day,” primarily the return of a purified remnant from Babylon, then the setting up of a Christian Zion, perhaps, by-and-by, a restored and purified Israel once more. Isaiah 30:23, and more remotely still Isaiah 29:6, perhaps may better come in later on. The same Holiness which is purifying to the man who desires to be purified, burns as a consuming fire against sin and the sinner who will not be parted from his sin. Hence fire frequently sets forth the holy, active antagonism to evil and evil men, in defence of His people. Isaiah 30:27, “His tongue a devouring fire; lips full of indignation.” “Fury like a fire,” Jeremiah 4:4 (against unfaithful Judah and Jerusalem), Jeremiah 21:2. So it proved, Lamentations 3:3. So against the heathen and Idumæa, Ezekiel 36:5; against Gog, Ezekiel 38:18-19. [Psalms 83:14; Psalms 140:10; Ezekiel 24:9; Amos 5:6.] God and His people are so identified that they become a fire too, Obadiah 1:18; Zechariah 12:6. So in Isaiah 30:27-33 we have it again. Fire purging the faithful from the unfaithful, sifting the nations, then burning up the pile of Tophet. [But “the King” may (as Talmud) be the Eternal King, and Tophet the burning-place outside the purified, ideal Jerusalem, where all the refuse is to be cast (Matthew 13:50).] Certainly the twofold action is seen in Isaiah 31:9, “Fire in Zion; furnace in Jerusalem”; Isaiah 33:14. As the Assyrian invasion approached, and the denunciations of holy wrath against sinners in and enemies of Zion, “sinners in Zion are afraid.” “Who can dwell with devouring fire?” cry they, “… with everlasting burnings?” i.e. with a God whose holy antagonism to sin never relaxes, never spares, never ends. 1 Corinthians 3:15 is the answer. But the principle is here which has occasioned and justified a very frequent use made of this text. God’s fierce, fiery antagonism to sin cannot cease unless sin cease—must last everlastingly if sinners live on everlastingly sinners still. Same connection appears in Nahum 1:6. Indeed, the whole cycle of events connected with the Assyrian invasion seems the foundation of much Bible language concerning the punishment of wicked. Not only such as Psalms 46:9 (usually [not in Speaker] connected with these events), but Isaiah 9:5, bring up the fires with which the dead bodies and the wreck of the host were cleared away (1 Corinthians 9:5 = no fighting, no blood, but simply burning of the litter and refuse and the dead), with, by the usual analogy, a future fulfilment. Isaiah 66:24 (foundation of Mark 9:44-46 [cf. Stier, Words of L. J., i. 156]; rather the figure of a holy Jerusalem with its Gehenna, its burning-place for all the refuse of the city [Matthew 13:50]); here also the fires on the battle-field after Sennacherib’s defeat are evidently in the mind of the writer. The battle-field is one vast Gehinnom outside the city walls.
5. Many actual examples of God’s vengeance in which fire is the agent of punishment. N.B. these are all examples of sins very directly against His holiness and unique position and claims. Nadab and Abihu, Leviticus 10:2; Taberah, Numbers 11:2; Achan, Joshua 7:25; Korah, Numbers 16:35; Elijah and the captains, 2 Kings 1:10 (unless, indeed, this be, first and chiefly, God’s manifestation of Himself, appealing both to Elijah and to the witnesses and hearers of the event). Above all Sodom, Genesis 19:24; referred to in Luke 17:29; and at least shaping the language of Psalms 11:6; Ezekiel 38:22; Revelation 21:18. [Imagery of Malachi 4:1-2 is anticipated by Genesis 19:24; Genesis 19:23.]
6. So, coming to the New Testament, we find three great cycles of type: (a) Sodom, (b) Gehinnom, (c) Assyrian invasion.
NEW TESTAMENT
1. General.—God’s vengeance against sin is fiery, Matthew 3:10 (? primarily the Jewish nation), “Tree hewn down and cast into the fire”; Hebrews 6:8, the doom of the persistently barren ground. Also of individuals, Matthew 7:19; Luke 3:9; Hebrews 10:27, “Judgment and fiery indignation; 2 These. 1 Corinthians 1:8, “In flaming fire taking vengeance.”
2. God’s holiness is testing.— 1 Corinthians 3:13 [though there is here very little of all this typology; hardly more than the commonly observed action of fire]; 2 Peter 3:7 (Luke 12:49-52 is connected).
3. Sodom.— Jude 1:7, “Suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.” Revelation 19:20; Revelation 20:10, “Lake of fire and brimstone, where the Beast and the False Prophet are” [Revelation 18:9, Babylon; cf. Abraham beholding the ascending smoke of Sodom]; the Devil; Gog and Magog deceived by him (obvious ref. to Ezekiel 38:22); who-soever “not found written in the book of life.” Revelation 14:10, worshippers of the beast and his image, who have received his mark.
4. Gehenna.— Matthew 18:9, “Worm dieth not,” etc.; Mark 9:44-46, referring to Isaiah 66. “Furnace of fire,” Matthew 13:42; Matthew 13:50, where the latter verse, having nothing in the parable connected with it to suggest it—the fish are cast into the water—shows that the phrase had become, or was now first made by Christ, a customary equivalent for the doom of the wicked.
5. The battle-field.—Linked with Mark 9, as above, but originating the phrase “everlasting burnings.” In Matthew 25:41; figure (almost?) lost. So completely the revelation of the future that we must say: “Whatever be the nature of the punishment of a lost, embodied spirit, if we might ask him what he suffered, he would say, ‘Fire,’ as the only earthly analogy available.”
6. Mark 9:47. A difficult verse. Every man shall—must—come into contact with the holiness of God. Will a man let it (Him) burn away all impurity, and himself thus become a sacrifice salted with grace, and so accepted? Or, refusing this, will he simply meet and feel the fire which never burns itself out?
1 Corinthians 3:16-17. There were Hebrew converts in Corinth, and such would easily catch St. Paul’s allusion … to the national Temple. This national Temple in the Apostle’s mind clearly enlarges and transfigures itself into a Temple spiritual. This living Temple of the Catholic Church is one Temple; it is one, yet elastic; it grows and expands, associating to itself and assimilating, so to speak, many lateral chapels. It is, in fact, an organic unity of several organs, each it itself a unity; it is, in brief, a unity of many contained unities. Each several Church, therefore, of the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church in miniature, so that of the whole all the several parts are themselves wholes; each branch of the Tree is a tree planted in Christ.—Evans, in “Speaker.”