Beloved, I have the joy of sharing with you today the above theme from 1 Co 3. 2 and following. Indeed, absorbed in their divisions, the Corinthians had made no progress. They looked like bad schoolchildren arguing over who has the most learned master or the most beautiful classroom. Paul told them that to care for the servant rather than his teaching was childishness, it was still to be carnal (1 Co 3:3). How often we confuse the truth with the one who presents it: If, for example, we listen to a certain servant of God with the bias that he has nothing to bring us, we receive exactly what we have expected.
Then the apostle evokes the responsibility of the one who edifies. For in God’s work, seen as a field of culture or as a building, each worker has his own activity. He can bring materials (that is, various aspects of the truth): to edify souls by presenting them with the righteousness of God (gold), redemption (money), the varied glories of Christ (precious stones). But under the appearance of a lot of volume, it can also build with wood, hay, thatch… work that will not withstand fire. Yes, “let everyone consider how” (not how much) he builds on this unique and imperishable foundation: Jesus Christ.
Alongside true workers who can do a bad job (1 Cor 3:11-15), there are false servants who corrupt the temple of God, that temple that is holy as the one that inhabits it. And we too are holy, recalls the apostle. Let no one be under any illusions about who he is or what he does. The wisdom of the world is foolishness for God, the wisdom of God foolishness for the world. Both are assessed according to the goal pursued. The natural man regards with pity the Christian who, he believes, sacrifices to a vague and uncertain future the advantages and pleasures of the present moment. May we all be afflicted with this kind of madness. What are the wretched vanities that we could flaunt next to what we have? For all things are ours, Paul says; and they are ours because we ourselves are to Christ to whom everything belongs.
Thus, in contrast to his wonderful description of a Christian, the apostle now appreciates in detail the condition of those to whom he writes. Two things characterized the Corinthians: First, they were carnal. This is not to say that they were not children of God. The man who is alien to God’s thoughts is not called a carnal man, but an animal man (1 Co 2:14), a man driven only by his soul created and directed by his natural will, but lacking in the divine life and spirit of God. A carnal man can be a believer, but with the features of the flesh (Rom 7:14) that characterizes the old man. This is the name that believers are constantly called to in the New Testament. But the Corinthians should have been deeply humiliated, thinking that, as redeemed, they had received all spiritual blessings without reservation, and that they behaved, not as saints, but as men. In their walk, they were “little children in Christ.”
For a sinner, at the moment when he comes to the knowledge of God the Father through conversion, is a little child: this is his normal state. He knows the Father, he is now in contact with Him; but this little child is called to grow and develop; the Corinthians, on the other hand, had remained at an elementary knowledge of Christ. They thought, acted, spoke like children. Was it a desirable state? We can appreciate this in the order of nature. A person, having reached a respectable age, whose tastes, occupations, language and manner of acting would be those of a small child, and who would do at fifty what he did at three, would be rightly considered to be suffering from idiocy. The same is true of God’s children who do not make spiritual progress and are content all their lives with an elementary Christianity, characterized by the forgiveness of their sins.
It was therefore necessary for the apostle to give a very simple food to these Corinthians, that he told them only of Jesus Christ crucified. He could not tell them about all that followed the cross, about the heavenly glory in which the Lord found himself, and they in Him. He was therefore obliged to introduce them to basic notions, without which their childish condition could not end.
Indeed, the carnal state showed itself in their divisions, their sects, their parties and their quarrels. One said: I am of Paul; the other, from Apollos, things that are found even more often among us Christians today. What do preferences mean for such a more educated, more eloquent, more literary preacher, if not that one is “men”? We judge in these matters as men, as the world alien to the Spirit of God. For we have forgotten that God chooses His instruments, and that we have to receive them as coming from Him. Thus the apostle cites as an example the character that he and Apollos had in the midst of the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 3:5-8). They were servants. In his field, God had entrusted one with the task of planting, the other with the task of watering; the function of both contributed to the same goal. For only one could make their work prosper; neither Apollos nor Paul were nothing; it was God who gave the increase.
Then, after presenting the characters of God’s servants, Paul said, “For we are workers with God. You are the field of God, the edifice of God.” He emphasizes the word God, for everything depends on Him. The apostle immediately passes from the image of a field to that of a building, in the house of God. Here we enter into what makes the great subject of this epistle: the order and organization of the house of God. Paul had posed him as a wise architect; but then God calls his workers to continue on this foundation the building of his house. Here you will find two classes of workers. The first builds on the foundation of gold, silver, precious stones. These are all doctrines brought to the building of the house of God, but, at the same time, so many people formed by these doctrines and added by the ministry of the Lord’s workers.
Some bring gold. In the Word, gold is always the emblem of divine righteousness. It is a subject of immense importance to be presented to souls, that there is no justice in sinful man, and that God alone justifies his own righteousness. Indeed, others bring money. Money always represents, on the one hand, the Word, on the other the wisdom of God, two inseparable things. If you build people up on the word of God, what a good work you will do!
Unfortunately, there are other materials, wood, hay, thatch. All of them can be destroyed by fire, some a little more, others a little less quickly, but, in the end, everything becomes the prey of the fire. Then, when a servant of God, instead of putting souls in contact with God, enslaves them to his authority, or places them under the yoke of the law, as a means of reconciling divine favor; when he promises them perfection in the flesh, or appeals to their will to acquire salvation and holiness (doctrines widely spread today), it is as much wood, hay, thatch, that he adds to the edifice. How many souls introduced by these doctrines into the house of God, do not have even a spark of divine life!
For the day when judgment falls on this house, all that is precious will resist the fire, and everything else will be consumed without anything left. For here we find good workers who do good work; real workers, and there are many of them everywhere, who do bad work, thinking they are getting good results with bad materials. They will not be lost, for this work; but as long as their house burns, they will have no alternative but to flee. Similar to the just Lot, they will be saved as if through fire.
So, all of us who are called to work for the Lord, let us be careful not to introduce into the house of God anything other than souls, established on divine principles, not on the principles of men. Let us imitate the chiefs of the tribes of Israel who, to build the temple, voluntarily offered five thousand talents of gold, ten thousand talents of silver, and as many precious stones as they could gather (1 Ch 29. 6-9).
The following verses have been compiled for your edification and grouped together for your better understanding.
- Spiritual immaturity
-Inability to receive a solid doctrine 1 Co 3:1-2 For me, brethren, it was not as spiritual men that I have been able to speak to you, but as to carnal men, as to children in Christ. 3 I have given you milk, not solid food, for you could not bear it; and you cannot even now, because you are still carnal.
-Necessity of being taught Gal 4:1-3 Now, as long as the heir is a child, I say that he is no different from a slave, though he is the master of everything; 2 but he is under guardians and administrators until the time marked by the father. 3 We too, in the same way, when we were children, were under the slavery of the rudiments of the world;
-Instability of faith Eph 4:14 so that we may no longer be children, floating and carried away in every wind of doctrine, by the deception of men, by their cunning in the means of seduction,
-Continue in the elementary principles He 5:12 You, in fact, who for a long time should be masters, still need to be taught the first rudiments of the oracles of God, you have come to need milk and not solid food.
- Lack of vision
Mt 16:11 How do you not understand that it is not about breads that I have spoken to you? Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees. Lk 24:21 We hoped that it would be He who would deliver Israel; but with all this, this is the third day that these things have happened. Jn 3:4 Nicodemus said to him: How can a man be born when he is old? Can he fit into his mother’s womb and be born? John 6:60 Many of His disciples, after hearing Him, said: This word is hard; who can listen to it? Jn 20:2 She ran to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and said to them: They have removed the Lord from the tomb, and we do not know where they put him. John 21.4 When morning came, Jesus was on the shore; but the disciples did not know it was Jesus.
- Human weakness, manifested by all men
Nb 11:14 I cannot, on my own, carry all this people, for it is too heavy for me. Mt 26:40 And he came to the disciples, whom he found asleep, and said to Peter, “So you could not watch an hour with me! Jn 16:12 I still have a lot to tell you, but you can’t wear them now. 1 Co 3.2 I gave you milk, not solid food, for you could not bear it; and you cannot even now, because you are still carnal.
- Workers of Christ
-Prayer for the increase of their number Mt 9:37-38 Then he said to his disciples: The harvest is great, but there are few workers. 38 Pray therefore the master of the harvest to send workers into his harvest.
-A great opportunity offered to the workers ofChrist. Jn 4:35-36 Don’t you say that there are still four months until the harvest? Behold, I tell you, look up, and look at the fields that are already whitening for the harvest. 36 He who reaps receives a salary, and gathers fruit for eternal life, so that he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. 1 Co 3:9 For we are workers with God. You are God’s field, God’s edifice.
-Worthy of their salary 1 Tim 5:17-18 Let the elders who lead well be judged worthy of a double honor, especially those who work in preaching and teaching.18 For Scripture says: Thou shat not the ox when it tramples the grain. And the worker deserves his salary.
From all the above, we note that to take care of the servant rather than his teaching was childishness, it was to be still carnal. For in God’s work, seen as a field of culture or as a building, each worker has his own activity. He can bring materials (that is, various aspects of the truth): to edify souls by presenting them with the righteousness of God (gold), redemption (money), the varied glories of Christ (precious stones). But under the appearance of a lot of volume, it can also build with wood, hay, thatch… work that will not withstand fire. Yes, “let everyone consider how” (not how much) he builds on this unique and imperishable foundation: Jesus Christ. Let us find a third category of workers who are running before a terrible fate. There are in the edifice, which has become Christendom, men who introduce deleterious doctrines, attack the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, the holiness and divinity of the person of Christ, deny the existence of Satan, preach universalism that overthrows the cross of the Savior. “Don’t you know,” said the apostle, “that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If someone corrupts the temple of God, God will destroy it, for the temple of God is holy, and as you are.” These doctrines, widely spread today, are signs of the end, proof that we are moving quickly towards final apostasy. When the day of judgment rises, it will destroy all this evil and, at the same time, those who have worked, through their teaching, to corrupt the temple of God. For God “takes the wise in their tricks.” Their wisdom is a trap in which they get caught and God confuses them. Indeed, they claim to have light, and this light is only darkness; to be wise, and their wisdom is but folly, while the poor, the puny, the humble are saved, raised and seated forever. The apostle also quotes Ps 94:11 to show that God “knows the reasoning of the wise, that it is vain.” Will we contradict what God knows and tells us? Let us therefore place ourselves on the side of God and do not glorify ourselves in men, not even in a Paul, or an Apollo, or a Cephas. For God has given them to us to jointly maintain God’s wisdom and truth. They are only a way to make us depend on Christ alone, and Christ leads us to God. Everything else, world, life, death, present things, or things to come, belongs to us, because we are to Christ, to whom all things are subject. Our prayers sustain you in your efforts to remain unto Christ.
PRAYER FOR ACCEPTANCE OF JESUS CHRIST AS LORD AND PERSONAL SAVIOR
I now invite every person who wants to become a new creation by walking in the truth, to pray with me the following prayer:
Lord Jesus, I have long walked in the lusts of the world ignoring your love for humans. I admit to having sinned against you and ask your forgiveness for all my sins, because today I have decided to give you my life by taking you as Lord and personal Savior. I recognize that you died on the cross of Calvary and rose from the dead for me.
I am now saved and born again by the power of the Holy Spirit. Lead me every day to the eternal life that you give to all who obey your Word. Reveal yourself to me and strengthen my heart and faith, so that your light may be shining in my life right now.
Thank you Lord Jesus for accepting me into your divine family, so that I may also contemplate the wonders of your kingdom.
I will now choose a nearby watering point to baptize myself by immersion, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
All adoration, power and glory are yours, now and forever and ever. Amen!
I would be happy to respond to any questions and comments you may have, before sharing with you tomorrow on “The Pride of the Corinthians, the Trials Endured by the Apostles.”
May the Lord Jesus Christ bless you abundantly.
David Feze, Servant of the Almighty God.