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Bible Notes - Tabernacle Commentaries
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1 Corinthians 1:4
Comments
Paul now considers the basis of blessing. Again, grace is free and undeserved. This church in Corinth was quite disorderly in some ways. As you read the epistle, there was disorder at the Lord's table. There was a denial by some of the resurrection, and it hadn't been corrected. They were very attached to their Greek culture, and they loved oratory and were inclined to choose preachers who were great orators, rather than faithful expounders of the word. They shut their eyes to a very grave sin in the midst of the church and would not discipline it. Some of them denied that Paul was an apostle, and they had a party spirit which is the first thing Paul deals with. They formed factions within the church following their favourite teacher, joining to him and ignoring the others. So there were these faults in Corinth. But we must not so magnify them and exaggerate them that we make it a bad church, because Paul commends them very highly. Paul never forgot the Corinthians. They were such trophies of grace. They had been so amazingly changed. What favour God had shown on the Corinthian sinners, Corinthian permissive people. There is such a sin list of the things that happened in Corinth in this epistle; we will come to it in due course. Paul has one of his sin lists, and then naming terrible sins he says, ‘And such were some of you’ to the Corinthians, and the ‘some’ doesn't indicate a few, but a large proportion of them, have been into all permissiveness and idolatry. ‘I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God’ that has changed so many and so wonderfully.There are some preachers and writers who say this was an utterly carnal church. It wasn't just carnal Corinth; it was the carnal church at Corinth, not fit to be called a church. But when we see the strength of Paul's commendation of them as a church, we realise that we need to see this in proportion. All these faults were in the church, but they didn't involve the majority of people. When you took the church as a whole, they were very earnest people. Yes, it was a great fault that they allowed that Corinthian sinner with his grave, sexual sin, to go undisciplined, and he had to be disciplined, and they obeyed the apostle and dealt with it, and were very sorry about it, but it doesn’t mean that everybody was the same, and so with all the other problems. Some of them did not accept the resurrection of the dead – a vital doctrine – but that was not true of most of them; it was a minority.
Application
Now when we realise this and we see it in proportion, we say, ‘Oh, this as an epistle for us. This is an epistle for true churches where maybe the majority of people are very earnest, committed to Christ, and very faithful, but there are faults within the church.’ Says the Corinthian epistle, ‘You must deal with them; you must always be working at them, you must always be reforming; you must always be moving forward.’ If we take the view that the church was terrible beyond description, this epistle does not have much to say to us. Every time we see an exhortation we say, that was just them. They were beyond the pale. So it is not very productive to exaggerates the woes of the Corinthian church.
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Introduction