1 Corinthians 3:16-20

CRITICAL NOTES

1 Corinthians 3:16.—A temple (R.V.) misses, or denies, the typology binding Old Testament and New Testament together here. A case where, as often (e.g. 1 Corinthians 11:20), one of the great leading facts of the Old Covenant is divested of its temporary, local robing and embodiment, and brought forward into the new world of the New Testament, to find a new embodiment in the Church. The old building has gone; the new shrine where God dwells on earth is growing, rising, every day. A local Church, and still more the aggregate Church, is the New Testament form of the old Temple idea. It is the Temple to-day. This a collective Temple; in 1 Corinthians 6:19 an individual application of the same idea is found. The word here is that which signifies, not the whole structure inclusive of the surrounding courtyard, but only the actual Temple building itself. “In” is here practically “among”; as distinguished from the indwelling in the man, 1 Corinthians 6:19 (see Appended Note from Evans).

1 Corinthians 3:17.—Defile and destroy, same word; combining “impair,” “mar,” “ruin,” “destroy.”

1 Corinthians 3:18.—Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:33 for the thought (not for the word); men seem to persuade themselves that they shall somehow evade the penalty of sin, although others do not escape. Thinks.—As 1 Corinthians 8:2; not with any hesitation, but with much confidence. Among you.—And yet taking his place, and holding his own, as a wise man of the world “in the world.” “Can’t be done! Incompatible things altogether!” The connection between inflated self-esteem and a slavish submission to party leaders is exposed in 1 Corinthians 6:6. Surely no implied caution to, or censure on, Apollos!

1 Corinthians 3:19.—Note the small change of translation. Quotation of words of Eliphaz, from Job 5:13. [On the general principle of such a quotation being taken as part of what “is written,” see Homily on xv. 33, § 1.]

1 Corinthians 3:20.— Psalms 94:11. “Reasonings” (R.V.).

HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 3:16

The Temple of God.—Very little in this paragraph which is not dealt with elsewhere. For 1 Corinthians 3:16 see, e.g., 1 Corinthians 6:18; for 1 Corinthians 3:18 see, e.g., 1 Corinthians 1:18 sqq. Note, however, that the Temple is here collective, the whole Church; in 1 Corinthians 6:18 it is individual—indeed, the very body of the Christian man.

I. Note how, from paragraph to paragraph, the illustrations change.—In 1–4 Paul is the “nursing father” (Isaiah 49:23); the Church is the house where “the holy seed” is growing up, or ought to be, into strength and ripeness of godliness. In 1 Corinthians 3:5 figure is dropped, unless “ministers” be a figure. Paul and his friend and successor Apollos are employés of God, enrolled in His service, to bring men to Christ and to faith in Him; John Baptist-like, to bring Bridegroom and Bride together. There has been “a division of labour,” and the thought is made pictorial in 1 Corinthians 3:6. Paul and his fellow-worker are seen toiling each at his task in God’s field or in God’s vineyard—“labourers in the vineyard,” each of whom is to receive “whatsoever is right” according to his work. [There is more in the Scripture than was in the Scribe. The mind of the Spirit is often fuller than any thought in the mind of the human writer. Yet the use of the illustration goes so little beyond the division of tasks amongst the qualified workers, and the payment according to results and fidelity, that an expositor may hesitate to fill out these two hints with the typology of the Vine and the Vineyard of God, found, e.g., in Psalms 80; Isaiah 5:2; Ezekiel 15; Ezekiel 17; Matthew 21:28; Matthew 21:33, sqq.; Luke 13:6 (where the two figures for Israel are conjoined); and, with most profound significance, John 15:1, and Matthew 26:20 (adding, perhaps, 1 Corinthians 9:7).] Then again the picture changes; as the “dissolving-view picture” fades out when another is superposed upon it, so the busy “labourers” at their “husbandry” have scarcely been shown to us before the field has faded and a “building” is rising as we watch. There is no doubt who is the Architect; whose is the great, leading, essential Idea of such a house. It is a busy scene. Not Paul or Apollos only are “workers together with God” this time. Every Corinthian teacher, every Corinthian believer, is a co-worker too. Paul has done his part of the work; “well and truly laid” does this Master-mason declare his foundation to be. Yet more truly the “foundation” is bed-rock; of God’s “laying,” in the prehistoric ages of a wider than earthly history (Revelation 13:8; 1 Peter 1:20).

“The Church’s one Foundation

Is Jesus Christ the Lord.”

What Paul or Cephas may lay is rather the lowest courses of the masonry, which, in their turn, rest upon this “Rock of Ages” (Isaiah 26:4, margin). It is mercy and blessing to man that he is permitted, privileged, to be a worker “together with God”; but we touch the fringe of The Great Problem in all human thinking—the problem of Evil—when we see how this has entailed the invariable consequence that the design of the Great Architect never gets fairly carried out. Nor is it only that the workers blunder or are innocently incompetent; the deviation from the design of the Great Builder has a moral character. The material is bad; the building is careless; the work will be fit for nothing but the fire—very much of it. In our paragraph the building is specialised in its character. What we saw as a great house rising is now the Temple of God. And then the figure drops once more. Upon the screen are portraits; Corinthians strutting themselves in their fancied “wisdom”; He who knoweth men pronouncing His verdict: “Fools! You are only setting a trap for your own feet!” And the chapter leads up to the last solemn sentences in which is recited God’s “grant” of all men, all things, to His Church, to the individual Christian. A party said at Corinth, “We are of Christ.” The truth is far wider than that. They all “are Christ’s”; He is not “divided” (1 Corinthians 1:13); He belongs to no one party; all the parties belong to Him; as yet, all the “schisms” at Corinth have not cut off any of them from Him. The seemingly so humble “We are of Christ” too easily passes over into the miserably exclusive “We are of Christ.” “Ye are all Christ’s; all that is His is yours; all things are yours.”

II. The Church is the Temple of God.—[N.B. the, not a.] Fulfilling the age-long truth that God loves to dwell amongst men. “God with us” is the keynote in which, if Sin had not put all things out of tune, the story of the relations of God and man would have run on in one lovely strain of most perfect music. He planted His Tent in the midst of the tents of Israel in the wilderness; He accepted the Royal Palace built for Him in His capital, Jerusalem, by His viceroy Solomon. Men looked from their housetops in the city across to the Temple; they hushed their thought as they passed beneath the boundary walls of its outer court—“The King, Jehovah, is within there!” And when their sin had cost them the presence of the occupying Shekinah-cloud, the Palace stood still, a witness to the desire of the heart of God to dwell amongst men. [All this is carried out in chap, 6, where see.] The word used is that for the actual Temple building, the Naos or Shrine. Around this lay broad outer courts, the outermost and largest being open to the world, the Court of (even) the Gentiles. It was an ill day for the Church when it added a great outer court, the Court of the World. In a true sense, perhaps, like the Court of the Gentiles, it may be included in the Hieron. The outer Court of the World does stand in a true relation to God. But the ill-day is when the court of the baptized, or unbaptized, world is counted part of the Naos; when the sacred name which belongs to the Shrine only is extended to the outer court, to the great confusion of thought and discipline and practice. “Ye are the Naos.” The Church with the “indwelling” of the “Spirit of God” is the present-day embodiment and exhibition of God’s Thought. [Not the last; the last but one. The last and most perfect is in Revelation 21:3. And in heaven to-day is another, concurrent, exhibition of it, where He sits who is, and will eternally be, the God-man. (The two are one: Ephesians 1:23).] The individual and the collective modifications of Paul’s illustrations are combined in 1 Peter 2:5. The whole building is instinct with Life, because every single stone is “living.” Peter’s figure hardly bears, even in a reader’s mind, to be put into visible shape. The truth is clear. The Temple is built up of temples. Men whose body is a temple, and they alone, build up the Temple of God. But there is a presence of God which specially belongs to the Church as such.

III. “Defile” and “destroy” are the same word.—A vox media, for which Evans suggests “mar.” Sin, as so often is repaid in kind. It shapes, as well as earns, its own punishment. [In part, a sinner makes his own kind of hell.] The man who does anything in the corporate life of the Church, which is a “grief” and an offence to the Divine Tenant of the Temple of to-day, shall find that he has grieved the Spirit of his personal life. It is the One Spirit of Holiness who everywhere, in church or soul, makes its most grievous penalty His own withdrawal. Let the life of the body depart, and from that moment it begins to be “marred” and “destroyed” by disintegrating moral corruption. In this particular instance the “defiling” is done by the introduction of party spirit, and by the introduction of the “wood, hay, stubble” into the structure, whether of Church order or Christian doctrine, or personal character and life; not to add by the envying and strife which proved the Corinthians “yet carnal.” Let every man in Corinth watch not only lest he offend against the holiness of his personal Christian life, but be jealous of anything which might impinge upon the corporate holiness of The Church of Christ. Let every Corinthian enrol himself in the honourable Guild of the Temple-guardians [lit. “Temple-sweepers,” Acts 19:35] of the shrine of the great God and His Spirit.