1 Corinthians 10:3-4

“And did all eat the same spiritual meat; 4. And did all drink the same spiritual drink; for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them; and that Rock was Christ.”

As the Holy Supper serves to maintain in salvation those who have entered into it by the faith professed in baptism, so the Israelites also received, after the initial deliverance, the favours necessary to their preservation. These benefits, corresponding to the bread and wine of the Supper, were the manna daily received, and the water which God caused to issue from a rock in two cases of exceptional distress. The epithet πνευματικός, spiritual, cannot refer to the nature of these two Divine gifts; for they were material in substance. We may interpret it in two ways: either in the sense of typical, if we regard the material gift as the figure of a higher and future one; or in the sense of supernatural, in so far as these gifts were the immediate products of creative energy, regarded as proceeding from the Divine Spirit (Genesis 1:2; Psa 33:6). I doubt whether examples can be quoted sufficient to establish the first of these two meanings; Revelation 11:8, the only passage adduced by Edwards, is not convincing. The second meaning, on the contrary, is in harmony with biblical language in general and with that of the apostle in particular, though Holsten alleges the contrary; comp. Galatians 4:29. Moreover, it must be considered that the first meaning, by lowering the gifts made to the Israelites to the level of mere figures, would so far diminish the force of the argument; while the second, by representing them as miraculous gifts, gives it additional solidity: Heavenly food, and He did not save them! Supernatural water, and those who drank it perished under condemnation! The pronoun τὸ αὐτό, the same (food), does not refer, as is thought by Calvin and Heinrici, to the identity of these gifts with those bestowed on Christians. The one point in question is the relation of the Israelites to one another. All partook equally of this miraculous nourishment; and two were saved!

Vv. 4. Paul here refers to the two events related Exo 17:6 and Numbers 20:11. The miraculous character of the water which came from the rock is explained by the following proposition (for); it follows from the spiritual nature of the rock whence it flowed. The word spiritual cannot therefore have here a meaning exactly similar to that which it had in the foregoing propositions. There this epithet denoted the supernatural origin of the material gifts. Applied, as it is here, to the source of the miraculous water, it can only designate the nature of the rock; for it is this nature which explains the creative energy that was inherent in it and the supernatural effects it could produce. To produce this supernatural water, there was needed a rock Divine in its nature. Several commentators, Rückert, Baur, de Wette, Meyer (1st edns.), have thought that Paul was here appropriating the Rabbinical fable, according to which a material rock rolled over hill and dale across the desert beside the camp of the Israelites, so as to supply them with the water they needed; it was Miriam, Moses' sister, who above all was said to possess the secret of getting this water. But how can we imagine for a moment the most spiritual of the apostles holding and teaching the Churches such puerilities? In any case, even if he meant to allude to so ridiculous a fable, which we greatly doubt, he has done so in such a way as to make palpable the wide divergence between the Rabbinical opinion and his own.

In fact, the object of the two epithets ἀκολουθούσης and πνευματικῆς, accompanying and spiritual, is certainly to distinguish exactly the invisible and spiritual Rock of which he himself speaks, from the material rock spoken of in Exodus, that of which the Lord said to Moses the first time: “I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb, and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it,” and the second time in the wilderness of Sin: “Take the rod...and speak to the rock..., and thou shalt bring forth water from the rock.” These two rocks already stood there when Israel arrived in these localities, and they remained there when Israel left them. Paul, therefore, can only mean one thing: that behind these material and immoveable rocks, there was one invisible and moveable, the true giver of the water, to wit, the Christ Himself. If anyhow such is the meaning of the narrative of Exodus, in Paul's view, where is place left for a third sort of rock at once spiritual and material and of a nature wholly incomprehensible? The imperfect ἔπινον, drank, indicates duration, a repetition of similar cases; and this because the spiritual Rock was always present in the mysterious cloud which accompanied Israel. This is what the apostle expresses when he adds: and that Rock was Christ. Meyer, after abandoning his first explanation, adopts the view, since his 4th ed., that these words constrain us to hold that Paul regarded the Rock as a visible and real manifestation of the Christ, who accompanied Israel in the cloud, according to the words of the Targum of Isaiah (1 Corinthians 16:1) and of Philo, who say that “the rock was wisdom. ”

But the idea of the incarnation of the Christ in a rock is so contrary to the spirit of St. Paul, that one cannot entertain it seriously, and 1 Corinthians 10:9 represents the Christ in the wilderness acting as the representative of Jehovah, from the midst of the cloud! Is it not perfectly simple to explain this figure of which Paul makes use, by the numerous sayings of Deuteronomy, in which the Lord is called the Rock of Israel: “The Rock, His work is perfect” (Deu 32:4); “Israel lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation” (Deu 32:15); “Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful” (Deu 32:18), etc., and by all those similar ones of Isaiah: “Thou hast not been mindful of the Rock of thy strength” (Isaiah 17:10); “in the Lord is the Rock of ages” (Isaiah 26:4)? Only, what is special in the passage of Paul is, that this title of Rock of Israel, during the wilderness history, is ascribed here, not to Jehovah, but to the Christ. The passage forms an analogy to the words John 12:41, where the apostle applies to Jesus the vision in which Isaiah beholds Adonai, the Lord, in the temple of His glory (ch. 6). Christ is represented in these passages, by Paul and John, as pre-existent before His coming to the earth, and presiding over the theocratic history. In ch. 1 Corinthians 8:6, Paul had designated Christ as the Being by whom God created all things. Here he represents Him as the Divine Being who accompanied God's people in the cloud through the wilderness, and who gave them the deliverances which they needed. We have the same view here as appears in the angel of the Lord, so often identified in Genesis with the Lord Himself, and yet distinct from Him, in the Being who is called in Isaiah the angel of His presence (Isaiah 63:9), and in Malachi the angel of the covenant, Adonai (Mal 3:1), the Mediator between God and the world, specially with a view to the work of salvation. It is easy to understand the relation there is between the mention of this great theocratic fact and the idea which the apostle wishes to express in our passage. The spiritual homogeneity of the two covenants, and of the gifts accompanying them, rests on this identity of the Divine head of both. The practical consequence is obvious at a glance: Christ lived in the midst of the ancient people, and the people perished! How can you think yourselves, you Christians, secure from the same lot!

It is clear that there is no good ground for holding, as Holsten does, the second part of this verse to be interpolated. It enters perfectly into the course of the argument.

Reuss alleges that with such a conception of history as the apostle here expresses, “one comes very near seeing nothing more in it than pure allegories, and not realities.” It seems as if this critic would like to make St. Paul the forerunner of his own critical system. He forgets that it is one thing to derive a moral application from an accomplished fact, and another to assert that the fact itself is only an illustration of the moral idea.

It has been justly observed that in this passage we find for the first time the combination of the two sacred acts of baptism and the Lord's Supper, as forming a complete whole: the one representing the grace of entrance into the new life, the other the grace by which we are maintained and strengthened in it. The combination of these two acts, under the particular name of sacraments, is not therefore an arbitrary invention of dogmatic.

The Israelites, after their exodus from Egypt, all received Divine favours analogous though inferior to those which Christians themselves enjoy; and, notwithstanding, what a judgment!