1 Corinthians 3:10-15 - The Preacher's Homiletical Commentary (2024)

CRITICAL NOTES

1 Corinthians 3:10.—Was given … I laid, q.d. “when I was at Corinth.” “A foundation,” “which I subjectively laid in my teaching at Corinth, because God had already laid the same objectively in heaven” (Evans). “Laid objectively for the whole Church in the Great Facts [by God], … laid subjectively in the hearts of the Christians at Corinth as the firm ground of their personal hopes by Paul” (Beet).

1 Corinthians 3:11.—See Homiletic Analysis; also Appended Note. No valid analogy to warrant the application of this to the doctrine of Purgatory. This rests upon (a) the distinction drawn between venial and mortal sins with temporal and eternal penalties attached, and (b) the doctrine of merit. The temporal penalty of sins not “paid off” at the date of death must be “paid up” in Purgatory fire. The accumulated stock of merit, of Christ and the saints—a surplus beyond their own requirements—may be drawn upon by an indulgence, and the amount be applied to reducing the purgatorial term.

HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 3:10

Work tried by Fire.

I. The imagery employed.—Ancient cities, and some modern ones (e.g. St. Petersburg), not so sharply divided into rich quarters and poor quarters as often the case with us. Houses of highest and humblest much more closely associated and intermingled. Palace and hovel might literally jostle. Buildings adorned with costly marbles [=“precious stones”], perhaps made priceless by the lavished art of the sculptor, stood surrounded with (sometimes literal “lean-to”) houses of stucco, of wood, or even of clay, thatched with hay and stubble, the houses of the artisan, the poor, the slave. St. Paul sees the work of a great fire, such as that which under Nero was made the occasion of a great persecution of the Christians, or that which a century before, on the capture of Corinth itself by Memmius, had laid the city in ruin. [Not to be made too precise, but may be conceived of thus:] The fire breaks out (say) at midnight, in some obscure dwelling, and quickly reduces to a heap of ashes the frail tenement of “wood, hay, stubble.” It catches adjoining houses; the winds fan and spread the flames, till a whole quarter of the city is wrapped in a conflagration which seems to Paul a fit emblem of the fires of “The Day” of all days, God’s Day of testing and doom. In the morning little knots of curious spectators and of sufferers wander about the ruins, discussing the work of the night. The slave is looking for his house of wood, hay, stubble. It stood there where that heap of ashes lies. He stirs them with his foot, and lays bare the stone foundations still unconsumed. The fire could not touch those. And, like many more, the homeless man recounts to any sympathetic listeners how his own life and that of his family are all they could save out of the wreck and loss of all. They were awakened, perhaps, and saved at the very last moment, “saved through the fire.” Another little group gathers round the stronger-built and still-standing stone walls of a better class of house. Stucco, woodwork, ornament have perished; but the man who built it “has his reward” for the money and pains spent over his substantial walls. There is something, more or less, to begin with, in restoring his ruined house. Close by stands a temple or a palace, as if almost contemptuous of its ruined neighbours, as it stands in the isolation of its survival. It has passed through the ordeal almost unscathed. Contents uninjured; cunning works of the goldsmith; spoils of conquered nations,—all untouched by the fire. Its costly marbles and statues within have not felt it. Its strong walls, besmirched with smoke indeed, have defied the flames. That builder, too, has his reward. He built with good material; it stands the fire.

II. Paul’s use of the imagery.—

1. In the course of a somewhat lengthy stay in the city, Paul had founded the Church of Corinth. No man could pretend to dispute or share with him the honour of being the “master-builder,” the first to preach Christ in the city. Some little time after his departure, he sent over from Ephesus his friend Apollos to carry on the work. Apollos, an Alexandrian Jew, worked in perfect harmony of heart and aim after Paul; but perhaps felt himself more free than Paul had done to use the Alexandrian rhetoric and human learning in setting forth the Gospel. Every Greek was a born “politician,” or at least a born party man; the Corinthian Church early showed the effects of this partisan spirit within its membership. Parties sprang up with men’s names for their badges. [Little “schisms” Paul calls them, dissidences within the body, not yet grown to separations from it.] Whether we have the exact names 1 Corinthians 4:6 perhaps makes a little doubtful, nor is it clear that Paul’s list is exhaustive. Yet the characteristics and tendencies of the parties may be easily gathered.

2. There was an “Apollos” party. They liked such rhetoric as Apollos gave them, and chose to think their intelligence flattered by what of philosophy he may have employed in the shaping of the truth. Their danger was perhaps (e.g. in 1 Corinthians 15) to exalt reason at the expense of faith; we may not unreasonably think that in trying to be philosophical Christians they were denying or refining away the facts and doctrines of the Gospel, frittering away their power, or rejecting them as contrary to reason. It might not to be an unwarrantable borrowing of a modern name to call them the “rationalising” party at Corinth.

3. There was a “Cephas” party, belonging to that “wing” of the Christian Church who had been Jews, and whom at this period of Paul’s life we everywhere find dogging his footsteps, denying his Apostolic standing, often defaming his character. These at Corinth glorified Peter,—no, “Cephas.” “Call him by his honest Hebrew name!” Old school men, who could not so rapidly or readily unlearn as Paul had done the habits and training and teaching of years; who mistrusted him as “sadly radical”; who, though Christians, sought to enforce upon the Gentiles the worn-out ritual of Moses’ law and the now meaningless circumcision. Old style, conservative men, with a leaning to ceremonialism. The “ritual” party.
4. “No,” said another party. “We stand by Paul. He will have none of your Law for Christians. We will have none of it. He is a ‘liberty’ man. We are ‘liberty’ men too.” Only, where he meant the formal law of Moses, they meant the very principle of law itself. When he taught “liberty,” they interpreted “licence,” and some lived “licentiousness.” The Christian Church from the beginning has always had some too “liberal” in thought and in practice.
5. Yet one party more. They owned no human teacher, indeed. They had climbed to a sublime, serene height far above where their poor, misguided brethren were rallying round, and fighting over, this man or that, Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas. Possibly hyper-conservatives, fresh from the Lord’s brother, James, in Jerusalem; at all events, they said, “We are of Christ!” A beautiful party-cry; very attractive to the unwary and simple-hearted. But when it means “Christ as we understand Him” it is not quite so beautiful.
6. So, then, to the Church at Corinth had happened on a small scale what has been happening in the Church of Christ ever since. These were all Christians as yet. The differences between them and their heathen or Jewish neighbours were far greater than those which distinguished them from each other. All acknowledged one Divine Head, and had some great doctrines connected with Him as a bond of union. But some of them were building up the Church [and Christian lives] with doctrine and practice which Paul regarded as “wood, hay, stubble”; useless at best, and sure to perish in “The Day,” when God’s judgment should “try every man’s work, of what sort it is.” Some there were, he knew, who happily were building after his own heart and judgment, “gold, silver, precious stone.” Great should be their reward! Some also there were whose work gave him only mingled satisfaction. “Every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour,” partly according to how much he has done, but still more according to what kind of work he has done. Of those for whom he feared that they should find the labour of their life wasted, yet he hoped they should at least “save themselves,” if even like men snatched out of the flames which left them nothing but “their foundation” and “their lives.” [The opening words of the paragraph suggest:] “Woe to any builders whose work should really be a disturbing of the very Foundation itself, other than which none may lay a basis for faith, or life, or hope.”

7. These Church parties at Corinth were our modern “Churches” and “sects” in miniature. The causes at work at Corinth have never ceased to work wherever we have Christian men, until we have a Christianity not even outwardly at one. Yet we need to give Paul’s recognition that they are nearer to each other than to the world outside. Their unity is a more striking and deep thing than their diversities. They are one Church still. The broadest and deepest diversities at Corinth were still within the Church, insomuch as they were only surface cleavages; they did not run down into the foundation. That was one. Men weep because there is not external unity of all the Churches in one communion. As well weep that the sapling, which a thousand years ago was one simple undivided stem, has branched out into the oak with its hundred arms, many of them really big trees themselves. The branching is an inevitable consequence of life. And the tree is one at stock and root. Minds will always differ in cast and capacity. Training is of endless diversity. Race will make a difference. No one man ever sees the whole round of a truth; hardly any one Church or age does; no two ever see the same phase of presentation of it. There will always be men liable to pay too great honour to Reason; always some too ready to insist upon and overvalue Ceremonial. Reasons convincing to one do not appeal to another. An order of service not to the taste of one suits another and helps him. And so on, in endless diversity. What then? Recognise the fact that the diversity is a necessity. It has often become an evil; it need not be, and will not be, when men become broad as Paul, and recognise other patterns of doctrine and life and church order as all fairly to be included in the One Church. 8. It were a good thing for some to be as narrow as Paul about the “One Foundation.” It is unreal “liberality” to attempt to include within the “Christian” Church both those whose Christ is God-man, the Father’s equal and man’s fellow, Messiah of the Jews, Mediator for the Race, and, on the other side, those whose Jesus is at the highest a creature whom His Creator could annihilate, and who was perhaps a mere man, who might or even did make mistakes, a man not superior to Paul, and to whom Christianity owes not more than it does to Paul. Their status and acceptance before God depend on other considerations, but they are not on the Foundation in Paul’s sense. The lesson of the paragraph is not indifference to what a man believes, or what his neighbour believes, or how he works or worships. Each should be honest and earnest in accepting and living and defending that special aspect or portion of The Truth, which he or his Church sees. Experience shows that, as a rule, they do most for the broad work of Christ who work with a fixed creed and with a definite Church attachment. Each should give and claim equal recognition. The paragraph teaches charity, since experience also teaches that perfectly honest church-and creed-builders have built in what others saw clearly was “wood, hay, stubble,” and have rejected what some saw was “precious stone,” if not “gold” or “silver,” of system and doctrine. Probably no uninspired teacher ever built upon the One Foundation nothing but what would endure the fire.

III. A personal application of the words lies not far from this.—

1. If a man is to be saved in “The Day” of God’s judgment, Christ must be the foundation of his life. “Saved” and “perishing” (2 Corinthians 2:15) mingle together it the closest intercourse of life, with closest similarity of outward course and bearing. Indeed, sometimes the balance of amiability or of strict probity seems to be on the side of the “perishing.” What is there to make Paul’s classification so sharply definite?

2. Dig down to the foundations of the two lives.—In the man really “being saved” this is the starting-point: Time was when he felt himself a sinner, guilty before God, and his heart full of sin. He cast himself on God’s mercy in Christ; he was forgiven; ever since, the Spirit has dwelt in him, doing something towards cleansing the heart, and putting there a new motive for all he does and feels—love to God who gave him Christ. If not, he is not a Christian. Others are “perishing,” because, go back far as we will, dig down deeply as we may, we cannot find that. There never was the fundamental experience of “sin” and of “faith in Christ” as the “spiritual man” understands them. Reform may only be throwing the arch of a culvert over the sin of the past and the sin of the heart; the man covered up his past and began to build the new life over it. But there, lowest of all, are the past and the sin, not Christ and His atonement. The other foundation and beginning of all life-building is Rock! [Turning over a new leaf is a good thing if it do not mean simply fastening down the old, without having first the record “blotted out.”] The superstructure of Eddystone Lighthouse was good enough when it was removed a few years ago; but the sea was undermining the foundation. A good superstructure upon a good foundation: lesson the first.

3. Then build something upon the foundation.—See in the suburbs of growing towns unfinished property. Walls of a certain height, but left unfinished; perhaps hardly more than the foundations got in when the money failed. Ground lies waste; weeds grow, rubbish accumulates, till it becomes difficult to see without some search whether there are any foundations at all. Like some lives. The true foundation was made right some years ago, but scarcely anything has been put upon it since. The accumulations of a worldly life have gathered, until an observer—and perhaps the man himself—hardly knows whether the foundations are still there. Rear a Christian character; build a superstructure of work for Christ. No better evidence that the foundation is there, and is sound, than the growing, fair superstructure. Build something. Some builders never get very far. What they build is good—stone, if not gold or silver, but it never amounts to much. A day’s unfaithfulness pulls down a week’s building. “Sinning and repenting.” “Ever learning, never coming to the knowledge of the truth.”

4. Build something every day.—“How did Michael Angelo accomplish so much?” “Nulla dies sine linea!” he replied. No day without something which will endure the testing fire: this will be the secret of some very unobtrusive, little-noticed lives which by-and-by are crowned with large reward when the reward is according to the work—in amount as well as quality (cf. supra).

5. Test all employments by this.—“Will they stand ‘the fire’? Do they now help towards an abiding, thorough Christian character? Or are the things I have done to-day mere ‘wood, hay, stubble,’ sure to perish?”

6. Build something to-day; at least, find the foundation to-day.—If to lay the one and only foundation [so far as we can be said to lay it at all] were the last act of a wasted life, the builder should escape “saved as by fire.” But it would be a very unworthy use to make of Christ and His salvation. “To-day.”