1 Corinthians 4

1 Corinthians 4:8-21

XVI THE REVOLT AGAINST PAUL’S 1 Corinthians 4:8-21; 1 Corinthians 9:1-27. In the last chapter this question was asked, “Who questioned Paul’s authority?” And our answer was, “Visiting brethren from Jerusalem,” and we discussed the various grounds upon which they based their questionings. Paul’s reply is found in 1 Corinthians 4:8-21; 1 Corinthians 9:1-27; and three or four verses in 1 Corinthians 15. We take two sections somewhat distant apart and put them together in order to put everything together that bears upon the discussion.

The first charge was that he was not one of the original twelve. He admits the allegation, but denies the deduction. Jesus Christ had as much right to appoint an apostle after his resurrection as he had while in the flesh. It will be remembered that in Acts I, through the Spirit, Matthias, not one of the original twelve, was numbered with the twelve, received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and became in every way a qualified apostle of Jesus Christ. Paul was as truly appointed an apostle by the will of God as Peter was. There never was any more definite or important a transaction than his meeting the Lord on the way to Damascus at which time he was not only converted, but was specially called into the apostolic office.

Over and over again in his letters and in his life are evidences that the Lord not only originally called him, but appeared to him many times in confirmation of that call. So he well says in commencing this letter, “Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ, through the will of God.”

Then they charged that he had not seen Jesus in the flesh. He admits the fact, but he says it is altogether unimportant whether he had seen Jesus in the flesh or not. He had seen him after he rose from the dead, and that was the point upon which the apostleship rested. That he had seen the risen Lord constituted his qualification to be a witness as an apostle. They charged that he had not exercised his apostolic authority in vindicating himself by punitive judgments on those that questioned him. Peter had Ananias and Sapphira struck dead for telling a lie.

It is said that Paul talked big enough, but did not act. To that Paul replies that on account of mercy he had refrained from vindicating, by punitive right, his power, but that he had a right and could exercise it, and when he got among them he would do it unless they repented of the wrongs that they had done.

They charged that he had not exacted apostolic support for himself and wife. They argued that he, in his own conscience, did not feel entitled to it. His reply to that is superb, and is completely unanswerable. He commences with 1 Corinthians 9:1, which is the chapter of the Bible on the scriptural grounds for ministerial support, by saying, “Am I not free?” This matter of support is a right, not a duty. “May I not waive the right ‘if I choose?” There are some things we can waive if we choose to do so.

A certain man whom I knew, an exceedingly eccentric man, was, as a widower, paying his addresses to a widow. The lady said when he asked her to marry him, “I have some objections to marrying you.” He said, “I have a great many objections to marrying you, but I waive them.”

Next, Paul gives the reasons why he waived the right. They were missionary reasons. If he had come there and made his first speech on their paying him a salary, nobody would have listened to him. It was not after the plan of God’s gospel that a missionary, reaching territory that had never been occupied, should lay great stress on the people’s paying him to preach to them. The next is, that his desires were for them, not for their money: “I coveted you for Christ, and not anything that you had.” Third, as a matter of fact it was not true, since in part he bad been supported while among them, through a contribution of the church. Next, that he labored with his own hands, not because an apostle had to do that, but because it was a necessity for an important lesson to them in that community.

Tens of thousands of Corinthians were loafers. Paul wanted to be able to say, “You remember – you people who won’t work – that when I was among you I worked by night and preached to you by day. These hands ministered unto my support in order that you might understand that he who won’t work should not eat.” There is no sentimentality about Paul on the beggar question. They charged that he had exacted no pay for his preaching. He replied that that did not make him inferior, but made them inferior: “For what is there wherein ye were made inferior to the rest of the churches, except it be that ye were brought to Christ and established and built up by my ministry, and ye did not pay me a cent?” Then he said, “Forgive me this wrong. It was wrong for me to waive my right to a support that you should not be instructed to minister to those who minister to you.” Then he goes on to prove his right.

To the end of time, 1 Corinthians 9, will be the chapter in the New Testament on the subject of ministerial support. I once took as a text this scripture: “My defense to them that examine me is this.” They put him upon examination. He bases his answer, first, upon analogy from human conduct in other things, and cites three things: First, the soldier: “Who goeth forth to warfare at his own charges?” They objected to a preacher being supported for his ministry. On all sides these people could see soldiers. “Do they pay for their rations, their uniforms, their weapons, their hospital in which they stay, and the medicine which they take?” It would be impossible to have an army permanently without setting aside from some source adequate support for them. So applying that analogy to the preacher, why may he not have a right to a support? Paul might have gone further: Officers in the army are not merely provided for the field, but are educated at national expense, like Army cadets at West Point, or Naval cadets at Annapolis.

My wife’s brother, Willie Harrison, is in the Navy. I remember well when he was just a boy he entered Annapolis as a cadet. He knew no more about a ship than he did about a balloon. He is now lieutenant on one of the great battleships, and has charge of a most responsible position in its navigation. I went to see him a few years ago and went all over the yards at Annapolis, Washington, and Baltimore. It became perfectly evident to me that no untrained man could be a naval officer. His training must commence very early. As protected those enormous guns, I realized that one slight mishap in the process of making defensive armor that take and the whole ship would blow up, and that the keenest, highest education was necessary in order to know how to handle those ships in time of war.

Then he cites the case of the vine-dresser: “Who planteth a vineyard and eateth not the fruit thereof?” One cannot drag a man to a piece of ground, make him clear it, cultivate and gather the grapes, and not pay him anything. He asks: “Who feedeth the flock and eateth not of the milk of the flock.” Will a Texas cowboy take charge of a herd of cattle, watch by day and night, nearly kill himself avoiding a stampede, be burned in the sun, and do all for nothing? Hasn’t he a right to a piece of beef, to milk and butter? Or if it be sheep, to a piece of mutton, or to woolen clothes? That argument is perfectly unanswerable.

Second, he appeals to the law of Moses. The Jews were questioning his right. He refers to their law, “Say I these things as a man? It is written in the law of Moses. Does the Mosaic law forbid a man to muzzle his ox that is threshing the grain?” In those days they threshed the grain by oxen treading on it continuously. That was their primitive way of threshing. “Now would you begrudge an ox his food if he stooped to get a bite of grain?

The Mosaic law forbids you to muzzle the ox that treads out the grain. If it be a sin to muzzle an ox, is it not a greater sin to muzzle a man that brings the message of eternal life to the people? He brings not the bread of earth, but the bread of heaven. Certainly it applies more to men than to oxen.” He says, “If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things? The preacher finds you in darkness under the power of Satan, lost; and in tears and love he pleads with you and you are led to Christ and find eternal life. The spiritual things to which he leads you are worth more than all the world.

Is it then unreasonable that he should reap your carnal things?” In other words, a man who by the grace of God and through the ministry of a faithful preacher has been led to eternal life and made a partaker of the inheritance of the saints, who would grudge help in a carnal way to the one who had been the means of his salvation, would certainly throw a question over his salvation.

Notice his next argument, viz.: their own conduct: “If there be those who are partakers of this power over you, are not we rather?” In other words, “The preachers you have had, you have paid for their services. You concede the right to Peter and others, and if this support is for them, why not Paul? Ask yourselves which one of these led you to salvation. Paul is the one that found you and led you out of darkness into light.” Then he passes to his next argument, still on the law of Moses, the Levites, and the priests: “Do you know that they who minister about the holy things of life, of the things in the Temple, and they which wait at the altar are partakers of the altar? The tribe of Levi, which had no territory given to them, had become the Lord’s servants to do the Lord’s work and minister to the Lord’s sanctuary, and the Lord provides for their support.”

He thus makes the application of these five distinct arguments: “Even so did the Lord ordain that they that preach the gospel should live of the gospel.” It certainly is an important declaration. As a government maintains its soldiers, and when they get old and feeble, it provides hospitals and infirmaries, and when officers are retired they receive half pay, so “God hath ordained that they that preach the gospel should live of the gospel.”

When Christ sent out his apostles he commanded them to take no means of support, saying, “The laborer is worthy of his meat and his hire.” In other words, “I would be a very poor employer if I sent you out to confine your attention strictly to my work, and make you hustle to get your living from other things.” Wherever there is no adequate provision for ministerial support, and the preacher must do things for his living, run a farm or practice medicine, we may rest assured that he cannot give his undivided attention to the ministry, and that churches that receive that kind of ministry do not receive the full work of the ministry. The calamity in that case is on the church. Oftentimes it is downright covetousness that is the cause of it. Churches think we can get Brother So-and-so for fifty dollars a year, and we can just have preaching once a month. Can a church prosper on once a month’s preaching?

I have always taken this position: If any preacher, truly called of God to preach, will implicitly trust, not the churches, but the Lord Jesus Christ to take care of him, and will consecrate his entire time to the work of the ministry, verily he shall be clothed and fed, or else the heavens will fall, and God’s word will not be so.

I made that statement once and some of the brethren questioned it. I still stand on it.

If I were a young man again, I would do just as I did then, burn all the bridges behind and push out on the promises of God, that perhaps not in my way, not in the church’s way, but in some way the Lord Jesus Christ would take care of my wife and children.

I would say in my heart, “I am God’s man; I am to go out as his minister, to do his work, to do no other business; and sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I will trust the Lord and stick to my work.” I have tried trusting Jesus and he has never failed; I have had men to lie to me straight-out; I have had 1,000 promises to fail, coming from men, but never has any promise of God failed that he has ever made.

An illustration on this point occurred at an early day in Waco. We had a very skeptical man there, Mr. Berry, whom Dr. Burleson invited to attend an association. He had no buggy, and so Dr. Burleson said, “You may ride with me.” When he saw Dr. Burleson’s shabby old buggy and rattletrap harness and lean, raw-boned horse, he said, “Dr. Burleson, you have faith that you will get there in that buggy, but I have not; I am going to get a buggy from the livery stable.” But Dr. Burleson beat him there just the same. I have known preachers to get there in ramshackle buggies and pieced-out harness, tied with shoe-strings. Once I saw a collar on a horse tied with a necktie, and the preacher had to preach without one, but “he got there just the same.”

When Jesus gave the commission he said, “These things shall follow: If a serpent bite you, or you drink deadly poison, it will not hurt you.” They applied that to Paul and said, “We infer from your extraordinary afflictions – the Roman lictors, the stripes and scourges of the Jews, and the thorn in your flesh, and that bad eyesight, that if you were an apostle of the Lord he would take care of you.” His reply to that is certainly great. It is in 1 Corinthians 4:9 : “I think God hath set us, the apostles, last of all, as men doomed to death; for we are made a spectacle unto the world (kosmos), both to angels and men. . . . Even unto this present hour we both hunger and thirst and are naked.” In other words, “You bring up that charge against me and I accent the facts, but it is worse than you know. You are rich from our labors; you are kings through our labors. We are weak and poor and suffering.” Just as Jesus, the Captain of our salvation, was made perfect through suffering, these apostolic leaders were to share his suffering and fill up what remained, and to bear all things.

A demonstration was needed upon this subject, and therefore he says, “I glory in it.” The word “spectacle” was taken from the custom of the amphitheater where from 50,000-200,000 people were gathered – as many as could be gathered in the great Roman amphitheater – and down below a gladiator was to fight a Numidian lion or a Bengal tiger. High upon the platform was the emperor and his suite, and all around in this semicircle thousands of the people were gathered, and that man was the spectacle. He fights the wild beast, and as his blood gushes out of his wounds he salutes the emperor and says, “Caesar, I salute thee,” and so Paul, about to make his exodus, ready to have his blood poured out as a libation, salutes the Emperor and says, “I have fought the good fight – I have kept the faith; henceforth there ‘is laid up for me the crown of righteousness.”

Again he says, not to some Roman, Corinthian, or Athenian amphitheater, but to the kosmos – to the universe of angels and men, that all the galleries of heaven are filled with the onlooking angels, and all the population of the earth have their eyes fixed upon these apostles, and they are in the arena appointed unto death. This is proof of their apostleship, as Jesus told him when he called him.

If a man is going to turn his back on the ministry on account of the suffering, the sooner the ministry is rid of him the better. If he is only going to be a sunshine, fair-weather, daylight man, who, because the darkness comes, the march is long, or the battle is terrible, or the cold severe, or the watching is trying, or the wounds are painful – if he is going to turn away from the ministry of Jesus Christ on that account – let him go.

His reply to their charges that he could not be an apostle because he was not exempt from suffering is one of the finest arguments in literature. Jesus Christ could not be Saviour according to that argument, for it was by his suffering he became Saviour.

NOTE. – The other charges given in James 2:1-26 are answered in 2 Corinthians 10:13.

1. What the second ecclesiastical disorder, who raised the question, and what the scriptures containing his masterful reply?

2. What Paul’s reply to the charge that he was not one of the original twelve, and had not seen Jesus in the flesh?

3. What his reply to the charge that he bad not exercised his apostolic authority in punitive judgments?

4. What his reply to the charge that he did not exact support for himself and wife?

5. What the condition at Corinth that made it necessary for him to waive this right?

6. What reflection on them does Paul show in his second letter that they had allowed him to waive his right in the matter of support?

7. What good text on ministerial support cited?

8. What three instances of human conduct does he cite in defense of ministerial support?

9. What his argument from the law of Moses relating to the ox?

10, What his argument from the benefit they received?

11. What his argument from their own conduct?

12. What his argument based on the support of the priests and Levites?

13. What the general application of the five preceding distinctive arguments?

14. What the teaching of Christ on this same line?

15. What the result generally of a poorly paid ministry?

16. What the author’s position with regard to the preacher and his support?

17. What Paul’s reply to the charge that he had extraordinary afflictions?

18. What the origin and application of the word “spectacle” as used here?

19 What Paul’s reply to the charge that his was not the true gospel?

20. What Paul’s reply to the charge that he did a great many foolish things?

21. What Paul’s reply to the charge that he had bodily infirmities and weaknesses?

22. What his reply to the charge that he was against the law of Moses?

23. What his reply to the charge that he was a preacher to the Gentiles?

NOTE: For answer to questions 19-23, study carefully the scriptures cited, and for continuation of the discussion of this subject see last chapter in this book.