1 Corinthians 3
TLBC1 Corinthians 3:5-9
God’s Workmen, the Apostles; God’s Workmanship, the Church (3:5-4:21) The Apostles’ Unity in Service (3:5-9) You might expect, after all Paul’s talk of “spiritual” and “unspiritual” men, that the “spiritual” were clear out of this world, that “spiritual” truths are so lofty they cannot be expressed in human language. Far from it. You can make a simple diagram to show Paul’s idea here. Unspiritual men: discord, quarreling. Spiritual men: harmony, unity. The “babes in Christ” are spiritual men who keep acting like unspiritual ones. Church quarrels are just as mean and unreasonable as any other kind of quarrel. It is unreasonable, and ridiculous too, to quarrel about which apostle is the Top Apostle. All three men whose names marked the parties in the Corinth church are simply God’s workmen on God’s farm, and the Corinthian Christians are the farm itself. The famous sentence, “We are fellow workmen for God,” or better, “We are fellow workers with God” (3:9; see also margin), does not here mean Paul and the Corinthians, it means Paul and Apollos and Cephas.
1 Corinthians 3:10-23
The Church’s Unity in Christ (3:10-23) Without warning, Paul changes metaphors. He often does this in the middle of a stream of thought. A moment ago the Church was a field where God’s laborers worked; now it is a building on which God’s stonemasons are employed. (This is the passage back of the famous hymn, “The Church’s One Foundation.”) The building is a temple. Elsewhere Paul thinks of individual Christians’ bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit (I Cor. 6:19), but here and in II Corinthians 6:16 it is the Christian community which is such a temple. At this point Paul puts in another word for Christian unity. To split a church is like wrecking a beautiful building. Indeed, splitting a church is one of the worst sins, just because the temple of God is holy. Finally— yet not quite finally— Paul rises in an eloquent appeal: why do you quarrel as if Paul and Apollos and Peter were things to be owned and fought over? “All things are yours” (3:21)— all these leaders belong to all of you, they are not only God’s servants but yours. That is all Paul needed to write, but he goes on in one of his great sayings: not only do these men belong to you, but so do the world, life, death, the present, the future. And they belong to you because you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God.