Gooding, David: What the Church Must Rediscover

Now, you have asked me this afternoon, as the s- first speaker in this succession, first to give a survey of the first epistle by Paul to the Corinthians, and then to comment on its first two chapters, and to do all in the space of thirty five to forty minutes, from which it is obvious that you believe that the age of miracles has not yet passed. Now, introductions can take many forms, can they not? Some of them go into great details, such as the name of the author and who were his parents and where he was born and when he was born and where he was brought up. And then, after several pages of that, they come to the date of his writing and the circumstances in which he wrote it, and after that also to the people to whom he wrote, and who were they, and what were they, and what were their circumstances, and so forth. And then as to the validity of the manuscripts upon which we're dependent for our reconstruction of the text. All that this afternoon I shall pass over in silence, because you can find it written in the many, many commentaries that have such introductions, and written in much more clear English than I could possibly command. What I will attempt to do now is to give two simple surveys of some of the prominent features of the general landscape of this epistle, so that as throughout the hours of the day you come to consider the detail, you may be able to put them in their proper perspective against the major themes of the epistle. And having done that briefly, I will then attempt to sum up the point and purpose of chapters one and two. The Corinthians, to whom this letter was written, our ancient brothers and sisters in Christ, were, one might say, a very reliable group of believers. If there were two ways of doing a thing, the right way and the wrong way, they could be relied upon to do it the wrong way. Only I must temper my language about them, mustn't I, by the memory that one of these days perhaps I must meet them in glory. And if I speak too severely of them, perhaps they will then accost me and want to know why then was I guilty of the same things of which they were guilty when I criticized them so severely. Nonetheless, the interesting thing about them is not their fault so much, though they too are instructive for us, but the way in which Paul goes about correcting their faults. From time to time, of course, he issues his apostolic commands, and when necessary, he doesn't hesitate to do so. If anybody is spiritual, says he, let him recognize that the things that I write are the commandments of the Lord. At the same time, what interests me particularly is the way he generally goes about correcting the misdemeanors and faults of his fellow believers. For he does so time and time again by bringing the Corinthians back to the basic principles of the fundamental Christian gospel. In other words, he doesn't correct their faults merely by turning up the rule book and quoting Rule two hundred and seventy five, subsection C, Roman figure one. What he does is to analyze their situation in the light of the basic principles of the fundamental Christian gospel, and constantly and again he is seeking to draw back the believers to the gospel message of Jesus Christ, our Lord. So let's follow him in the text. You may have it in your hand. I have not time to read it in detail, but let's follow him as he proceeds to do this. In chapters one to four, for instance, he's telling them that they must stop this incipient denominational labeling of themselves, this party strife within the church. And why must they stop it? Because, says he, it conflicts with the fundamental message of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. In engaging in this party strife, they are living inconsistently what with what is the basic gospel message that Jesus Christ, our Lord, was crucified for us. Or if you move over into chapters five, six, and seven, Paul is there to be heard rebuking them once more. You just cannot carry on like you're carrying on, says he, of permitting immorality such as would shock even a pagan Greek. And why must you stop that immorality? Because, says he, it is contrary to the fundamental gospel that we Christians preach. Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us, to deliver us from bondage to Satan and to sin. But just as in Israel, the Passover had to be kept simultaneously and inseparably from the Feast of Unleavened Bread, so it is with us, says Paul. Our Christian gospel is not merely that Christ died as our Passover lamb to deliver us from bondage. Our Christian gospel contains as an inseparable element that those who are delivered from the guilt of sin must be delivered from the power of sin. And to live in sin is to contradict, not some rule in the church book, it is to contradict the basic principles of the gospel. And you can't go on eating sacrifi- uh, meat sacrificed to idols in the idol's temple and appear to be taking part in ceremonies of the worship of idols, says Paul. And why can't we continue eating the table of demons? Because to eat of the table of demons, says Paul, is quite inconsistent with eating the ta- of the table of the Lord. Oh, what blessed things there are. What a wonderfully rich banquet it is that lies upon the table of the Lord. All those blessednesses of which the ancients and the moderns speak. Oh, the blessedness of the man and woman whose sins are forgiven, whose iniquities are covered, to whom the Lord will not impute iniquity, all those glorious blessings with which God has laden his table of salvation. But if we eat those fundamental blessed things, those fruits of salvation, then let us know that we must live consistently therewith, and it is utterly inconsistent with the Christian gospel and all its benefits, then to go along and to partake of the table of demons. And similarly, when Paul comes to regulate their behavior at the Lord's Supper, now come, my fellow believers, says he, this is just downright disgraceful. For you see, when you come to eat the Lord's Supper, in the result, it is utterly impossible to eat the Lord's Supper. The reason was, of course, that the Corinthians had the habit of having a love feast before the celebration of the Lord's death, and at Corinth, that love feast have got completely out of hand and turned into a mere social meal where the rich brought rich supplies and ate themselves to the full and were sizably drunken, and the poor believers, only being able to bring a crust or two, were ashamed out of their very lives and crept into a corner. And in all that self-indulgence and social discrimination, it was impossible any longer to see the significance of the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the cup in memory of the Lord Jesus. And that won't do, says Paul, to carry on like that in the church and, and so magnify the social side of it and all the distractions of that communal meal that you can't give attendance to the celebration of the Lord's body and blood. Why? That would be to contradict the very purpose for which the Lord Jesus instituted that celebration supper. When he handed us the cup, he said, this cup is the new covenant in my blood. When we come to take the cup of a Lord's day, we are, of course, to remember the terms of its institution, are we not? We have come to do dealings with God. We have come to do business with Christ as we take the cup into our hand and hear his gracious promise. I will write my law on your heart, and on your mind will I inscribe it. We must be free in mind, undistracted by any, uh, extraneous thing, so that we can have business with the Lord and say, yes, Lord, even as you died to forgive me and rose to empower me, as I take this cup, I stand with you, Lord. Please carry on and write your laws on my heart and write your laws on my mind. We can't afford to be distracted by all sorts of irrelevancies, can we, in those sacred moments? Because that would be to go counter to the very basis of the gospel and the whole point of the gospel. And come, come, he says, now the way you're carrying on with your gifts is positively childish, you know, really, if I have to say so. You know, God has endowed you with many, many gifts in Corinth, hasn't he? But the way you're using them is not profitable. Uh, you're like a lot of little children, you'll see. And the way you're carrying on using your gifts for your own gratification, regardless of the edification of the church. That must stop, and that must stop for this reason. For the way you are using your gifts positively goes against the very basic principle and motivation of Christianity. The mainspring of Christian life and ministry, says Paul, is love. And if I had not love, though I give my body to be burned, it profits of me nothing. Come, come. You are allowing behavior in the church that contradicts the very basic principle of the gospel. And when he arrives finally at chapter fifteen, it's the same message, isn't it? It wasn't some simple little aberration that they caught hold of at Corinth when they taught that the resurrection of the body was impossible. They perhaps hadn't seen the implication of the false doctrine that they had imbibed. But it was no less serious. For, says Paul, how say some of you that there is no resurrection? If there is no resurrection, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then you are yet in your sins. There isn't any gospel left to preach. Exit the whole of Christianity. So once more and again, to correct the faults of the believers at Corinth, Paul is bringing the church back to the basic fundamental principles of the gospel. And I could hope that today, as you- we study the Epistle to the Corinthians together, that the Holy Spirit may emphasize that in our heart. It is nothing but healthy, is it, for a church from time to time to come back to the basic principles of the gospel. For in my small experience and in the light of the bigger experience of church history, it seems to me that very often it is the gospel that goes. In the great evangelical awakenings, of course, people being converted straight out of the world and the darkness of paganism magnify the gospel, do they not? In every such wave of the workings of God's spirit down the centuries, the recapturing of the gospel and men and women getting converted to God. This has prov- proved to be a tremendous powerhouse, and churches have been planted all over the place, and missionaries sent out on the tidal wave of the gospel to the four corners of the earth. And the second generation keeps it up generally, but when it begins to come to the third generation... and they having been brought up in Christian homes and not having had such clear-cut conversions, the danger is that the appreciation of the gospel begins to go low. And presently, all kinds of extraneous things are brought in by way of entertainment instead of the pure gospel of Christ. And then you get a situation where the preacher doesn't know whether he's preaching to the unconverted or the converted. And the distinction between the two begins to blur itself. And people are allowed to take part of the Lord's Supper without being converted. And presently the edge of the gospel is gone. I don't remember in the northeast of England where once I lived, when I came to lodge in the house where I lodged, I was told that over the road there was a gentleman who had recently been converted to Christ. He had been an atheist, but he, so he told me one night as he was sitting by his radio, he heard Billy Graham preach on the text, How Shall We Escape? And he said, David, I was overwhelmed, David, by a sense that God was offering me something, and if I rejected it, I should never have another chance, and I knelt down by my chair, atheist though I was, and received the Savior. And he said, next day I said to myself, well, I've become a Christian, but I don't need to go back to church. I can stay where foot as I am. But he began to read scripture until he came across the verse, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together as the manner of some is. Oh, said he to himself, then I must go back to church. Which church? So he decided to go back to the church where he was brought up as a boy. There came the Sunday morning when he turned up at the door, and the elders on the door were surprised to see this atheist, as they thought, come to church, and they said, what's happened, Harry? Good to see you, but, uh, it's unusual, isn't it? What have you come to church for? Oh, he said, gentlemen, I've been saved. No, no, they said, there's nothing in that, Harry. That'll soon go. That's only a flash in the pan. It can happen, my brothers, my sister, that Christian churches lose hold of the gospel and then allow all kinds of practices that are inconsistent with the basic gospel. That's my survey number one. My survey number two is that because the epistle, the first epistle to the Corinthians contains so much reference to the gospel, here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the New Testament, we are given to see what is the Christian philosophy of man. What is the Christian view of man, that is of human beings, man in the generic sense. I would like now to point out how beautifully this epistle outlines for us, discusses at some length, the Christian philosophy of man. That isn't, as I say, surprising because of Paul's emphasis on the gospel in this epistle. What is surprising, perhaps, when we first notice it, is the beautiful way Paul has constructed his letter and arranged the subject matter of his letter. It is commonly said, isn't it, that in First Corinthians, Paul is doing two things. He has received a report with some disturbing news of misbehavior in Corinth, and he writes to correct it. Then he has received from Corinth a number of questions, and he is writing to answer those questions, and that's that, the very practical, down to earth, dealing with problems and answering of questions. Now, the First Epistle to the Corinthians is far more than that. It is written, of course, under inspiration and is very carefully ordered. Take, for instance, the fundamental matter of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. It is so fundamental to the faith, isn't it, that you might have expected that when Paul wrote to the Corinthians, that would be the very first thing he mentioned. Oh my brethren, there is this fundamental thing you're beginning to teach. There's no resurrection. That would destroy the gospel. First things first, let's put that first, the bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Actually, he leaves it till the end, last. And he has reasons for it, as presently we shall see. I advance, therefore, the thesis that here is Paul's Christianity's, if you like, philosophy of man. In chapters one to four it soon becomes evident that Paul believes that natural man is a fallen creature with perverse attitudes that can be called soulish. The soulish man, he says, doesn't understand the things of the Spirit of God. The carnal man, he says, behaves in such and such a way. And what is more, it becomes evident that according to Paul's understanding, the perverse attitudes of fallen man are perpetuating themselves in the Christian church, even though these people have been born again and have been saved. And they need to be brought back to a proper estimate of man and his relationship to God. You'll see, man didn't make himself, did he? If you will understand what a real man is, what a true humanity is, you must understand man is in his relationship to God. And the central thing of a human being's proper relationship with God, his maker, is that the human being concerned should put his confidence, his ultimate confidence, absolutely in God. God spoke it through Jeremiah and enunciated this basic principle, didn't he? Let not the wise man put his confidence in his wisdom. Let not the mighty man put his confidence in his might. Let not the rich man put his confidence in his riches. But then mankind, ever since the fall, has been inclined to do that, isn't it? We're all of us tarred with that brush. Instead of letting our confidence be in the living God, we'll put our confidence in any old thing, our wealth, our wisdom, our intellect, our homes, our families, or even in great Christian leaders like Paul and Cephas and Apollos. Instead of allowing our confidence to be utterly in God, he that has confidence, says God through Jeremiah, let him put his confidence in the Lord. Man in his relationship to God, then, chapters one, two, three and four. and the danger being Christians continuing to live as if they were unconverted and putting their confidence elsewhere. Chapters five, six, and seven are man in relation to his human body. An exceedingly important subject, of course, I needn't tell you that. Because in the ancient world, many of the pagan nations had quite a perverted view of the human body, and many major religions in the world still have a perverted view of the human body. Hindus, for instance, would tell you, and theosophy would tell you, and that misnamed Christian science affair that would tell you, that the human body is an illusion, and the best thing to do is to ignore the human body and try, like old Socrates said and Plato after him, to get as far away from the body as you can and keep your soul untainted by the body, it will say. That the body is a bad thing on the whole. That's not Christianity. To have a healthy Christianity, we have got to come to a healthy estimate of our relationship with the human body. On the other hand, the Corinthians were going to the other extreme, and they were using what they felt to be their newfound liberty in Christ, redeemed and free, to allow a permissive morality in the church. So one man in the church had his father's wife to wife, shocking even the pagan Greeks. The danger was, therefore, that Christians should desecrate the very temples of God, for your body, says Paul, is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Man in relation to God, man in relation to his body. But then chapters eight, nine, and ten, once more, man in relation to God. And here it's not a question so much of man putting his confidence somewhere else than in God. This time the danger would be that even Christian men and women would be disloyal to God and engage in forms of idolatry that would, I repeat, be utter disloyalty to God and provoke God's jealousy. It was a marvelous thing in Corinth, and still is in some parts of the world, when Christians come to believe the gospel and they are delivered from their fear of spirits and idolatry and demons and so forth, and come to know the living God, the one Lord Creator, as their personal savior. It lifts a tremendous burden of fear from their minds and drudgery from their backs. But that freedom could go into license, couldn't it? It was in the danger of so doing with the Corinthians, that freed from fear of demons, they should nonetheless feel that their freedom allowed them to partake in idolatrous meals in the temples of the pagan deities. Our Lord himself later on had to complain of the church at Thyatira, that you got that woman Jezebel there, who teaches my servants to commit adultery and to eat foods offered to idols. You'll see in many a Greek town, there were trade guilds. If you wanted to be a silversmith, it would be difficult if you weren't a member of the trade. If you were a member of the trade guild, you would be expected to go along to the dinners of your guild. At the dinners of your guild, there would be plenty of women present, but they wouldn't be the men's wives, they would be certain ladies provided by the host for the occasion. And before the meal was at, the meal would be offered as a sacrifice to the patron deity of the trade guild. And the question would arise, was it all right for a Christian businessman to go to the dinner parties of the trade guild and virtually take part in fornication or consent to its being done before their very eyes, and consent to eating food that was offered to the patron deity of the guild? And there were in the church of Thyatira teachers who said that was perfectly okay. And of course, there are teachers in the Christendom still, are there not, that tell Christian businessmen that they can be members of secret trade societies who, in their ceremonies, worship the same old pagan deities as the ancient world worshiped and stir it all up together was a pseudo-Christianity, you'll see. But it's false, isn't it? It is disloyalty to God. So in the first half of his letter, Paul is dealing with his philosophy of man, man in relation to God, danger being that man puts his trust in something else than God. Man in relation to his body, danger that he desecrate the temple of the Holy Spirit. Man in relation to God, the danger here that man be disloyal to God. But with that, we come to what is formerly the second half of the epistle. And this now has that the emphasis lies on man's relationship to Christ. And we see that if we look at chapter eleven and verse three: I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God. And I fasten your attention for a moment on that last phrase. The head of Christ is God. A phrase we could easily overlook, but what majestic wonder lies in that phrase. For if I ask myself, how is it that the second person of the Trinity, who was equal with the Father, came to have God as his head? Then I open that whole wonderful treasure box, the glorious story of the incarnation of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ, that being in the form of God, he thought it not a thing to be grasped at, to be equal with God, but emptied himself and took upon himself the form of a servant, and being found in fashion of a man, he became obedient even unto death, and that the death of the cross. Herein stands the beginning of the other side of our Christian philosophy of man. We Christians come to God through a man. His name is Jesus. Let me remind you that Abraham didn't come to God through any man. Moses never ended up his prayers in the name of the Lord Jesus. David didn't say and say give thanks to God for his son. Those Old Testament men came to God direct, didn't they? We Christians are different. We believe that for the sake of our salvation, God himself became man, truly man. And the blessed Lord Jesus as man subjected himself to the Father as his head, and all for God's glory and for our salvation. And this lies at the very heart of the gospel, does it not? For God is not just in in process of forgiving us and cleansing us and restoring us to paradise. The wonderful story of salvation is this, that God has started all over again with mankind. God has started a new race of human beings, not just patching up the old, but starting all over again, a fresh race. And the head of that race is no longer Adam, it is Jesus. This is a wonderful story. God become man, and he who was equal with God, now becoming man and obedient and accepting God as his head. Man now, therefore, in relation to Christ the head, and the Christian man in relation to Christ the head, and the Christian woman in relation to the man. The protocol of redemption. And the danger here? That as Christians we become disloyal to the Lord Jesus. How disloyal? Well, at Corinth, on the one side, by their refusal to use the God-given symbols by which we point to Jesus Christ as our head. Christian men did not pray with their heads covered. Why not? To give testimony that their head is Jesus, the Christ. And in Corinth, they were refusing those God-given symbols and thus being disloyal to the Christian gospel and to the Lord as their head. And worse still, at the Lord's Supper, they were taking the symbols of his death, doing it without thinking what they really meant. Paul had to remind them that it was on the night that the Lord Jesus was betrayed that he took bread. It's possible for us to be disloyal, isn't it, to the Lord Jesus, even at the Lord's Supper. And in chapters twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, what now? It is the believer man in relation to the body once more, but not this time his own human body, but to the body of Christ. Christ has baptized his people in one spirit into one body, and the danger here is to be disloyal to our fellow members in the body and use our gifts, but not by love. And finally, man in his relation to the Lord Jesus once more, that glorious chapter fifteen. Now is Christ risen from the dead. Hear the lovely story. The first man was of the earth, earthy. The second man, the last Adam, the Lord from heaven. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, so we shall bear the image of the heavenly. Oh, how it warms our hearts, doesn't it? What a noble salvation is this. Not just the cancellation of our debt, but the creation of a completely new order of humanity. Christ, our, our real man, the head, and the protocol of redemption. The Christ, the head of every man, and the man, the head of the woman. Man made in the image of the glory of God, and when that image was spoiled, God beginning again with the new Ad- the last Adam, the man from heaven. It is, therefore, a wonderful picture that Paul presents to us. And all of it is necessary for a complete picture, is it not? But now I come to chapters one and two, that I have to describe, not in detail, but in summary. And I recur, therefore, to the question with which Paul begins, man's false attitude towards God. The practical question was in s- what you might call incipient denominationalism. In Corinth, they were beginning to group themselves around various Christian leaders, Paul and Peter and Apollos and so forth. What was the trouble? Well, like a Geneva cake, it was many-layered trouble. First, it was the business of taking labels to distinguish each group from other groups of genuine believers. It's wrong, isn't it? I know some people will say, well, labels don't matter, there's nothing in a name, you know, but there is, isn't there? Suppose the dear lady Mrs. Mrs. Smith, you know, and one day her visiting card falls out of her handbag, and Mr. Smith picks it up, and the visiting card reads Mrs. Brown. And then they say, who, my dear, is Mrs. Brown? Oh, that's me. You? What do you mean it's you? Your name is not Brown, is it? Your name is Smith, Mrs. Smith. Ah, yes, she says, but there's so many Mrs. Smiths about, you see, that, you know, I thought it would be a very handy thing for me to distinguish myself from all the other Mrs. Smiths and call myself Mrs. Brown, you see. And the husband said, Brown, what woman are you? Gone crazy. And who is Brown? Well, you remember he's the man that introduced me to you, my love, and I thought it would be nice if I took his name to distinguish me from all the other Mrs. Smiths. And what would the husband say? Oh, that's okay, there's nothing in the name. It wouldn't, would it? Of course, it was worse than that. Paul claims that they were now guilty of division in the church. But when we start grouping ourselves and labeling ourselves, very soon it leads to divisions, doesn't it? Because these groups have a way of then organizing themselves into federations of groups. And I do remind you of the evident fact of history that all federation leads to division by definition. Some people say, don't they, I've had it said to me in this connection. Oh look, the different names by which different Christian churches calls themselves, this is very natural. It's like different members of the family, they have different names, don't they? John and Betty, uh, and Emma Liner and so forth. And the names are pretty, and they, that's like it should be in a Christian family. But that won't do, that's false. John is John and Mary is Mary. But you'll allow me to speak f- freely, won't you? And here particularly. Who are Christian brethren? They're not one group amongst all the many people of God, are they? Aren't all believers Christian brethren? When we use that term, we must mean every single believer, mustn't we? Not a small group of churches that have agreed to federate. You'll see, who are Baptists? There is only one baptism, isn't there? I mustn't use the word Baptist of myself if I mean thereby to distinguish myself from other dear believers, may I? Shouldn't all believers be baptized? We'll say, my brothers and sisters, I'm not a member of the Christian brethren. You wouldn't want to distinguish yourself from me, I hope, would you? Do you really want to tell the world, now we're Christians, and that gooding fellow, he's a Christian, but please understand we're, we're different from him. Why can't we be content, says Paul, with the name of the Lord Jesus, and own it's equally applicable to all true believers? For was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul? Mercifully, throughout the whole of Christendom, Christians of all kinds and shapes and sizes have at least maintained that. I've never heard of anybody getting baptized in the name of Paul, uh, in the name of Christ and Paul, have you? Or in the name of Christ and Luther. No, folks are baptized solely in the name of Christ. And if it's enough for baptism, my brothers, my sisters, why do we want any other name for our churches? Why mustn't we do it? Because it's deeper still. Once we start grouping ourselves around leaders or around systems of theology, the danger is we get our eyes off the Lord and our confidence comes to the big men that we follow, instead of our confidence remaining in the Lord. And if we allow that, that's perilous. So you will find the reasons Paul gives are these. Don't thus allow divisions to come in with their ugly labels, for it diminishes the glory of the Lord Jesus. Was Paul crucified for you? No. Then don't call yourself after Paul. Only one was crucified for you. It is his name, and his name only, that we take. It defeats the strategy of God. Why does God choose the preaching of the cross by which to save us? Because the cross is God's deliberate strategy to break man's faith in man. See man when man has done his best, and he was so bad that it took the cross of God's son to save him. And certainly it detracts our attention from the Holy Spirit. We thank God for all teachers of his word, but Paul points out in two Corinthians two that ultimately it's only the Holy Spirit that can give us understanding of the things of God. Therefore, when we meet, it is not to men we look, however great teachers they are. It is to God's Holy Spirit that we look, is it not? God help us in these modern days. You'll some- sometimes hear the comment, we're not coming to the assembly tonight. Why not? Well, you'll say because we can get better on the TV from the TV evangelist. You can. But what about coming together with your fellow believers, not to wait upon the preacher, not to wait upon the evangelist, but to wait on God the Holy Spirit, that our confidence and expectation may be from the Holy Spirit himself. That is the path to true riches. And if we allow our confidence to be misplaced and to go over to men, in the end it will lead out into the wilderness. So may God encourage us in our day and generation. What a healthy thing it is that you have chosen this weekend to study this epistle once more. May it help all of us to get back to the basic principles of the gospel, to uncompromised loyalty to God and uncompromised loyalty to the Savior. So shall we be blessed, and so shall our work for the Lord be fruitful.