1 Corinthians
Introduction
This is going to
be a fascinating study because Corinthians more than any other epistle in the
New Testament is written to address problems. It was written to one of the most
screwed up congregations, one of the most carnal congregations, one of the most
out-of-fellowship congregations that possibly has ever
existed.
Paul first came
to Corinth in approximately 51 AD. We know that date is pretty sure because Gallio
was the proconsul there and that date is secure. In Acts 18 we come to the
middle of Paul’s second missionary journey and what took place when Paul came
to Corinth and established the church there. Acts 18:1 NASB “After
these things he left Athens and went to Corinth.” Acts was written by Luke, and Luke’s major point in writing
Acts was to explain the expansion of the church into the Gentile world, that as
the Holy Spirit has come upon the apostles on the day of Pentecost that He is
establishing a new work. The church is distinct from Israel and the church is going to incorporate
both Jew and gentile into a new body, the body of Christ where Jew and Gentile
distinctions are no longer relevant. He is explaining the expansion of
Christianity to the Gentile world through the three missionary journeys of
Paul. A second thing that he brings out, especially in this chapter, is that
Christianity is a legitimate religion. This is established in this chapter
because there will be a court case involving the legitimacy of what Paul is
doing. The Jews in jealousy will take him to court and it is basically going to
be thrown out of court. There is a certain amount of irony here from the Holy
Spirit because of all the places in the ancient world it is the Roman court in Corinth where the legal status of Christianity is
first established. This isn’t going to hold a lot of press as time goes on
because it will not be granted true legal status in the Roman empire until after Constantine’s conversion in about 300 AD. So this is just a way of protecting the gospel at this
particular point in time, in the early stages around the middle of the first
century.
Corinth was a major port city. Its history is really divided into
two stages. The early city ended in 150 BC. It had
flourished during the golden age of Greece in the fifth century BC and from about 200-150 BC it was the
leader of the Achaian league. Corinth became the leader of a consortium of
cities, an alliance for trade, and they became involved in a war around 150 BC with Sparta. The problem with that was that Sparta had an alliance with Rome, so as soon as Corinth went to war with Sparta, Sparta called on Rome. Rome came in and in 146 BC Corinth was defeated and destroyed. All of the
citizens were either killed or enslaved. That was the end of the ancient city
of Corinth, and it was of the ancient city of Corinth that the proverb was framed about
Corinthians being the epitome of immorality so that the slang term for sexual
immorality was to “Corinthianize.” That was their
reputation in the ancient city before it was founded a second time and
re-established by Julius Caesar in 44 BC as a Roman
colony. All indications of the Roman colony were that the same dynamics were
found at that time, and so the basic culture of Corinth was pretty much the same as it was in the
ancient city.
As a seaport town
it had all of this commerce coming, so it was a trade city, and money always
attracts money, and after 44 BC it was a place where people quickly came
and established themselves in order to seek their fortune. It rapidly became a center point and it was the capital of the senatorial province of Achaia, which was the southern part of Greece. By the second century AD it became the largest city in terms of population in Greece.
Acts 18:1-3 NASB “After
these things he left Athens and went to Corinth. And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, having recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had
commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. He came to them, and because he was of
the same trade, he stayed with them and they were working, for by trade they
were tent-makers.” This was Paul’s way of supporting himself initially. He has
left Paul and Silas behind in Thessalonica and until they came to help support
him he had to work to support himself. The arrival of Aquila and Priscilla in Corinth was an evidence of the ethnic mix of the city. We
know from Acts 18 that there are a number of different people there whose names
signify their background. So Paul began by supporting himself and then he
followed his standard operating procedure and went to the synagogue. He would
go into the synagogue and would get an opportunity to stand up and go through
Old Testament Scriptures in order to demonstrate that Jesus Christ was the fulfilment
of all of the prophecies related to the coming of the Messiah. He was trying to
persuade Jews and Greeks, i.e. Gentiles, converts or proselytes who had joined
the Jewish synagogue. [4] “And he was reasoning in the synagogue every Sabbath
and trying to persuade Jews and Greeks.” The word “persuade” is the Greek word PEITHO [peiqw] which has the idea of convincing someone of the
truth. In some passages it is used almost as a synonym for faith, that is, in
order to have faith you have to first be persuaded of the truth of something.
It is a word that relates to the intellect, to thinking. You don’t put your
brain in neutral to be a Christian! [5] “But when Silas and Timothy came down
from Macedonia, Paul {began} devoting himself completely to the
word, solemnly testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ.” Paul is now
able to devote his full time to the ministry. This is a very important concept
for the support of ministry. Silas and Timothy come in to provide the
logistical grace support for the apostle Paul and now he is now able not to be
distracted by his every day cares. He promoted himself
now primarily to teaching the Word.
Any time you start
teaching the truth there is going to be a reaction, and there was a reaction in
the synagogue there. Acts 18:6 NASB “But when they resisted and
blasphemed, he shook out his garments and said to them, “Your blood {be} on
your own heads! I am clean. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.” Paul really
challenges them here, confronts them with their own rejection of the truth and
makes some very strong statements against them. He leaves them and now is going
to take the gospel to the Gentiles. He then does a very clever thing which
resulted in producing a mixed-ethnic church in Corinth. This is part of the reason why the congregation ends
up getting so screwed up eventually, but here we see the sovereignty of God at
work because if it weren’t for the screwed up congregation with all the
problems that Paul had to deal with we would not have this epistle which answers
many questions about many different issues.
Acts
18:7 NASB “Then he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God, whose house was next to
the synagogue.” Paul is not going
to the other side of town, he is going to first of all challenge the Jews with
their rebellion and he is going to go right next door and hang out his shingle
so that he is going to continue to rub their nose in their rejection of the
truth. [8] “Crispus, the leader of the synagogue,
believed in the Lord with all his household, and many
of the Corinthians when they heard were believing and being baptized.” So Paul
now begins to have an impact amongst the Corinthians. It takes a while. People
have to think about the gospel a little, you don’t just see automatic response.
Even if people are positive they have to stop and think and they have to be
persuaded of the truth of the gospel. As things progress more and more are believing. This creates a negative reaction among the
synagogue. [10] “for I am with you, and no man will
attack you in order to harm you, for I
have many people in this city.” Apparently Paul had been threatened on many
occasions and there were threats against his life. God says he is going to
protect him. There were many people here who were positive and were going to
respond to the gospel and he would have a successful ministry here.
Verse 11 tells us that
Paul settled there for a year and six months. That is a lot of time and he
communicated a tremendous amount of doctrine in that time, especially when we
get into the epistle and realize how much he seems to be saying, “I taught you
this before, why haven’t you figured it out yet?” Apparently he covered the
entire realm of doctrine during those 18 months. But that created a hostility among the Jews.
Acts 18:12 NASB “But
while Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews with
one accord rose up against Paul and brought him before the judgment seat.” The
question here would be whether Christianity would be legitimate in the eyes of Rome. In Roman religion by this time they were worshipping
the emperor, Caesar, and all other religions also had to worship Caesar. It
didn’t matter what religious system you bought into as long as you also
worshipped Caesar—except for the Jews who were monotheists. The Jews had
continuously resisted any idea of worshipping the emperor, so finally Judaism
as a monotheistic religion had been legalized. They had been given a special
dispensation from Rome not to worship Caesar. That goes all the way back to
the Maccabaean revolt in the 2nd century BC. What happens
here is they bring this charge that Christianity can’t be covered by that
dispensation because it wasn’t Judaism. So they go to Gallio
and try to conv9ince him that he needs to condemn what Paul is doing. [13] “saying, “This man persuades men to worship God contrary to
the [Roman] law. [14] But when Paul was about to open his mouth, Gallio said to the Jews, “If it were a matter of wrong or
of vicious crime, O Jews, it would be reasonable for me to put up with you;
[15] but if there are questions about words and
names and your own law, look after it yourselves; I am unwilling to be a judge
of these matters.” Gallio throws the whole thing out
of court. He doesn’t want to recognize that what Paul is teaching is in any way
different or distinct from Judaism and so he dismisses the whole thing.
As a result of this and
because of the anti-Semitic environment here the Jews are going to come under
attack and they are driven away from the judgment seat, and in frustration they
took hold of Sosthenes, the leader of the synagogue. Sosthenes has succeeded Crispus
as the leader of the synagogue. They took him and started beating him up in
front of the judgment seat and Gallio just ignored
the whole proceeding. That tells us the basic story of the founding of the
church at Corinth.
The church at Corinth has quite a history and as we get into the epistle we
will review some of the characteristics that we will discover. Nothing much
more could happen to a church than happens to them. They have divisions, they
have flagrant sexual immorality in the church, they are plagued with open
divorce, they have idolatry and are still going into
the temples eating meat sacrificed to idols. They are taking the spiritual
gifts and making an issue out of them as if that makes them spiritually mature,
and their whole misunderstanding and distortion of spiritual gifts is because
of what was emphasized in the pagan religions. They brought all of this
religious baggage with them from their pagan past and that is causing them to
misunderstand and misinterpret what the Scriptures are teaching. As well as
that they have various other problems that are going on. There is not much else
that you could discover bad in a church than what is going on here. We read in 1:11 that there are internal divisions and these are
developed even more in chapter 3. There was immorality there (5:1), a type of
immorality that wasn’t even typical among the pagan Gentiles. In 6:13 they justified this with a slogan, and this was that
just as food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, sex is just like
food. If you have a physical craving for food, go satisfy it; if you have a
physical craving for sex, go satisfy it. This is what they meant by their
slogan. It was just a euphemism for sexual licence. In 6:4 they were having law
suits against one another and dragging other believers before the secular
courts in order to solve their problems. Chapter 11 deals with getting drunk in
the communion service, and they were having a great time of gluttony and
drunkenness at the Lord’s table. There was chaos in
the spiritual gifts. There is one major doctrinal problem, and that is the
denial of the physical resurrection. So there is also theological apostasy in
the church.
Paul deals with every one
of these problems from a doctrinal viewpoint. Throughout the entire situation
Paul is going to address them as believers, and this is one of the most
important things we can understand as we approach 1 Corinthians. The
Corinthians, as screwed up as they were, as pagan as they were, as immoral as
they were, as arrogant as they were, as divisive as they were, as apostate as
they were, as carnal as they were, Paul always addresses them as believers. He
addresses the epistle to “those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus.” He treats
them as set apart, positionally sanctified and called
to be saints in chapter one, verse 2. Second, he says, “I thank my God always
concerning you for the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus,
that in everything you were enriched in Him, in all speech and all knowledge,
even as the testimony concerning Christ was confirmed in you, so
that you are not lacking in any gift, awaiting eagerly the revelation of our
Lord Jesus Christ…, vv. 4-7. In verse 9 he says they were called into
fellowship “with His Son.” This is equivalent to being saved. He calls them
brothers and sisters in 1:10,
11. Twenty-four times Paul uses the plural ADLEPHOS [a)delfoj], for “brother,” to describe the Corinthians. That
means he views them as fellow believers and members of the body of Christ. In 3:16; 6:19
he says that they (all of them) are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and that is
referring to each individual. Collectively he refers to the fact that all of
them are believers and individually each body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.
In 6:11 he says, “Such were some of you; but you were washed,
but you were [all] sanctified, but you were [all] justified in the name of the
Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”