Reading: Psalm 11:1-4; 1
Cor. 3:9-17.
As we proceed with our
consideration of foundations there is a third thing. In the first
letter to the Corinthians we have another way in which
foundations are virtually destroyed, at least in a very real
measure. It is by what is put on them; the building that is
placed upon them. Not utterly and altogether and finally are they
destroyed by this means, but they are robbed of their supreme
value, and thus they are in their main virtue destroyed. You will
see what I mean by the apostle’s words: “I laid a
foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let each man take
heed how he buildeth thereon.” And then Paul proposes that
some build with certain materials and others build with other
materials. Then a testing fire from God comes to try out that
superstructure; and the wood, hay and stubble material goes up in
smoke, and when it has all gone the question is: Well, what was
the value of that foundation if when all is said and done nothing
is on it? In that way the foundation is in its supreme
significance and value destroyed. The apostle tells us that those
who do that sort of thing may be saved people, and, because they
have Christ the foundation is there; they themselves may not lose
their salvation, but then they were not saved just to be saved.
Christ did not come into them just to be there. He was not the
foundation just to remain the foundation. A foundation
presupposes a superstructure, it points to it, implies it,
necessitates it. There is no justification in having a foundation
if you have no superstructure. The superstructure is the
justification of the foundation. What would you think of a
builder who went round everywhere putting down foundations, and
then you went round the earth seeing a lot of foundations and
that is all you saw; foundations put in year after year and as
you passed on, you saw nothing but foundations. You would say:
Well, that fellow did not justify his existence, he did not
justify his labour. The only justification for putting those
foundations in is that he put something on them.
The justification of our
salvation is that there is a superstructure; for our salvation
involves that, and we are not justified as saved ones until God’s
building is up. God is justified in saving us when He has His
building. That is the justification of the grace of God. So the
apostle goes on with the language about God’s temple: “Ye
are God’s building.” God’s building. Now
what we are putting upon our salvation, what we are building is
either going to justify the foundation, or to, virtually, for all
divine intents and purposes, destroy the foundation; that is,
render it vain in the full purpose of God. That is plain. Do you
see what I mean? There is a way of rendering even the divine
foundation well nigh valueless, and robbing it of its real virtue
by putting up something not according to Christ. Now that is very
simple and very elementary, but it will help us on a little.
The superstructure has to be in
keeping with the foundation. It has to be spiritually and morally
of a piece, it has to be alike. What the foundation is, the
superstructure has to be. The building has to take character from
the foundation. The foundation is said to be Jesus Christ and the
whole building has to take its character and nature from its
foundation. Think of de-rooted foundations after an excavation
down to the bottommost depths of hell; for that is where Christ
laid the foundation. He excavated down to the very bottommost
depths of sin; He touched rock-bottom to lay the foundation of
our salvation. Deeper He could not go. He ploughed through hell
to lay the foundations of our eternal redemption. Now think of
putting up a flimsy wood, hay, stubble building upon that. Does
that justify those foundations? Something worthy of Christ is
required, something worthy of the work that He has accomplished,
something which will speak of the greatness of His grace and His
glory. That is God’s building.
When we have said that, and
seen that, we can come to this letter to the Corinthians and let
the letter itself explain that to us. You remember that we are
thinking of destroying the foundations in this sense, that
something not worthy of Christ is put upon them.
Now take up your letter to the
Corinthians and we will cover some familiar ground. Remember this
whole letter represents the problem which confronted the apostle
as he contemplated visiting Corinth. There was a situation there
with many sides which represented for him a problem calculated to
break the heart and destroy the faith of anyone whose foundations
were not well laid in themselves. I am quite sure before we are
through you will see that to face a situation like that, you will
need to have foundations well laid in yourselves.
The Wisdom of
the World and the Things of the Spirit
The first chapter introduces
you to the first phase of his problem. Before you are through
that chapter you discover that in that assembly of believers at
Corinth the spirit of the world outside, the Corinthian spirit,
had gained access and taken hold. The spirit of the world at
Corinth was the spirit of worldly wisdom; it was a centre and
citadel of philosophy. They had no better entertainment than to
discuss the latest phase of philosophy, the new thing in thought.
And Corinth was a place where human reason had full play and
everything was determined in its value by the reasoning powers of
the mind; argument, debate, discussion. It was a world-centre of
rationalism, and that had crept into the assembly of the Lord’s
people. And what we find is that the Lord’s people in that
spirit, in that mind, had taken hold of spiritual things,
heavenly things, things of God, and brought them down to the
level of mere human argument, debate, discussion, and reason;
applying all the time the test of human reason to them and
seeking so to handle them by the intellectual faculty as to bring
them within the limited compass of man’s own power of mind.
Thus they were discussing what the apostle calls the things of
the Spirit of God, and bringing heavenly, eternal, spiritual
things down there; dragging the things of eternity into the
school of worldly rationalistic discussion, debate, argument. Of
course, that was not exclusively the way of the Corinthians of
Paul’s day. There is plenty of that today. Again and again
we have come up against people whose one great obstacle to the
things of the Spirit of God is their own head. They will get
their head in the way; and what they cannot reduce to their own
intellectual comprehension, they reject. And when you say: Look
here, you will have to stop arguing, discussing, give God a
chance along the line of faith, they will answer: Why have we got
brains? That means our brains are the capacity of eternal things.
If that is so, God help the eternal things! Well, that was the
first phase of Paul’s problem, no little one. Those of us
who have met it even in a little way know what a big difficulty
it is.
Human
Predilections, Sympathies and Antipathies
Pass into chapter two and we
find the same thing carried on for a bit, and then as we move on
and begin the next chapter we find we come into the realm of
human preferences, human likes and dislikes in the direction of
teaching and teachers, preaching and preachers, the messengers of
God and their messages. One school says: Now Paul is the man we
like, and Paul’s line of things is the line we like. You may
like Apollos or Peter, but as for us, well, Paul is our man.
Within the same assembly another company are saying: We prefer
Apollos and his line of things. You may have Paul, and you have
Peter, but we like Apollos. The third company were saying: All
right, if you like Paul and if you like Apollos you may have
them, we will stick to Peter. There was a fourth class who said
in a superior way: Well, if you like to have Paul, you Apollos,
and you Peter, you may, but we belong to Christ (something quite
different from the other, of course). That is the implication,
you see, making Christ a party. You know when human preferences
run riot they are awfully difficult things to handle. That was
there; their sympathies and antipathies; and these are deeply
rooted things in human nature. It takes a lot of grace to get
over them. Of course, that was their condemnation. If it does
take a lot of grace to get over these things, and you have not
got over them, you have not got a lot of grace. That was Paul’s
problem, the thing which Paul had to face and deal with and for
which he had a responsibility before God.
The Tragedy of
Arrested Growth
In chapter three again you find
a state which is perhaps more difficult, that of unduly delayed
maturity. After some considerable time of being God’s people
and having the things of God in their midst, Paul says that he
could not speak to them as unto spiritual but as unto carnal, as
unto babes. That is a tragedy. There are perhaps few more
pathetic tragedies in human life than to see arrested growth in
infancy while years go on. That is how things were at Corinth.
Paul says it was carnality which had caused the arrest, and
carnality always does cause arrest, and when they ought to have
been mature they were still helpless, dependent, spiritual
infants, without understanding, perception, capacity to take
spiritual responsibility. A very difficult thing to deal with
that. Beloved, that was not peculiar to Corinth or Paul’s
day. Multitudes of the Lord’s people are like that today.
Oh, yes, it is a pathetic situation to find people who have known
the Lord for years, decades, who are still without their
spiritual faculties developed to a state where they can take
spiritual responsibility, where they know and have not to be
told! There are multitudes like that. The reasons are not always
the same. It is true that carnality is the cause of that very
often, but I am afraid poor teaching is also responsible for that
in many cases. They have not been fed and nourished. It is a
tragic situation with which we are met today; but there it is,
whatever the cause. In this case it was their own responsibility,
their own fault, their carnality.
The Shame of
Spiritual Pride
You pass to chapter four and
find the apostle speaking with language which indicates spiritual
pride. It takes this form. The Lord had blessed them with
spiritual gifts and done very gracious things for them, put them
in possession of His spiritual riches, and they were boasting of
those possessions, boasting of these things as though they had
acquired them by their own ability, had achieved them by their
own efforts; and the apostle says: “...if thou didst receive
it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?”
In other words: Why are you trying to make people think that your
possessions spiritually are the result of your own spiritual
ability, that you have by your own effort attained unto this? Why
don’t you recognise that it is all the grace of God, and
that you are the humble dependants upon the Lord? They were
boasting of their spiritual gifts as though they were their
spiritual attainments and not gifts. Spiritual pride is a
terrible thing. Ordinary pride is bad enough, always the hallmark
of ignorance, but spiritual pride is a far worse thing.
Then there is the next phase of
the problem confronting Paul. That alone would dishearten a good
many, but put them all together! Chapter five. Here we dare not
tarry. “It is actually reported that there is fornication
among you...” Amongst believers? In an assembly of the Lord’s
people? Yes, a tragic story which has been repeated again and
again through the ages. But oh, the heartbreak to any man who had
any real sense of spiritual responsibility for souls, to come up
against that.
Chapter six. Believers, members
of the Body of Christ dragging one another into the courts of
earthly judgment, having writs issued against one another,
summoning one another before the magistrate, charging one
another, lawsuits before the ungodly. Fellow members of the Body
of Christ! Oh, what a misapprehension of the Body of Christ. That
is, they were standing up and fighting for their own rights.
He goes on. You come soon upon
some terrible disorders at the Lord’s Table. One was that
they were turning the Lord’s Table into a revelry, a feast.
People better off in this world’s goods were bringing to the
feast luxuries, and people who were poorly off could only just
bring their little, and there was the class distinction, and all
that sort of thing. The apostle says: Have you not homes? If you
want to glut yourselves at least have the decency to do it in
your own home in private, do not do it as an assembly of the Lord’s
people. You see they often turned their common meal into a
sacrament. They met together, ate and drank together and then as
spontaneously as if it were the natural thing they made of their
meal a testimony, but this thing had so degenerated as to make it
a commonplace, as we have mentioned, and all the glory, beauty,
sacredness of the Body of Christ and Blood of Christ had been
dragged down to this. No small problem that in itself to have to
deal with. There were other aspects of this matter which we will
not deal with.
You pass on still further and
you come to disorders in the assembly in general. People usurping
authority, and you know what the apostle has to say about
disorder in the House of God. The place of men is under the
sovereign headship of Christ in a spirit of subjection,
fulfilling their ministry in the House of God. But here men were
taking authority themselves and not having their authority in
subjection to Christ. And then women, out of their divinely
appointed place, upsetting the whole order of the assembly. The
apostle tells them what this means: “You get out of your
divine covering and get into touch with the evil spirits who
deceived Eve. The Devil is out to disintegrate this assembly
along the same line, and you are giving him the chance he wants
by this disorder.” The whole matter was one of order. The
Lord has an order for His House, and all may fulfil their
ministry—women and men—if they keep to His order.
I think any one who had not the
foundations in himself well established would give up this
situation, abandon it, run away, do what the counsellors advised
David to do, flee to the mountain. “If the foundations be
destroyed, what can the righteous do?” Surely with a
situation like that the foundations are destroyed? Not a bit of
it! I come back and see that after all Paul does not run away, he
does not accept that the foundations are destroyed, but he does
see that those foundations are being robbed of their value by all
this. This is the thing which destroys the foundations in their
real virtue.
The Natural and
the Spiritual
Now do you want an exposition
of what Paul means by wood, hay, stubble? That is it! The Word
interprets itself. What did he mean by putting upon the
foundation a superstructure of wood, hay, stubble? He meant all
that. Divisions, schisms, worldly wisdom, intellectual glorying,
and all the rest. This is something which will be destroyed by
the fire. What will you have left? When you are building with
that material you cannot be building with the other at the same
time, therefore you will have nothing left. Do you want an
exposition of what Paul means in the second chapter by the
spiritual and the natural? “Now the natural man receiveth
not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness
unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually
judged (discerned).” Natural and spiritual. We know that
word natural, in the Greek, is the word soulical, or soulish man,
and he is set over against the spiritual man. What is the soulish
man? One Corinthians tells you all that. The man who is handling
spiritual things with natural wisdom, he is the soulish man. The
man who is influenced and actuated by his own natural likes and
dislikes, preferences, sympathies and antipathies—Paul,
Apollos, Peter—that is the soulish man. But over against him
is set the spiritual man. The man who is not actuated primarily
by his own worldly reason, but looks to the Lord the Spirit for
his understanding in the things of the Lord. The spiritual man is
never influenced or governed by his own likes or dislikes for
people or teaching or anything else. He is actuated by what the
Lord likes. He does not say: I prefer this man to that, this line
of teaching to that. He says: Has Paul got something of Christ?
Well, I will have all, it is Christ I am after. Never mind what
kind of a vessel, it is Christ I am after. There are no divisions
in the spiritual man, no preferences in the spiritual man. He may
know secretly what naturally he would like, but he does not allow
those things to come to prejudice his mind or in any way affect
his relationship. The spiritual man does not go to law with a
believer to fight for his own rights. The spiritual man is not
guilty of fornication. The spiritual man does not bring disorder
into the House of God; it is the man of soul who does that. You
see you have got a clear exposition with the whole letter of the
meaning of the natural or psychical and spiritual.
How Paul Won at
Corinth
Do you see what I am getting
at? It brings me right back to my beginning. What kind of a
building is to be suitable to the divine foundation? Well, we
have seen how Paul faced his problem. Oh, magnificent example of
how to face a spiritual problem! I am not coveting to face a
problem like that in one assembly. God forbid that it ever should
be, but I do see here the most magnificent example of how a
humanly impossible situation is faced, met, dealt with, and
triumphed over. I am so glad Paul won through. Read the second
letter and you see he has won, he is on top, and they are out
with him. Everything was in a state of suspense so far as
ministry was concerned in his first letter. The second letter is
the letter of ministry. “Therefore seeing we have received
this ministry, even as we obtained mercy, we faint not; but we
have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in
craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by the
manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s
conscience in the sight of God.” Then a wonderful chapter on
godly sorrow leading to repentance, and what the fruit of that
repentance is. But he has won, that is the point; solved the
problem from every standpoint. How did he do it? Open at chapter
one again. I see Paul away there with this whole problem spread
out before him. Yes, bowed, concerned, praying, saying: Lord,
this is a terrible thing, only You can meet it, but something
must be done, this does not glorify You. Give me the key to the
situation, put into my hand the key to the whole thing. And as he
sought the Lord, it flashed into him, and perhaps he shouted: I
have found it, and sat down to write. Chapter one, put your
pencil under every reference to the Lord Jesus and you will have
seventeen blue pencil marks in thirty-one verses, an average of
more than one to every two verses. Gather that all up into the
grand statement: “For I determined not to know anything
among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” “For
other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is
Jesus Christ.” What is the solution? Giving the Lord Jesus
His full and right place! Put the Lord Jesus into His place as
absolute Lord in the heart, in the life, in the assembly, and all
these foul birds will go out before the light. If the Lord Jesus
is dominant in our hearts, divisions will go. You will not have
to clear them up, they will go. What we need for all our
divisions, our lack of love, our schisms, our likes and dislikes,
is a fulness of Christ. Christ as Lord, Christ as Master, Christ
reigning. And like evil creatures in a dark cellar scuttle away
when the light comes on, so will divisions and schisms, and all
that makes for them, go, when Christ comes into His place. It is
the cure for everything.
If the foundation is to be
justified it must be justified in a superstructure after its own
kind. Christ at the root, and Christ the stem, branches, and
fruit. It is all Christ. We have something to think about. “If
the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?”
Destroyed in this sense, that they are made void by what is being
put on them. What can the righteous do? Well, there is nothing to
be done but one thing, but that one thing will do all the rest:
that is, bring the Lord into His place. Oh, Paul must have had a
wonderful faith in Christ; facing a situation like that, beloved.
Sit down with any one phase of it and see how you would like to
tackle it; and then taking the whole thing—more than I have
given you—and realising you have a spiritual responsibility
for that situation, you want a mighty faith to believe that whole
situation will yield if only the Lord Jesus can be brought into
His place. It will do it, and it will again. There is no problem,
no difficulty which cannot be solved by the enthroning of Christ.
All the problems in this world, and of all the nations, are going
to be solved by the enthronement of Christ. There is no other
solution, but this is the sure solution. God has bound up
everything to that, that all things are going to be settled when
His Son has His place. But judgment must begin at the House of
God; it must start with us.
I have used all this by way of
illustration. It may have an application to us in some way or
other. Whether that be so or not is for us to determine before
the Lord. Whether we are guilty of any of these things in spirit,
in principle, if not in act. If it does not come home to us in
any specific application, surely the grand truth should help our
hearts. How are we going to face our problem, either within
ourselves, or without, in others? Only in one way. Seek to have
the Lord Jesus exalted in your own heart, and in the hearts of
others. Bring Him first into view and then with Him in view all
the other things can be dealt with.
I have only touched one aspect
of this chapter. I will not go further with it. Paul said: “Jesus
Christ, and him crucified.” You will see what the foundation
is composed of. Jesus Christ as the foundation in this letter
includes Christ crucified, the meaning of His death for us:
Christ Risen, Christ exalted in the place of sovereign head.
Those three things comprise the foundation. When we know what the
death of Christ means so far as we are concerned, Christ
crucified; we died when Christ died, how can we have the natural
man then, the carnal man then? He has gone. When we know what it
is to be risen with Christ, that is, alive unto God, only unto
God; unto no other being or interest, and certainly not unto
ourselves, only unto God; when we know what the absolute lordship
of the Lord Jesus means to bring us into His government, how can
it ever be: I am of Paul, I of Apollos, I of Peter? They cannot
come in there if Christ is all. You find these threads running
right through this letter. The Spirit tells you of the Christ
crucified, risen, exalted. That is the foundation and the
superstructure must be according to that.
Let the word lead us to glory
in Christ, for that is where chapter one ends: “He that
glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.”