《Guzik’s Commentaries on the Bible – 1 Corinthians》(David Guzik)

Commentator

David Guzik is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Santa Barbara, having come to serve that congregation in July 2010.

For seven years before that, David was the director of Calvary Chapel Bible College Germany, near Siegen, Germany. David took this position in January of 2003, after serving for fourteen years as the founding and Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel of Simi Valley. He has been in pastoral ministry since 1982. David has no formal Bible College or seminary training, but does have a Bachelors of Arts degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

David, his wife Inga-Lill, live in Santa Barbara, California. Their three children are grown; Aan-Sofie serves as a missionary in Ireland, Nathan lives in Los Angeles, and Jonathan lives in Santa Barbara.

David has many interests, but one passion among them is to know God's Word and to make it known to others. Each week many thousands of users all over the globe - mostly pastors and teachers - use David Guzik's Bible commentary on-line, on cd-rom, and in print.

Currently there are no commentary information for the following books: Proverbs, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel.

You can keep updated with the work of Calvary Chapel Bible College Germany through their internet home page at www.ccbcde.com.

You can contact Pastor David through Enduring Word Media

01 Chapter 1

Verses 1-31

1 Corinthians 1:1-31 - JESUS, THE WISDOM OF GOD

A. Greeting and giving of thanks.

1. (1 Corinthians 1:1) Whom the letter is from: Paul, a called apostle.

Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother.

a. Paul: The apostle Paul follows the normal pattern for writing a letter in ancient times. We write a letter by saying who the letter is to first, and we conclude with writing who the letter is from. In the ancient culture of Paul, a letter began with writing who the letter is from, and then stating who the letter is to.

i. Paul had an extensive history of contact with the city of Corinth, beginning with when he established the church in Corinth, coming there after Athens and staying a year and a half (Acts 18:1-28).

ii. He wrote a letter to the Christians in Corinth from the city of Ephesus (Acts 19:1-41), which is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 5:9. This “previous letter” is lost.

iii. Paul then received reports from people in Chloe’s household about disturbances in Corinth (1 Corinthians 1:11); and he may have received a delegation from Corinth (1 Corinthians 16:7) who brought him questions from the congregation (1 Corinthians 7:1).

iv. Then Paul wrote 1 Corinthians to respond to these reports. But because of all the time Paul spent in Corinth, and all the letters he wrote them, we know more about the Christians at Corinth than we know about any other church in the New Testament.

b. Called to be an apostle: At the outset of the letter - indeed, the very first few words - show Paul fearlessly declaring his apostolic credentials. As is evident from 1 and 2 Corinthians, Paul’s standing and authority as an apostle were not appreciated among the Christians of Corinth.

i. Called to be an apostle is literally a called apostle; Paul is letting them know just what kind of apostle he is. “Paul knows that he is not one of the twelve apostles, but he is a par with them because, like them, he is chosen by God.” (Robertson)

ii. To emphasize the point, Paul writes: an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God. Paul has already begun contending with the Christians of Corinth. It is as if he is saying, “You all may not recognize my apostolic credentials. That is of little importance to me, because I am not an apostle because of a popular election. I am not an apostle through the appointment of the other apostles. I am an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, not the will of any man.”

iii. What is an apostle of Jesus Christ? In 1 Corinthians 15:1-58, Paul will deal more fully with what makes a person an apostle. However, we learn something just from the meaning of the Greek word apostolos, which has the idea of “a special ambassador.” Paul was a “special ambassador” of Jesus Christ to the world and to the church.

iv. Even in his introduction, Paul is thinking about the critical issues he needs to communicate to the Corinthian Christians. This is a letter Paul has thought carefully about.

c. Sosthenes our brother: This man Sosthenes is perhaps mentioned in Acts 18:17, as the head of a Corinthian synagogue who was beaten because he persecuted Paul.

i. When Paul first came to Corinth, the ruler of the synagogue was a man named Crispus. Crispus believed on the Lord with all his household (Acts 18:8), and was saved. So he was fired from - or quit - his job as ruler of the synagogue!

ii. His replacement was a man named Sosthenes, who was beaten by the Roman officials in a bit of anti-Semitic backlash against the Jews who tried to persecute Paul. Perhaps this same Sosthenes in Acts 18:17 is now with Paul, so Paul calls attention to the man with him whom the Corinthian Christians would know: Sosthenes our brother.

iii. It was common in the ancient world to dictate a letter to a scribe who would write it all down. Probably, Sosthenes was Paul’s scribe (or, more technically, his amanuensis).

2. (1 Corinthians 1:2) To: The church of God at Corinth.

To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours.

a. To the church of God: Most people today associate the word church with a building where Christians meet. But the Greek word for church (ekklesiai) was a non-religious word for an “assembly” of people, typically gathered together for a specific purpose.

i. “The Greek word has both a Gentile and a Jewish background. In its Gentile sense it denotes chiefly the citizen-assembly of a Greek city . . . but it is its Jewish usage that underlies its use to denote the community of believers in Jesus. In the Septuagint it is one of the words used to denote the people of Israel in their religious character as Yahweh’s ‘assembly.’” (Bruce in his Acts commentary)

ii. The term church of God has Old Testament associations, especially in the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament). See passages such as Numbers 16:3, Numbers 20:4, Deuteronomy 23:1, and 1 Chronicles 28:8.

iii. Because church was a secular term also (referring to “the gatherings of the citizenry in a city-state to discuss and decide on matters of public interest” [Mare]), Paul calls the gathering of Christians in Corinth as the church of God. This isn’t the gathering of the world, but of God.

iv. Paul doesn’t only consider these believers in Corinth to be the church of God; believers in Palestine are also mentioned in this way (1 Corinthians 15:9), as well as the church at large (1 Corinthians 10:31-32).

b. Which is at Corinth: Corinth was one of the great cities of the ancient world, and a community very much like Southern California. It was prosperous, busy, and growing; it had a deserved reputation for the reckless pursuit of pleasure. Corinth had a rich ethnic mix, and it was a center for sports, government, military, and business.

i. When Paul came to Corinth in 50 A.D. the city had been famous for hundreds of years before he was born. Ancient writers considered Corinth “rich, prosperous . . . always great and wealthy” (Mare). The Romans destroyed Corinth in 146 B.C. but Julius Caesar rebuilt the city a hundred years later.

ii. Many things made Corinth famous. Pottery and “Corinthian brass” (a mixture of gold, sliver and copper) from the city were world famous. Famous athletic contests known as the Isthmian Games - second only to the Olympian Games - were held at the temple of Poseidon in Corinth every two years. Athena, Apollo, Poseidon, Hermes, Isis, Serapis, and Asclepius, among others, had temples to their honor in Corinth. But most prominent was the worship of the Corinthian Aphrodite, who had more than 1,000 hierodouloi (female prostitutes and priestesses) in her service.

iii. Corinth was a major city of business, especially because of its location. It was on a four-and-one-half mile wide isthmus of land. “At its narrowest part the isthmus was crossed by a level track called the diolcus, over which vessels were dragged on rollers from one port to the other. This was in constant use, because seamen were thus enabled to avoid sailing round the dangerous promontory of Malea.” (Vincent) Sailors wanted to avoid the danger of sailing around Malea, which was indicated by two popular proverbs: “Let him who sails round Malea forget his home,” and “Let him who sails round Malea first make his will.” If the ship was too large to be dragged, the cargo was unloaded and loaded onto another ship on the other side of the isthmus.

iv. The Corinthian people were also world known: for partying, drunkenness, and loose sexual morals. The term Korinthiazomai was well known in the Roman Empire and it meant literally “to live like a Corinthian.” But everyone knew it really meant “to be sexually out of control.” “Aelian, the late Greek writer, tells us that if ever a Corinthian was shown upon the stage in a Greek play he was shown drunk.” (Barclay)

v. Fee comments on Corinth’s sexual immorality: “The Asclepius room in the present museum in Corinth provides mute evidence to this facet of city life; here on one wall are a large number of clay votives of human genitals that had been offered to the god for healing of that part of the body, apparently ravaged by venereal disease.” Fee sums up his analysis of Corinth by writing: “All of this evidence together suggests that Paul’s Corinth was at once the New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas of the ancient world.” Leon Morris describes Corinth as “Intellectually alert, materially prosperous, but morally corrupt.”

c. Notice the contrast: The church of God (good), which is at Corinth (bad). Understanding the tension between the church and the city is important to understanding the letter of 1 Corinthians. The bottom line is this: is the church influencing the city, or is the city influencing the church?

i. Morgan says well in his introduction to 1 Corinthians: “The measure of failure on the part of the Church is the measure in which she has allowed herself to be influenced by the spirit of the age . . . We are sometimes told to-day that what the Church supremely needs is that she should catch the spirit of the age. A thousand times no. What the Church supremely needs is to correct the spirit of the age.”

d. Paul continues his description of the Corinthian Christians: Those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints. The words sanctified and saints communicate the same idea, of being set apart from the world and unto God.

i. Notice the words to be are inserted by translators. The Corinthians were called saints, not called to be saints.

ii. There is much in 1 Corinthians that is unflattering to the Christians of Corinth. They are shown to have, at times, morality problems, doctrine problems, church government problems, spiritual gift problems, church service problems, and authority problems. It might be easy for us to think they weren’t even saved! But they were. They were called saints.

iii. We might also think saying called saints is mere flattery, Paul’s way preparing them for coming rebuke. It isn’t. The Corinthian Christians are called saints, but this was not based on the outward performance of the Corinthians. It was founded a promise of God, when He said for I have many people in this city (Acts 18:10).

e. Both theirs and ours: In his first few words, Paul lays the foundation for a fundamental issue he will address in this letter: Christian unity, based on the common Lordship of Jesus Christ. The Corinthian Christians are called . . . saints, but this isn’t exclusive to them. They are saints together with all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Jesus is both their Lord and our Lord, and because they share a common Lord, they share an essential unity.

3. (1 Corinthians 1:3) Greeting: Grace to you and peace.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

a. The greeting including grace and peace is typical of Paul’s letters, and draws from both Greek and Jewish customs. Paul uses the exact phrase of verse three five other times in the New Testament.

i. “Grace is always first, peace always second. This is due to the fact that grace is the source of peace. Without grace there is and can be no peace, but when grace is ours, peace must of necessity follow.” (Lenski)

b. Paul will often (more than seventeen times in the letter) refer to Jesus as the Lord Jesus Christ; it is well to recall what the title means.

i. Lord: A title designating not only master and boss, but also the Lord revealed in the Old Testament (known as Yahweh or Jehovah). “This term could be no more than a polite form of address like our ‘Sir.’ But it could also be used of the deity one worships. The really significant background, though, is its use in the Greek translation of the Old Testament to render the divine name, Yahweh . . . Christians who used this as their Bible would be familiar with the term as equivalent to deity.” (Morris, in Romans)

ii. Jesus: The given name of the son of Mary, and adopted son of Joseph, which is the Greek pronunciation of Joshua. The name Joshua means, “Yahweh is salvation.”