1:3 part 2

Paul wishes the Corinthians to have peace through Christ as well as grace. This peace is "well-being, wholeness, welfare" as Fee says. God's desire is to do good to His children. He always does what is good. His normal desire is to bless His children and work for their welfare. It was only when the nation of Israel turned against God and served evil for hundreds of years that God had to turn against them. But even then, God promised to restore His people and do good to them.

Jesus said that his peace was not the peace of this world, but a peace from him (John 14:27). This is the kind of peace Paul wishes for the Corinthian church.

1:3 part 1

Paul wishes them grace and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Wait - isn't there only one God? Yes, but 3 persons. The mystery of the Trinity. I don't think I'm going to launch into a Trinity discussion right now. Maybe another time.

The word for grace is charis. Charis means "favor, goodwill, gracious care or help" (Bauer). It carries the notion of freedom - that someone (God) is gracious freely, not because he has to be. It also has the meaning of "gift," or as the Lexicon puts it, a "practical application of goodwill, a (sign of) favor, [a] gracious deed or gift."

God's grace is His good will, His favor towards people. It is freely given, under no obligation. It is a gift, not an earned wage (or a loan, for that matter). It is not just a feeling that God has toward us, like some kind of pleasant, positive mood. It is an attitude and a practical, real gift.

If you have a flat tire on the side of the road, and I drive by, I might have good will towards you as I pass by, saying to myself "I hope he has a cell phone and that it all works out for him." But God's grace goes beyond that. God's grace would be exemplified by someone seeing you stranded, pulling over, and giving you a new tire for free. It is an attitude and an action of practical results.

Grace is not earned. In our tire example, if you had a flat tire and called AAA, then when the AAA guy shows up and fixes your tire, that's not grace. You paid for that service.

In Christ God saw that we were helpless to do anything with our sin, He had compassion and good will toward us (freely - we didn't deserve that compassion), and He provided the practical solution - His Son as an offering for sin. That is grace.

The world knows next to nothing about grace. Everything in our fallen world, apart from God, is based on earning and deserving. We assume that if we earn enough money, we can compel others to do what we want. The global economy is totally based on that assumption.

Let me stand on the soapbox here for a minute. (If you don't want to hear it, head on over to Horizon's web page or something.) When companies act as if "the customer is always right," they are in effect saying "You can treat our employees however you want, just as long as we don't lose your business." What does that tell us customers? Basically that we can demand service, we have the right to this and to that, we deserve something, just because we spend money at the store.

Recently I heard an employee from a major coffee chain tell me that they aren't allowed to defend themselves to the customers, and a customer had been verbally difficult (possibly abusive) because the drink had been made wrong. I had one of those prideful "If only I was in charge" moments, because I thought "That manager should have stuck up for his employee. His employee is much more important than losing whatever money the customer would have spent there."

The reason so many people serve and worship money is that it earns them the power to follow their own desires. This is the entire system in which we live. It is opposed to the way of the Kingdom of God - the way of grace.

The attitude of deserving and earning, the attitude of entitlement, is a pernicious and evil thing. God's way of freely giving favor and the right Gift is a glorious thing, but hard, so hard for us to grasp.

1:1 - 1:2

In our letters, we sign our names at the end. In the Biblical letters, the author states his name first. Paul states his name here in 1:1, along with the fact that he's been called by God's will to be an apostle of Jesus Christ.

The idea of being "called" is an important one here in the first 2 verses of 1 Corinthians. In Greek, the word kalew ("called, summoned, invited") is used a lot in these verses. Paul is called as an apostle of Christ (an "apostle" is one who has been sent/commissioned directly by Christ to spread the gospel). The church is called to be sanctified, or holy - set apart for God.
People call on the name of the Lord.

In fact, the word for church is ekklesia which means assembly or fellowship, a body of people that is called together regularly. You can see that ekklesia also has the prefix "ek" which means "out of", and the "kle" which is related to kalew. So it seems that the church is a body of people that has been called out of something - the world. The word ekklesia is also used in Greek to mean "a regularly summoned political body," according to Bauer's Lexicon. The church is also expected to meet together regularly (Heb. 10:25).

For some reason, Paul is using the word for call over and over here in these first 2 verses. Why? My best guess is that he is drawing attention to God. He's reminding the Corinthians that they are the church because they have been called by God, not because they have innately superior wisdom or strength. Paul receives his apostleship from God, the church is a fellowship called by God, and called to be set apart to God. This whole Christian thing is not some superior philosophy that wise Greeks discovered all of a sudden. It is a work of God Himself. Therefore, the Corinthians should not be proud of themselves, or feel superior to others, but they should be grateful and give glory to God for saving them.

We must not be proud of ourselves for being Christians. It is a work of God that brought us to repentance. We must not look down on non-Christians, as if we somehow achieved superiority over them because we know God. We are Christians because of a work of God in our hearts. We must not think of Christianity as just a set of doctrines, like any other religion or philosophy in the world. It is a total transformation, a transformation that God does.

Paul realizes all this and wants the Corinthians to remember that it is all about God, not them.

A Little More Background

1 Corinthians seems to be the second letter that Paul actually wrote to this church (see 5:9). We don't have the first letter. It's fascinating to me to think that God intended 1 Corinthians to be preserved, but did not intend the previous letter to be preserved for all the churches. No doubt it was a good, godly letter, but I guess it wasn't meant to be inspired Scripture for all time.

Fee writes (p. 7) that 1 Corinthians was a response to a letter from the Corinthians to Paul, brought by Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus (see 16:15-17). Apparently, in this letter from the Corinthians, they were refuting or disobeying Paul's previous instructions in his (lost) first letter. It's clear that Paul also receives a report from "those in Chloe's household" (1:11) about the situation in the church in Corinth. This report, and presumably the letter from the church, are what prompted Paul to respond back, and in a tone of authoritative rebuke.

Some facts about the city and church of Corinth

Once again, I'm using Gordon Fee's commentary on 1 Corinthians, and many background facts are coming from him. You can read the Wikipedia article about Corinth here.

Corinth is located in Greece, at a strategic point for commerce. It existed thousands of years ago and was a very, very wealthy city with a high standard of living. It also had a big temple to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, along with over 1000 prostitutes to help you to "worship" Aphrodite. There was a saying, to "act like a Corinthian." This basically meant that you slept around. The city was destroyed by the Romans in 146 B.C., and in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar re-formed it. It became wealthy again and, because of its commercially valuable location, it was well-connected to the rest of the world. Many different types of people lived there, people who brought their religious and philosophical traditions with them. Many different gods were worshiped there, and there were also other strange religious practices.

In Paul's day, Wikipedia notes, "it was noted for its wealth, and for the luxurious, immoral and vicious habits of the people." Fee says "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" (p. 3).

The Corinthian church was probably a church made up mostly of ex-pagans, not ex-Jews, from Corinth. Fee argues that most of the church was probably of Gentile, not Jewish background, and I think he's right. So there were a number of people who had lived the promiscuous, immoral Greek lifestyle, who had experienced conversion to Christ, but had a lot of baggage left from their backgrounds. Despite the wealth of the city, there were a number of poor people and probably a number of middle class people there, and the church was mostly made up of these.

Fee sums up the church's situation by saying "Although they were the Christian church in Corinth, an inordinate amount of Corinth was yet in them, emerging in a number of attitudes and behaviors that required radical surgery without killing the patient. That is what 1 Corinthians attempts to do." (Fee p. 4)

1 Corinthians

1 Corinthians has always been one of the most interesting books of the Bible for me. The Corinthians are "notorious" in Bible studies because, as most people know, there were a lot of problems in the Corinthian church. I mean, a LOT of problems. Some people were doubting the resurrection of the dead (a VERY important doctrine). There were different groups of people bickering over which teacher or apostle was the best ("I follow Paul; I follow Apollos; I follow Peter; I follow Christ."). It must have been pretty unnerving for Paul to see these people, including himself, put on the same level as Jesus. Many of the Corinthians must have been proud people, looking for acceptance and glory from the world, not understanding how God works with humble people. There were issues with the Lord's Supper, issues of rejection of each other. Some were boasting of the sexual "freedom" which approved of one man to be sleeping with his father's wife.

This is a serious mess. And some people think their church has problems!

The really amazing thing about the Corinthian church is that Paul stuck with them, and, more importantly, so did God. They had power in spiritual gifts in this church. God's presence was still among them. Paul does not excommunicate the whole church. The last two lines of the book are "The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. My love to all of you in Christ Jesus." Paul's love to all of them? Yes, Paul loved them. And so did God.

Still, Paul wrote a firm letter of exhortation, stating that they needed to really work on these sinful issues. The church is meant to be holy and loving, representing the One who died for it, and we can't back down on that.

I think the Corinthian church and the American church have a lot in common. By God's grace, we'll learn a lot by going through this wonderful book of the Bible.

One other note: when it comes to commentary, I'm going to be using Gordon Fee's The First Epistle to the Corinthians. Fee is a reputable evangelical scholar who believes that the spiritual gifts are still in operation today (as does Horizon).

Thanks for joining me!