1 Corinthians 9:1-14 Am I not an apostle? am I not free? have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord? are not you my work in the Lord?… To induce the Corinthians to deny themselves the exercise of a liberty they had in things indifferent, St. Paul bad made the argument in the eighth chapter. Liberty was amenable to conscience, knowledge secondary to love, and love was the constructing or building up power of the new spiritual edifice. Not one of these could be spared, for they were all constituents of manhood in Christ; but they must be adjusted to one another under the supremacy of love. If one had a true reverence for his own conscience, he would reverence conscience in others. The conscience of another might be weak, and he might pity the weakness, and yet this pity, if genuine, would not allow scorn or contempt. The argument was a lesson in patience and forbearance, a lesson in self abnegation, and a lesson, furthermore, in responsibility for our example; So far as the immediate issue is concerned (meats offered to idols and participating in feasts held in heathen temples), the logic is direct and conclusive. At no moment does the apostle confine himself to individual rights on the part of such as had enlightened views as to the nothingness of idols. He looks also at community rights and discusses a special duty on the ground of general interests. Here, as in the former chapters, the community man, the community Christian, is before him; and he shows the great characteristic of a teacher in the fact that his business is to mould a body of men into unity. Of what value are minds of large endowments, in their social relations, if they stand for a narrow and cramped individualism? If a man has a finer eye than others, it is that he may see further into the needs of the race. If he has more ardent sympathies, it is for their wider outgoing. Genius is nature's protest, not against ordinary talents, but against the littleness and selfish absorption of individuality. And so far, genius is an instinctive yearning in the direction, of a world wide appreciation and love, and is one of those innumerable parables m which Christianity lies imbedded till the human mind can be prepared to receive it. Now, St. Paul was the foremost representative, in a certain sense, of this community idea, and, unquestionably, Corinth put its strength and compass to a very severe test. At his time of life, at that era in his ministry, and from just such a mixed people, this grand sentiment of universality was destined by Providence - so we may conjecture - to undergo a thorough discipline. Each truth has its own peculiar test. Some truths need a hotter furnace than others to separate the human dross and bring out the refined gold. If, then, St. Paul was experiencing a special mental and spiritual training in respect to this transcendent doctrine, we have an insight into his mode of argument, and even into the style of his illustrations and enforcement. Identified with his doctrine, he himself merging, as it were, his personality in its nature and operations, his own fortunes bound up inseparably with its fortunes, - how could he avoid citing his own example to confirm the views he so fervently advocated? One paragraph, at least, must be given to his individual portraiture as a community man, a race man, intent with his whole heart on bringing a world to the Lord Jesus. And he had sprung to this high level of his own experience and history when he said in the thirteenth verse of the previous chapter, "I will eat no flesh," etc. On that ground, remote as it was from that occupied by some of his Corinthian friends, he was perfectly at home; he knew his strength in God; he saw precisely what to say of grace and its workings in his soul, and how to say it with unanswerable force - straightforward, vivid, incisive. The movement of thought, even for him, is uncommonly rapid. Sentences are short; the words simple, intense, and closely linked. Interrogation abounds. He is an apostle; a tree apostle; an apostle who saw not Christ in his humiliation, and never knew him after the flesh, but has seen him in his glorification, and dates his conversion from the spectacle of his Divine exaltation; and, last of all, an apostle whose success among the Corinthians ("my work in the Lord;" "the seal of mine apostleship") has vindicated and verified his claims as Christ's chosen servant. Self assertion becomes under some circumstances a very important duty, and, if self be surrendered to God, there is no way more effective to exemplify humility. One who can ascend to a height so lofty, and stand among the sublimities of the universe apart from self and even dead to self, is a far greater man in the moral scale than one who, on the low plain of this world, merely foregoes his selfishness and acts disinterestedly to comply with an earthly contingency. Full of the infinite and eternal, St. Paul's thoughts are God's thoughts finding tone and accent in his utterance. There is no faltering, no nice qualifyings, no hesitating apprehension lest self should insinuate its pretensions. But the view given of himself is large, massive, and, for its purpose, strikingly complete. Men cannot speak of themselves in such a strain unless an utter self forgetfulness be precedent. A thinker's illustrations show what hold a thought has on him. In this instance St. Paul's illustrations are significant as well as diversified. Soldiers in the field, husbandmen in the vineyard, shepherds with their flocks, supply his imagination with analogies to establish the right claimed by himself "to eat and to drink," "to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles," and "to forbear working." On all grounds, natural and civil and religious, he maintains the right, and then advances to Old Testament authority. "Doth God take care for oxen?" Yea, not only for their sakes as animals, but for man's benefit, the providence over the lower creation being tributary to the providence that looks to man's welfare as the final earthly cause of all arrangements in the kingdom of nature. Yea, verily, we are in the song of the bird and the muscle of the horse and the fidelity of all domesticated creatures, as surely as in the grass and the cereals and the luscious fruits of the ground. Most true it is that "More servants wait on man Than he'll take notice of; in every path He treads down that which doth befriend him When sickness makes him pale and wan. Oh, mighty love! Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him." The prefigurations and the wondrous homologies are all from below, so that whatever may be found by industry, by science and art, in the amplitude and beneficence of material things and of animal existence, are but so many prophecies of man's natural position of headship. Yet what incompleteness were in all this, and what a mockery of man's exaltation, if it were all! - a vast pyramid enclosing a mummy - a magnificent temple, like the heathen temples, in which you walk through portico and corridor and hall to confront at last a worthless image in stone. To perfect this idea of man shadowed forth beneath him and ever advancing towards him, there must be a counterpart. The counterpart is the archetype above. It descends to man in Christ - Son of man because Son of God. "For our sakes, no doubt, this is written;" and all the writings, below and above, on the earth's strata, in the Holy Scriptures, are alike in this: "for our sakes." It is all a unity or it is all nothing. And this power of manhood St. Paul declares to belong to him, and vested to the full in his apostleship. If, now, St. Paul had exhorted the Corinthians so urgently to obey the dictates of conscience in a matter clearly harmless, and thus avoid a wrong to the weaker brethren and a wrong to their own souls; and if he had avowed his own inflexible resolution to "eat no flesh" (the meat of which he bad been speaking) "forever;" it was a fit occasion to testify to his own self denial for the sake of the gospel. The solace of domestic life, the special tenderness of close sympathy, the offices of watchful affection, ministerial support, "carnal things" that might have lightened the burden of poverty and made his toil much easier, - these were cheerfully resigned. Others allowed themselves these aids and comforts; he refused them, one and all. From the common order of apostolic life he would stand aside in his own isolated lot, and "my gospel" should have in his own career the most forcible demonstration of his glorious individuality. And then, recollecting the law of the temple service which provided for the support of the priests, he would strengthen the analogical argument already presented in favour of his rights. At every touch the individual portrait of the community and race man glows more vividly on the canvas. The contrast had cost him much. Poverty, loneliness, sorrow, had been intensified, but there it was - a contrast with the soldier, the husbandman, the shepherd, the priest, the apostles - self assumed and a perpetual obligation - "lest we should hinder the gospel of Christ." - L. Parallel Verses KJV: Am I not an apostle? am I not free? have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord? are not ye my work in the Lord? |
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