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I Corinthians 3

(Overcomer Wu)

When a person becomes a Christian he also becomes a new creation, with a new nature, a new inner being, and a favorable disposition toward God—none of which a person can have apart from Christ (2 Pet 1:4; 2 Cor 5:17). From that point, until the Lord takes us to be with Himself, we are set on an upward journey, that is, it's a continual struggle against the world on the outside and the flesh within. Like a salmon returning to spawn, he discovers that gravity and the current are continually against him. His new heart drives him in an entirely different direction from that of the world around him.

The church has often thought of worldliness only in terms of drugs, x-rated movies, excessive alcoholic drinking, materialism, and the like. But worldliness is much deeper than bad habits; it is an orientation, a way of thinking and behaving. Basically it is buying into the world’s philosophies and human reasoning. It is looking to the world for our standards, attitudes, and meaning of life. Worldliness is accepting the world’s definitions, the world’s measuring sticks, the world’s goals as the de-facto standard.

The second great obstacle Christians face is the flesh. In fact, it is the flesh that produces the bridge the world uses to reach us. When we are given Christ’s divine nature, our flesh is not removed. That will not occur until we are glorified (Rom 8:18-25). Until then the flesh continually resists and opposes the new heart we've received at our new birth. Paul tells about the struggle in his own life: (cp. Gal 5:17)

“For that which I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate.… For the good that I wish, I do not do; but I practice the very evil that I do not wish.… For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind.” (Rom 7:15, 19, 22-23)

The world and the flesh are closely related. They are used by the same power, Satan, and they serve the same purpose, evil. They complement each other and are often hard to distinguish. But it is not necessary to precisely distinguish between them, because both of them are spiritual enemies, and both must be fought with the same weapons—God’s Word and God’s Spirit. The Corinthian believers had an especially hard struggle against those twin enemies, a struggle which they seldom won. They would not break with the world or break with the flesh and were continually succumbing to both. Consequently they fell into one serious sin after another. Almost all of this epistle has to do with identifying and correcting those sins.

When we were born physically we inherited from Adam the flesh with its propensity to sin. When we were born spiritually and given a new spirit, a new heart, God broke the back of sin, and paid its penalty demanded by God's righteousness. But the tendency to evil remains. The one word that best characterizes the flesh, our humanness, our Adamic nature, is selfish. The sin of Adam and the principle of sin in general, like the sin of the tempter when he fell (Isa 14:13), centered on setting his own will and interests against God’s; and that has been the operating principle of sin ever since. This selfishness inevitably manifests itself in self-exaltation and self-glory. Self-exaltation and self-glory was what led many in the churches to form cliques and factions around different prominent speakers or leaders in the churches. By their close association with these prominent personalities, they hope to gain some of their identity and glory through these individuals by association. Thus, by exalting these prominent personalities and putting them on a pedestal, they are in fact indirectly exalting themselves. Yet little do they realized that this sin of self-exaltation and self-glory not only undermines the glory of God, but it is also one of the most serious sins, because it divides the Church of Christ! And we know that the Church is the Bride of Christ (Eph 5:25-32) and the temple of God (1 Cor. 3:17); therefore, the serious consequence of God's judgment on those who would perpetrate such heinous sin against God is clearly mentioned in this chapter, verse seventeen.

3:10 -17

This passage continues Paul’s discussion (1:10–3:23) of divisions within the Corinthian church. But its more immediate background is the Lord’s second coming. Paul shows how worldly and fleshly behavior, and the ecclesiastical division it causes, affects the rewards the Lord will give when He returns.

The Lord’s second coming was one of Paul’s greatest motivations. In a sense, everything the apostle did was motivated by that truth. His objective, within the supreme objective of glorifying our God and Savior, was to prepare himself to stand before the Lord and be able to hear Him say, “Well done, good and faithful slave” (Matt 25:21, 23). He wrote the Philippians, “One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phi 3:13-14). It was not that he wanted glory or honor for himself, or wanted to prove himself better than other Christians, showing them up in Christian service. He wanted the Lord’s highest reward because that would be the most pleasing to the Lord Himself, and would most effectively demonstrate his grateful love.

In his second letter to Corinth, Paul mentions three specific motivations he had for giving up his entire life to live for and by Christ. First, he wanted to please his Lord: “We have as our ambition,” he said, “whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him” (2 Cor 5:9). Second, Christ’s great love controlled everything he did (2 Cor 5:14); his whole ministry was directed by his love of God. And third, he knew that Christ’s work was complete, that “He died for all” (2 Cor 5:15), and that therefore the ministry of the gospel would always be effective. Jesus Christ had already finished all the work that would ever have to be done for people to be saved.

Paul was not one to do things halfway. When he ran a race or fought a fight, he did so to win—to win the imperishable wreath of the Lord’s reward (1 Cor 9:24-27). He was not competing with other believers, but against his own weakness, weariness, and sin. Though the particular words had not yet been written, Paul always had before him the knowledge that, “Behold, I [Jesus] am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done” (Rev 22:12).

The subject here is not God’s judgment on sin either. The “judgment seat” before which all believers will one day stand (Rom 14:10; 2 Cor 5:10) is the Greek beôma, a tribunal. But both of those passages make it clear that the judgment at that place and that time will not be mainly to dispense condemnation for sin but reward for good works in Christ, and that it involves only believers. Christ judged sin on the cross, and because we stand in Him we will never be condemned for our sins as long as we applied His cleansing blood for our sins; He had borne our sins on our behalf (1 Cor 15:3; Gal 1:4; 1 Pet 2:24; etc.). He took the penalty of all our sins upon Himself (Col 2:13; 1 Jn 2:12). God has no more charges against those who trust in His Son, those who are His elect, and will allow no one else to bring charges against them (Rom 8:31-34). “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:1). As we will see later, “each man’s praise will come to him from God” (1 Cor 4:5).

In 1 Corinthians 3:10-17 Paul changes the analogy from agriculture to architecture. He had been speaking of his own planting, of Apollos’s watering, and of God’s giving the growth (vv. 6-8). At the end of verse 9 he makes a transition in his metaphors: “You are God’s field, God’s building.” In reality, the analogy of agriculture is closely tied to the analogy of architecture in that the agriculture is producing the materials needed for the architecturural building, which typifies the Church.