Yet Possessing all Things.
All things are yours ; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come ; all are yours ; and ye are Christ's ; and Christ is God's. — I Cor. iii. 21-23.
1. The Corinthian Christians seem to have carried into the Church some of the worst vices of Greek political life. They were split up into wrangling factions, each swearing by the name of some person. Paul was the battle-cry of one set ; Apollos of another. Paul and Apollos were very good friends, their admirers bitter foes — according to a very common experience. The springs lie close together up in the hills, the rivers may be parted by half a continent.
These feuds were all the more detestable to the Apostle because his name was dragged into them ; and so, in the first part of this letter, he sets himself, with all his might, to shame and to argue the Corinthian Christians out of their wrangling. This great text is one of the considerations which he adduces with that purpose. In effect he says, " To pin your faith to any one teacher is a wilful narrowing of the sources of your blessing and your wisdom. You say you are Paul's men. Has Apollos got nothing that he could teach you ? and may you not get any good out of brave brother Cephas ? Take them all ; they were all meant for your good. Let no man glory in individuals."
That is all that his argument required him to say. But in his impetuous way he goes on into regions far beyond. His thought, like some swiftly revolving wheel, catches fire of its own rapid motion ; and he blazes up into this triumphant enumeration of all the things that serve the soul which serves Jesus Christ. " You are lords of men, of the world, of time, of death, of eternity ; but you are not lords of yourselves. You belong to Jesus, and in the measure in which you belong to Him do all things belong to you."
I COR. — 8
ii4 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
2. There is a fine wholesome exultation about the words, considering from whom they come and to whom they were addressed. We do not like to hear a rich man boasting of his wealth ; but when a poor man tells us how rich he feels, that seems wholesome, and it gives us a glimpse into the deeper fact of what being " well off" really is. And that is what we have in this word of St. Paul's to his Corinthian converts. Poor men they were, every one of them, with little enough of this world's gear. What different ways of looking at things there are ! If we could have gone to any one of the great merchants at Corinth, and asked him about the standing of the score or two of men who were beginning to be known as the followers of the new religion there, his answer would probably have been something like this : " Standing, my dear sir ? They have not any ! Why, there is hardly a man among them worth his fifty ounces of silver. You might buy up the whole lot of them for five talents of gold. The only man among them who has anything is that sailmaker, Agrippa, and he was almost ruined by having to break up and leave Eome on that edict of the emperor, expelling the Jews." That was one way of looking at them. St. Paul looks at them differently. "You have everything," he says. "I am yours, and Apollos is yours, and so is Cephas. And this world is yours, and the next world is yours, things present and things to come — 'all things are yours.'" It was a right royal setting forth of their position, if they could only feel it so. And they did feel it so in the main. Take that early Christian life as a whole ; there is very little whining in it, very little about their poverty, or difficulties, or hardships. They rise up before us — St. Paul and his fellows, and those humble, nameless folk who gathered round them — they rise up before us out of the shadows of the past, not as weary and sorrow-laden men, treading pain- fully along, but as soldiers marching with firm ringing steps, and singing songs of triumph as they go.1
3. " All things are yours," says St. Paul, and he goes on with an enumeration which has been called, not without reason, " the inventory of the possessions of the child of God," and in which death itself figures. He sums up his enumeration by reproducing
1 B. Herford, Courage and Cheer, 235.
i CORINTHIANS m. 21-23 115
the bold paradox with which he had begun, " Yea, I tell you, all are yours." Then he adds the ground or basis of this possession. " Ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's." " All things are yours," he says, " but ye are not your own, ye are Christ's, and it is because ye belong to Christ and depend on Him that all things belong to you."
I.
All Things are Yours.
There are days in the year when merchants take account of their stock. It is well sometimes for a Christian disciple likewise to stop and take an inventory of his possessions. The Apostle Paul here gives us such an inventory. " All things are yours." There cannot be anything left when you have said " All things." That is an expression which sweeps round the whole universe and takes in everything. " All things are yours." And now the thought strikes the Apostle's mind, " They will hardly understand how much that includes, unless I begin to specify," and so he adds : " Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas," representing all that ministered in word and doctrine; but that is only one department of this great possession. "Or the world." "The world " is one of the most universal terms of which we have any knowledge. It includes the whole human family ; it includes the whole of human history ; it includes the whole of the habitable earth. Yet even that will not do. "Or life." That covers the term of our existence both in this world and in the hereafter ; it is all yours with all its experiences. " Or death." If there is anything that seems to have both " all seasons " and all men for its own, it is death. " Things present " ; these include whatsoever is and whatsoever has been, because whatsoever has been belongs to the present as the property of memory, just as whatsoever is belongs to the present as the property of actual daily experience. But all this will not suffice. " And things to come." That reaches into the illimitable ages of eternity. St. Paul has been trying to make specifications, to give the items in this stocktaking. But, as though discouraged with the attempt to enumerate, he has only succeeded in giving a very few of the things possessed by the disciple, but those are the most comprehensive terms possible. And — like a man who has begun taking stock in a