The Pulpit Commentary — 1 Corinthians — Section 502

HOMILIBS BY V.ARIOUS AUTHORS. Vers. 1-;;-4.-In~i·oductio'!· "Moreover" indicates a change of ·subject. "Declar~ unto yo~, or remmd Y?u, 1s so1:11ewhat emphatic. What St. Paul brings to memory are cert.am fundamental ideas winch he does not hesitate to call "the gospel" the glad tidings of God to the world. It w~s the _same gospel he had preached unto' them, the same thfy had accepted, the same m which they stood. By it these CorinthianR were- sa ,.ed, present and future, if they adhered to their faith, unless indeed their faith was "in vain." Was this faith a vain thing? Was it possible that it was an illusion? How could this be when they bad embraced it, stood in it, felt its power to save, and rejoiced in its blessedness? The power of this gospel lay in these facts, viz.: Christ had c.ied, bad been buried, had been raised from the grave; and these had occurred for a special purpose and agreeably to pre-announcement of Divine revelation. What was the specific object of Christ's death? He died "for our sins." In this he was the Christ of God, the Messiah, the Anointed, the Jesus of Nazareth, who, as "the righteous Servant of the Father," we.s ordained to "bear their iniquities." It was not, then, a common death. It was not a death brought about as to its main end by the disappointment of his nation because he had refused to be a secular king. It was not the death of a martyr. Worldly influences, earthly agencies, Satanic power, appear in the immediate and circumstantial connections of bis crucifixion. His arrest was an act of human violence; his trial was twofold, Jewish and Roman; his execution was Roman; and yet all this array of man's hate and skill and successful wickedness passes out of sight, and is lost in a view infinitely higher. Judas could not have betrayed him, Caiaphas and the Sanhedrim could not have condemned him, Pilate could not have given him over to the Pharisees and Sadducees, unless Christ himself had permitted them to control the manner and incidents of his death. 'l'he death itself, as to its ,motive, spirit, and aim, occupies the whole mind of the apostle. Man and man's instrumental relation to it fade from view, and it is with him a. vicarious, expiatory, propitiating death, deriving its reason, character, and value from a single consideration-a death/or our sins. On no other basis could he regard the gospel as glad tidings. And how hadi the knowledge of this as a doctrinal reality come to him? He had "received" it from Christ himself, who had appeared personally to him at midday. The historical facts of his death, burial, and resurrection had been known to him; for Saul of Tarsus could not have been ignorant of these things as events involving the nation. Mysteriously, too, he bad felt their impression in vague ideas, in vaguer fears; out of unconscious depths, sounds had throbbed a.s strange pulsations on the inner ear; and so sharp had been the call to thought and reflection, as for the Lord Jesus to remind him on the way to Damascus that be bad been kicking against the goads which had pierced his con- science. His conversion was sudden and marvellous. Sudden and marvellous it could not have been but for the long and acute goading that had opened his heart to the hand of the Divine Healer. Yet this preparatory work of conviction was all within himself, under the Spirit's agency. What he knew of Christ's death was not,from the historical fact alone, but from the doctrinal trnth couched in the fact, and this saving truth he- had received. It was a revelation to his soul, a. direct and assuring manifestation from the Lord Jesus. 'l'o be an apostle, he needed this immediate communication from heaven, this peculiar intensifying of conviction and conversion. Means and methods suited to others were not adapted to his case. Notorious as he had been in the championship of the national Church-the forlorn hope of Sadduceeism and Pharisaism, the young hero whose fanatical strength was adequate to replenish the wasting and well- nicrh exhausted forces of the Sanhcdrim-it was not for him to go over to Christ in some quiet way by meditation, by laborious inquest of soul, by those high resolves which often have their birth from the womb of solitude. No; he must be .~ignally converted, on. xv. 1-58.J THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. 511