13 If
I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy
gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic
powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all
faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If
I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not
love, I gain nothing.
(1 Corinthians 13:1-3,
ESV)
I had a night off from church last night since our evening
services were cancelled because of special services throughout the day. I had
the chance to go listen to Bro John
Raines at Alvin MBC
on the subject of 1 Corinthians 13. He had some really thought provoking
comments, but he also provoked some other ideas in me which I wanted to share.
Please do not hold him responsible for any heresy here, this is my own tangent
off of his points.
1 Corinthians 13, often called the love chapter and often
read[1]
at weddings, is the culmination of Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts. The
church at Corinth, quite a messed up group by any account, had become
positively obsessed with showing off. These proto-Americans worshipped
knowledge and the heroes who delivered it, much to the detriment of their
relationship with the Living God. When measuring the value of a person, the Corinthians
looked for glitz, glamor and gaudiness. They had projected these ideas onto
religious figures, and had begun to produce a cult of the personality.
This is not an entirely unnatural problem. God has chosen,
for reasons I have never been able to grasp, to use human personalities as His
instruments and representatives. As Paul explains in his sequel to this letter,
God has not chosen angels or miracles to convey His message, but He has
entrusted it to the frailty of humanity. In Exodus 7:1 (ESV), we are met with
this doozy of a statement: “And the Lord
said to Moses, ‘See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother
Aaron shall be your prophet.’” What a powerful thought! Have you ever read that
before? God told Moses that when he spoke God’s words, Moses would stand in God’s
place, serving as a visible manifestation of the invisible God. What an
incredible responsibility Moses held! Pause for a moment and imagine how you
would have to live if God placed you under that kind of a charge.
Once you have grasped and sympathized with Moses, let me
give you the difficult news. You have also been called to be God’s
representative (2 Corinthians 5:20, Galatians 4:14, Ephesians 6:20 and
Philippians 1:29 all discuss God’s people representing Him, without even addressing
the ongoing metaphor of being the body of Christ). Beyond that uniquely
Christian responsibility, the entire Bible assumes that human beings are the
image bearers of God; in some sense, we do for God what the idols did in paganism.
We serve as a reminder and as a visible pointer to the invisible.
Given human pride and sinfulness, it is no surprise that
people begin to have an intense devotion to the human beings who lead them. In
fact, even this is not sinful. It was God’s design for Moses to represent him,
and Paul even told the factitious Corinthians specifically to follow him, as he
follows Christ[2].
The problem is when the symbol begins to be worshipped instead of the Symbolized,
and the creation rather than the Creator. It is a terrible thing to credit the
one who directs you to the cure for the curing, and it certainly ought to grieve God’s servants to feel
that they are distracting people from Christ, rather than pointing them to Him.
It certainly does grieve God that His
people do not always respond that way.
Like so much of the sin in our lives, the issue is not of
something being entirely and unforgivably bad. The issue is of mankind taking
something good, the product of the design of the Good One, and perverting it
into something sinful. In the first century church, God had granted miraculous
spiritual gifts for His people to use for His glory, but the church at Corinth
had decided to turn them into a self-glorifying show. In the midst of this
chaos, Paul puts everything into dramatic perspective, claiming that the things
the Corinthians value are not the things God values. If we imitate someone and
hope their path will bring us closer to God, certainly we should look for what
God looks for in defining success. Paul sums it up succinctly: if I have all of
the trappings of success, but love does not undergird it all, it is less than
worthless. Like a Stradivarius falling down a staircase, any capacity for
fantastic music becomes a meaningless clatter. Like a great redwood tree
consumed by termites, we can speak every truth, only to be crushed when they
crash to the ground. Like an empty nursery, torn by grief, a crib is not
precious unless it swaddles a child. In each of these cases, the potential for
glory does not console, but only deepens the terror.
Paul, looking at the Christians in Corinth, but down to our
own day, says the same of all of our pride. I can hear him calling across the
centuries to our American mentality: “You wish to be great? You wish to speak
for God? You have talent, knowledge and devotion? Well, if you lack love,
everything you have is just a frame around a torn painting.”
God has called each and every one of us to be His
representatives. To trade the privilege of pointing people to the Sovereign God
for pointing them to our fallible selves is an exercise in futility, and any
greatness we may display only makes the foolishness of the task more evident. If
I wrap a lack of love in the best that the world has to offer, I have sold my
life for nothingness. May God deliver us from pride and from success in the
wrong things. May He open our eyes to His greatness and the upward calling that
presses us onward in His service.
Next time we will look at these thoughts in a little more
detail and see what specific things are worthless, so make sure you subscribe
to this blog. In the meantime, pray for God to help us all to value things the
way He does, and so repent of the sin we have borrowed from Corinth.
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