1Cor 3:1-4 - Part 2 - To Be Truly Human

1-4 But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. 2 I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, 3 for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? 4 For when one says, "I follow Paul," and another, "I follow Apollos," are you not being merely human?


OK - now down to the case at hand. Many of the Corinthians, with whom Paul had spent 18 months only 5 years earlier had, in a number of ways, failed to progress in the Christian life. Perhaps they had regressed or they may just have become stuck. Whatever the reasons, this church is not a picture of the model Christian walk but is, rather, in so many ways a model of what can so easily go wrong when there is no vigilance and no discipline. It is the picture of a church full of immature people, unschooled or unappreciative of the doctrine underlying the truth of the incarnation of God the Son in Jesus Christ.

For example, they have entirely missed the absolute primacy and uniqueness of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is not just a man to be compared to other teachers. He is the God/man whose voluntary death delivers His people from the power of sin and takes away the condemnation of all who entrust their lives to Him. He is the Truth. All other teachers speak of Him and testify to Him. They do not vie for a constituency that rivals Him.

And, in the same way, those being taught are not receiving truth from their teachers per se, but from Christ through their teachers if indeed the teachers are preaching Christ at all. When Christ is preached properly then truth is preached. When truth is preached then it emanates from Christ, regardless of the vessel by which the words come. God can speak truth even using an ass (if we remember Balaam’s story).

Despite their error, Paul is not saying that they are reprobates. He is hoping in God and believing the best while gently (at first) pointing them in the right direction. He hopes that their foolishness springs from immaturity, rather than from unregeneracy. He cannot see the hearts of the people and he knows that God is the only One who knows for certain those whom the Father has given to the Son. So he labours on in the work God gave him to do - prayerfully endeavouring to strike the balance between stern admonition and gentle correction.

Right doctrine, which is no more and no less than a right knowledge of God in personal relationship through the indwelling and illuminating Spirit of God - right doctrine is vital to right behaviour. The Corinthians are being reproved for their jealousy and strife. Note - they are not being reproved for doctrinal disagreements, but for ignorance of doctrine, which is being manifested in UnChristlike behaviour. The fruit of their wrong belief and/or their culpable ignorance is demonstrated by their bickering.

The ignorance being displayed stems from, as I mentioned {See Note "1Co 1:11"}, a failure to understand the uniqueness of Christ, His centrality and His infinite superiority to all other preacher/teachers, who are merely His servants. Even if those congregants in Chapter 1 who were saying "I follow Christ" really meant that Christ was superior to the other teachers (which I doubt) they entirely missed the need to edify their brethren and lapsed in factional debate, effectively making Christ a competitor of Paul, Apollos and Peter.

There are other opinions on what this and verse 12 of Chapter 1 refer to. Some believe that there is a faction arising between the Pauline crowd, who are most likely Gentiles, and the Petrine crown, who are most likely Jewish converts. It may be that the church has been infiltrated by those emphasizing perceived differences between the two - and then also with the more cultured Greek presentation of the Alexandrian, Apollos. Nobody knows for sure. But whenever true believers disagree, the only possible direction they should go is not to pull against their so-called opponents, but to move towards the gospel. In other words, a right understanding and relationship with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, is foundational to everything else. And when we lose our way we must go back to the basics to discover if we had it right to begin with, or to get it right at last.

This is what Paul is doing here. He is diagnosing or observing the problem, reproving them for falling into it, and pointing them to Christ as Lord of all. Ultimately, just like every other preacher, Paul has no control over whether or not they will heed the admonition. He simply does what Christ called and raised him to do, which is to preach Christ crucified to all, knowing that the effects of this preaching are literally in God’s hands. Those who ultimately heed will show evidence of their faith through obedience unto fruit. Those who are unregenerate trouble makers, or who have been deceived by others or by themselves, will be offended and will bear the fruit of their own wicked hearts. But Paul must labour in love and truth and leave the rest with God.

Finally there comes this very interesting phrase, "For when one says, "I follow Paul," and another, "I follow Apollos," are you not being merely human?" Much is made of the idea of humanness. Much is made of the human nature of Jesus Christ. And parallels are drawn between us and Him. He became one of us. He came down to our level, so to speak. No! He never came down to our level. He was incarnated and was indeed a full member of humanity, but He was at that time the only truly full member of the whole race, because He was without sin. Jesus not only never sinned, but was without the taint of original sin. This is why His Father was God and his mother was Mary.

And so we need to understand what it is to be human from God’s perspective and not from our own. Adam was human before the fall. Christ was human throughout the entire period of His earthly ministry and is still fully human in heaven, sitting at the right hand of God. But Adam died spiritually and became a fallen human, passing that along to the rest of his descendants. The whole race fell in Adam. Since Adam no natural human has had spiritual life and is, in this sense, sub-human.

Christ, however, had no original sin, lived and impeccable life, and had the Spirit upon Him without measure. He was a fully spiritual man. He is the epitome, the ne plus ultra of humanity in every way - including not only the bodily reality, but also the spiritual reality of what being human is intended to be.

I need to be careful here. I am not saying we are sub-human in the same sense that the Nazis spoke of the Jews. They propagated such things in order to dehumanize Jewry and to elevate themselves. But I am speaking of the entire human race, including myself, as having fallen short of what real humanity is in God’s eyes. Only one Person was really human in God’s eyes in every sense of the word "human," and that is His beloved Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who came from heaven. He put aside His glory, but not His divinity, and became a man. He lived as a man, that is, He lived a fully human life. What He spoke, He spoke as hearing it from the Father. What He did, He did as instructed by the Father. He walked the earth and did all things that any man does - he breathed, sweated, ate and interacted with friends and enemies. He lived and healed and did mighty works in reliance upon the Holy Spirit for illumination and for endurance and for power, even though all these things were His by nature and by right. He demonstrated to men how to be human in the heavenly sense.

God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. And this is how it was done - by Christ’s active and passive obedience, even unto death. But I hope it is clear that Christ was not "a man like us". He was a man as we ought to be. He was not human in the sense that we are, because we are carnal, spiritually dead humans until we come to Him. Christ was and is spiritual and eternal Life in a man - He is what man is made to be and what some men are becoming.

The Bible teaches us that there are two Adams in which terminate all human life on earth. The first Adam was definitively human, but mutable - and when he fell the whole of the race fell in him. The second Adam was definitively human, and all those who are born of Him spiritually have eternal life and become (true) children of God - truly human as God intends for man to be. And it is only in His Son that this has been made possible.

All this to come to the point that being "merely human" is a rich and deep theological statement referring to the old nature which is common to all men and which is death. We are not called to be human in this sense. We are called not to be Adamic, but to be Christian. It is not that Adam is our father, but that God is. We have died to whatever we were in Adam - to all that we were in Adam - and we have been made alive in Christ. The flesh will pass away. Even the passions of the flesh will go. We cannot take anything Adamic into heaven. Our bodies will be glorified - not merely given a makeover. All that will be left of us is what is of Christ in us. He will have completely remade us. Some of this is while we are conscious partakers in this life, and some of this remaking will await final glorification. But if any man be in Christ Jesus He is a new creation. And that creation is and will be truly human when it is perfected in us.

Though we are born anew of God’s Spirit and we shall ultimately become what God purposes fully human beings to be, we must grow in grace and knowledge and we must live our lives under this reality. We are in the world but not of it. We have a body of death, but we have died and been renewed, and we are called to live in that light. In this we put to death daily the deeds of the body {Ga 5:19-21}, some of which Paul is pointing to in the Corinthians here. So here, being merely human is not a good thing; it is living death awaiting eternal judgement. For Paul says in this very Galatian quote that those who do the deeds of the flesh (habitually and without any sign of repentance) will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Our call, and the call to the Corinthian church, is not to be human in the fallen sense, but to be human in the heavenly sense, which is to be made like Christ. To be perfect as He is perfect. To strive to enter in at the narrow gate and to stay in the narrow way. And we love both God and our neighbour when we help each other, by the grace of God, to be so found.