'Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether
there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be
knowledge, it shall vanish away. 13. And now abideth
faith, hope, charity, these three....'--1 COR. xiii. 8, 13.
We discern the run of the Apostle's thought best by thus omitting the
intervening verses and connecting these two. The part omitted is but
a buttress of what has been stated in the former of our two verses;
and when we thus unite them there is disclosed plainly the Apostle's
intention of contrasting two sets of things, three in each set. The
one set is 'prophecies, tongues, knowledge'; the other, 'faith, hope,
charity.' There also comes out distinctly that the point mainly
intended by the contrast is the transiency of the one and the
permanence of the other. Now, that contrast has been obscured and
weakened by two mistakes, about which I must say a word.
With regard to the former statement, 'Whether there be prophecies,
they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease,' that
has been misunderstood as if it amounted to a declaration that the
miraculous gifts in the early Church were intended to be of brief
duration. However true that may be, it is not what Paul means here.
The cessation to which he refers is their cessation in the light of
the perfect Future. With regard to the other statement, the abiding
of faith, hope, charity, that, too, has been misapprehended as if it
indicated that faith and hope belonged to this state of things only,
and that love was the greatest of the three, because it was
permanent. The reason for that misconception has mainly lain in the
misunderstanding of the force of '_Now_,' which has been taken to
mean 'for the present,' as an implied contrast to an unspoken 'then';
just as in the previous verse we have, '_Now_ we see through a glass,
_then_ face to face.' But the 'now' in this text is not, as the
grammarians say, temporal, but logical. That is, it does not refer to
time, but to the sequence of the Apostle's thought, and is equivalent
to 'so then.' 'So then abideth faith, hope, charity.'
The scope of the whole, then, is to contrast the transient with the
permanent, in Christian experience. If we firmly grasped the truth
involved, our estimates would be rectified and our practice
revolutionised.