This epistle is addressed to the church of God which is at Corinth with
all the _saints_ which are in all Achaia.
Looking out over that wide region, Paul saw scattered over godless
masses a little dispersed company to each of whom the sacred name of
Saint applied. They had been deeply stained with the vices of their age
and place, and after a black list of criminals he had had to say to them
'such were some of you,' and he lays his finger on the miracle that had
changed them and hesitates not to say of them all, 'But ye are washed,
but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord
Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.'
The first thing, then, that every Christian has is a cleansing which
accompanies forgiveness, and however his garment may have been 'spotted
by the flesh,' it is 'washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb.'
Strange cleansing by which black stains melt out of garments plunged in
red blood! With the cleansing of forgiveness and justification comes,
wherever they come, the gift of the Holy Spirit--a new life springing up
within the old life, and untouched by any contact with its evils. These
gifts belong universally to the initial stage of the Christian life and
require for their possession only the receptiveness of faith. They
admit of no co-operation of human effort, and to possess them men have
only to 'take the things that are freely given to them of God.' But of
the subsequent stages of the Christian life, the laborious and constant
effort to develop and apply that free gift is as essential as, in the
earliest stage, it is worse than useless. The gift received has to be
wrought into the very substance of the soul, and to be wrought out in
all the endless varieties of life and conduct. Christians are cleansed
to begin with, but they have still daily to cleanse themselves: the
leaven is hid in the three measures of meal, but ''tis a life-long task
till the lump be leavened,' and no man, even though he has the life that
was in Jesus within him, will grow up 'into the measure of the stature
of the fulness of Christ' unless, by patient and persistent effort, he
is ever pressing on to 'the things that are before' and daily striving
to draw nearer to the prize of his high calling. We are cleansed, but we
have still to cleanse ourselves.
Yet another paradox attaches to the Christian life, inasmuch as God
cleanses us, but we have to cleanse ourselves. The great truth that the
spirit of God in a man is the fontal source of all his goodness, and
that Christ's righteousness is given to us, is no pillow on which to
rest an idle head, but should rather be a trumpet-call to effort which
is thereby made certain of success. If we were left to the task of
self-purifying by our own efforts we might well fling it up as
impossible. It is as easy for a man to lift himself from the ground by
gripping his own shoulders as it is for us to rise to greater heights of
moral conduct by our own efforts; but if we can believe that God gives
the impulse after purity, and the vision of what purity is, and imparts
the power of attaining it, strengthening at once our dim sight and
stirring our feeble desires and energising our crippled limbs, then we
can 'run with patience the race that is set before us.'
We must note the thoroughness of the cleansing which the Apostle here
enjoins. What is to be got rid of is not this or that defect or vice,
but '_all_ filthiness of flesh and spirit.' The former, of course,
refers primarily to sins of impurity which in the eyes of the Greeks of
Corinth were scarcely sins at all, and the latter to a state of mind
when fancy, imagination, and memory were enlisted in the service of
evil. Both are rampant in our day as they were in Corinth. Much modern
literature and the new gospel of 'Art for Art's sake' minister to both,
and every man carries in himself inclinations to either. It is no
partial cleansing with which Paul would have us to be satisfied: '_all_'
filthiness is to be cast out. Like careful housewives who are never
content to cease their scrubbing while a speck remains upon furniture,
Christian men are to regard their work as unfinished as long as the
least trace of the unclean thing remains in their flesh or in their
spirit. The ideal may be far from being realised at any moment, but it
is at the peril of the whole sincerity and peacefulness of their lives
if they, in the smallest degree, lower the perfection of their ideal in
deference to the imperfection of their realisation of it.
It must be abundantly clear from our own experience that any such
cleansing is a very long process. No character is made, whether it be
good or bad, but by a slow building up: no man becomes most wicked all
at once, and no man is sanctified by a wish or at a jump. As long as men
are in a world so abounding with temptation, 'he that is washed' will
need daily to 'wash his feet' that have been stained in the foul ways of
life, if he is to be 'clean every whit.'
As long as the spirit is imprisoned in the body and has it for its
instrument there will be need for much effort at purifying. We must be
content to overcome one foe at a time, and however strong may be the
pilgrim's spirit in us, we must be content to take one step at a time,
and to advance by very slow degrees. Nor is it to be forgotten that as
we get nearer what we ought to be, we should be more conscious of the
things in which we are not what we ought to be. The nearer we get to
Jesus Christ, the more will our consciences be enlightened as to the
particulars in which we are still distant from Him. A speck on a
polished shield will show plain that would never have been seen on a
rusty one. The saint who is nearest God will think more of his sins than
the man who is furthest from him. So new work of purifying will open
before us as we grow more pure, and this will last as long as life
itself.
II. The Christian life is to be not merely a continual getting rid of
evil, but a continual becoming good.
Paul here draws a distinction between cleansing ourselves from
filthiness and perfecting holiness, and these two, though closely
connected and capable of being regarded as being but the positive and
negative sides of one process, are in reality different, though in
practice the former is never achieved without the latter, nor the latter
accomplished without the former. Holiness is more than purity; it is
consecration. That is holy which is devoted to God, and a saint is one
whose daily effort is to devote his whole self, in all his faculties and
nature, thoughts, heart, and will, more and more, to God, and to
receive into himself more and more of God.
The purifying which Paul has been enjoining will only be successful in
the measure of our consecration, and the consecration will only be
genuine in the measure of our purifying. Herein lies the broad and
blessed distinction between the world's morality and Christian ethics.
The former fails just because it lacks the attitude towards a Person who
is the very foundation of Christian morality, and changes a hard and
impossible law into love. There is no more futile waste of breath than
that of teachers of morality who have no message but Be good! Be good!
and no motive by which to urge it but the pleasures of virtue and the
disadvantages of vice, but when the vagueness of the abstract thought of
goodness solidifies into a living Person and that Person makes his
appeal first to our hearts and bids us love him, and then opens before
us the unstained light of his own character and beseeches us to be like
him, the repellent becomes attractive: the impossible becomes possible,
and 'if ye love Me keep My commandments' becomes a constraining power
and a victorious impulse in our lives.
III. The Christian life of purifying and consecration is to be animated
by hope and fear.
The Apostle seems to connect hope more immediately with the cleansing,
and holiness with the fear of God, but probably both hope and fear are
in his mind as the double foundation on which both purity and
consecration are to rest, or the double emotion which is to produce them
both. These promises refer directly to the immediately preceding words,
'I will be a Father unto you and ye shall be My sons and daughters,' in
which all the blessings which God can give or men can receive are fused
together in one lustrous and all-comprehensive whole. So all the great
truths of the Gospel and all the blessed emotions of sonship which can
spring up in a human heart are intended to find their practical result
in holy and pure living. For this end God has spoken to us out of the
thick darkness; for this end Christ has come into our darkness; for this
end He has lived; for this end He died; for this end He rose again; for
this end He sends His Spirit and administers the providence of the
world. The purpose of all the Divine activity as regards us men is not
merely to make us happy, but to make us happy in order that we may be
good. He whom what he calls his religion has only saved from the wrath
of God and the fear of hell has not learned the alphabet of religion.
Unless God's promises evoke men's goodness it will be of little avail
that they seem to quicken their hope. Joyful confidence in our sonship
is only warranted in the measure in which we are like our Father. Hope
often deludes and makes men dreamy and unpractical. It generally paints
pictures far lovelier than the realities, and without any of their
shadows; it is too often the stimulus and ally of ignoble lives, and
seldom stirs to heroism or endurance, but its many defects are not due
to itself but to its false choice of objects on which to fix. The hope
which is lifted from trailing along the earth and twining round
creatures and which rises to grasp these promises ought to be, and in
the measure of its reality is the ally of all patient endurance and
noble self-sacrifice. Its vision of coming good is all directed to the
coming Christ, and 'every man that hath this hope in Him, purifieth
himself even as He is pure.'
In Paul's experience there was no contrariety between hope set on Jesus
and fear directed towards God. It is in the fear of God that holiness is
to be perfected. There is a fear which has no torment. Yet more, there
is no love in sons or daughters without fear. The reverential awe with
which God's children draw near to God has in it nothing slavish and no
terror. Their love is not only joyful but lowly. The worshipping gaze
upon His Divine majesty, the reverential and adoring contemplation of
His ineffable holiness, and the poignant consciousness, after all
effort, of the distance between us and Him will bow the hearts that love
Him most in lowliest prostration before Him. These two, hope and fear,
confidence and awe, are like the poles on which the whole round world
turns and are united here in one result. They who 'set their hope in
God' must 'not forget the works of God but keep His commandments'; they
who 'call Him Father,' 'who without respect of persons judgeth' must
'pass the time of their sojourning here in fear,' and their hopes and
their fears must drive the wheels of life, purify them from all
filthiness and perfect them in all holiness.