Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Corinthians · About this commentary
The Testimony Confirmed in You
1 Corinthians 1:4-9
4 I always thank my God concerning you for the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus, · WEB
The thanksgiving credits God for the very gifts the Corinthians were boasting about, and rests their future on God's faithfulness rather than their performance.
I always thank my God concerning you for the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus 1 Corinthians 1:4.
He thanks God for them, and the object of the thanks is grace... given. Paul's thanksgivings are never mere courtesy; they announce his themes. Here he begins to disarm the boasting before he names it, by attributing to God everything the Corinthians took credit for.
That in everything you were enriched in him, in all speech and all knowledge 1 Corinthians 1:5.
Speech and knowledge are precisely the two commodities this church prized — eloquence, and the sense of having understood something. Both will be criticized: their fondness for wisdom of words 1 Corinthians 1:17, and the knowledge that puffs up 1 Corinthians 8:1. Yet Paul does not begin by denying either. They really were enriched, and the enrichment really was a gift. The problem was never the gifts; it was what they did with them.
So that you come behind in no gift, waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ 1 Corinthians 1:7.
A striking verdict on a church in this much trouble: they lack no gift. Spiritual endowment and spiritual maturity are not the same thing, and this letter is the proof — a congregation abounding in gifts and failing at love, which is why the chapter on love sits at the middle of the discussion of gifts 1 Corinthians 13:1–3. And their posture is defined as waiting: the gifts belong to an interval, given to people whose attention should be on a coming revelation. A church absorbed in its own present endowments has lost the tense of its own gifts.
Who will also confirm you until the end, blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, through whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son 1 Corinthians 1:8–9.
The thanksgiving ends on the one ground of confidence available for a church like this: God is faithful. Not you are promising, not you have made a good beginning — the guarantee that they will stand blameless at the end rests on the character of the one who called them, and the same word that opened the letter closes the paragraph: they were called. Paul is about to be severe with them for sixteen chapters, and he settles first that their security does not depend on his severity working. Fellowship is the last word before the rebuke begins — the very thing the next paragraph shows them destroying 1 Corinthians 1:10.
settled What this mark means