Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Corinthians · About this commentary
What Each Man's Work Is
1 Corinthians 3:10-15
10 According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another builds on it. But let each man be careful how he builds on it. · WEB
One foundation is laid and cannot be replaced; what gets built on it will be tested by fire, and a builder may lose everything he built and still be saved.
According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another builds on it. But let each man be careful how he builds on it 1 Corinthians 3:10.
He claims the skill and immediately assigns it to grace... given — the letter's habit 1 Corinthians 4:7. And the warning is addressed to each man, which widens the passage beyond apostles. Anyone who teaches, leads, or shapes a congregation is building on someone else's foundation, and the caution is about how.
For no one can lay any other foundation than that which has been laid, which is Jesus Christ 1 Corinthians 3:11.
The foundation is not a doctrine about Christ or a style of ministry but the person, and it is already in place. Nobody gets to lay a second one — not Apollos, not Cephas, not Paul, whose names the parties were building on 1 Corinthians 1:12. A church may be built badly; it cannot be re-founded.
But if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, or straw 1 Corinthians 3:12.
Six materials in two groups of three, and the division is not cheap against expensive — it is fireproof against flammable. Gold, silver and stone survive a blaze; wood, hay and straw are gone. Both kinds of builder are working on the right foundation, and the difference between them will not be visible until the test.
Each man's work will be revealed. For the Day will declare it, because it is revealed in fire; and the fire itself will test what sort of work each man's work is 1 Corinthians 3:13.
The Day needs no further identification. And the verb governing the whole verse is revealed — the fire is diagnostic before it is destructive; it does not decide what the work was, it declares it. What a ministry actually consisted of may be concealed from the congregation, from observers, and from the builder himself until then, which is why Paul refuses to render verdicts early 1 Corinthians 4:5.
If any man's work is burned, he will suffer loss, but he himself will be saved, but as through fire 1 Corinthians 3:15.
The most merciful sentence in the chapter, and the most sobering. A man's entire life's work in the church may be consumed — he will suffer loss, and the loss is real and irreversible — and he himself will be saved. Salvation rests on the foundation, not on the quality of what was built; a bad builder on the right foundation is not a lost man. But the image is not comfortable: he comes through as through fire, escaping with himself and nothing else, like a man out of a burning house. The verse says nothing about a place or process of purification after death; the fire here tests work, on a stated Day, and its subject throughout is the builder's product rather than the builder's soul.
held with reason What this mark means