Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Corinthians · About this commentary
Stewards of the Mysteries
1 Corinthians 4:1-5
1 So let a man think of us as Christ’s servants and stewards of God’s mysteries. · WEB
Paul reframes the teachers the parties were grading as household stewards answerable to their owner, and refuses to accept any verdict — including his own — before the Day.
So let a man think of us as Christ's servants and stewards of God's mysteries. Here, moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful 1 Corinthians 4:1–2.
The factions had been assessing their teachers as patrons assess public speakers. Paul supplies the correct category: stewards, household managers who handled another man's property and answered to him alone. The word settles two things at once — a steward has real responsibility, and none of it is his own. And the standard applied to stewards is not brilliance, popularity, or results, but faithful: did he handle what was entrusted to him honestly?
But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you, or by a human court. Yes, I don't even judge my own self 1 Corinthians 4:3.
He dismisses the Corinthian assessment, and then goes further and dismisses his own. That second clause is what keeps the first from being arrogance. A man who says your opinion of me is a very small thing while privately treasuring his own opinion of himself has merely relocated the tribunal; Paul closes both courts.
For I know nothing against myself. Yet I am not justified by this, but he who judges me is the Lord 1 Corinthians 4:4.
And this is the sentence worth carrying away. A clear conscience is not an acquittal. He can think of nothing to charge himself with and refuses to treat that as a verdict, because self-knowledge is too shallow an instrument for the question — the psalm asks God to search out faults its writer could not see Psalms 19:12 Psalms 139:23–24. Conscience is a witness, not a judge.
Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of the hearts. Then each man will get his praise from God 1 Corinthians 4:5.
The conclusion is a moratorium, and its ground is the same as the fire that tests the building 1 Corinthians 3:13: the evidence is not in yet. Two things are missing from every present assessment — the hidden things of darkness, what was actually done, and the counsels of the hearts, why it was done. Motive is precisely what makes a work gold or straw, and it is the one thing no observer can see. Corinth's confident rankings were verdicts reached without the decisive testimony.
And the last clause is unexpectedly warm. The Day brings praise from God — the point of deferring judgment is not that everyone escapes assessment but that the assessment, when it comes, comes from the one who both sees everything and means to commend.
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