1 Corinthians 3:16-23

Paul has laid out the idea of preachers as being carpenters, as builders. But what exactly is that they were building? That is the idea of this next passage. The focus here is on how we, as the church—especially the laity, as those who are not preachers or missionaries—should see ourselves.

Paul begins with a bold statement: a statement that the church is a temple of God. This doesn't mean that the church meets in a temple building--it would seem that at least while Paul was there, the church met at the private house of a man named Justus. It is “ye”--the people to whom he wrote—the people who comprised the church—they were collectively the temple of God. This links back to Paul's statement a few verses earlier, where he called them “God's building.” Here, he expands and says they were not just a building but a temple, a place dedicated to the worship and the glory of God. Their lives were God's sanctuary.

This is taken even further in the second half of verse 16, where adds that “The Spirit of God dwelleth in you.” The Corinthian Christians had their share of problems—many of them were not where they should have been spiritually—many of them were carnal and not spiritual. And yet they were Christians, and so had God's spirit; that is what it means to be a Christian. When they met, they weren't simply engaged in a normal human activity; they were part of something divine, something supernatural.

Look at verse 17: “if any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy.” The word defile and destroy are the same word in Greek. Robertson paraphrases it: “The church-wrecker God will wreck.” The point is that church is something special—it is holy, set apart, belonging to God. Therefore those who cause damage to it will be punished. 

Here we have an echo of our last passage. There Paul pointed out that preachers are part of something greater than themselves and for this reason have a greater responsibility and will be judged accordingly. They would lose their reward if their work was not up to the standard it should be—and if even preachers, sincerely and honestly, doing their best work will be judged, what greater judgment will their on those who deliberately or through selfish and carnal attitude mar the church?

Remember the greater context. The Corinthian church was plagued with sectarianism; with attempts to divide the church into smaller sects and parties; sects and parties which were at odds with each other; very likely this was causing strife and division in the church; perhaps were in danger of dividing the church. And Paul is making it clear to them that this is a serious matter. They were damaging the church which was a big deal, because the church was not merely a human construct, but something made by God—and therefore their sin was not against man, but against God.

I said in the introduction that the main point of the passage is to show the church how it ought to view itself. And the first thing I would say is that we must realize the church is something more than us. It is something divine. And while that carries a comfort and a glory, yet it also has a warning. Because the church belongs to God, we will answer to God for how we treat it.

And that leads directly into the second point. Because the church belongs to God, it must be run on God's principles. We come back to the point we saw throughout chapters 1 and 2—this contrast between man's wisdom and God's wisdom. Here Paul repeats the basic point.

In the book of Job, Eliphaz is talking about how God always judges the sinner and make this statement: “He disappointeth the devices of the crafty, so that their hands cannot perform their enterprise. He taketh the wise in their own craftiness: and the counsel of the froward is carried headlong.” (Job 5:12-13) The idea is that God can always outmaneuver and outthink the sinner; no matter how smart a sinner thinks they are, they never come up with a plan to get around God—not only can they not beat God with their schemes, but God can actually turn their own schemes against them. (See the story of Haman for an example.) Of course, Eliphaz was wrong for thinking that God always brings an obvious and visible judgment on sin in this life, but he was right on the general idea—man's wisdom cannot beat God's, and whenever man tries, it always backfires in the end.

In a similar vein, the Psalmist is addressing sinful men, men who believed that they could hide their sin from God. The Psalmist addresses the folly of such ideas, saying: “He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? he that formed the eye, shall he not see? He that chastiseth the heathen, shall not he correct? he that teacheth man knowledge, shall not he know? The LORD knoweth the thoughts of man, that they are vanity.” (Psalm 94:9-11) God made man and knows all about him, all about his thinking and his so-called wisdom, and God knows just how empty all of that is. “[God] knows the patterns of thought, the processes of reasoning, the very essence of human thinking. Knowing such thinking completely, God regards it as vain.” (Beacon Bible Commentary)

In verses 19 and 20, Paul quotes from these two passages to make the point that human wisdom is insufficient. Here we have an echo of chapter 1: “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” (1 Corinthians 1:23) To man, God's plan seemed like foolishness. But here Paul says that to God, man's wisdom is foolishness. God has seen through it all.

Given this, there is no reason to cling to or pride ourselves on human wisdom. This is verse 18: “Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.” This may mean: you have to unlearn all the wrong things, so you can learn the right things. You have so many false ideas and patterns of thought from the world that you have to give up before you can start learning true wisdom. Alternatively, it could mean: you must admit that you aren't as wise as you think you are so that you will be humble enough to learn true wisdom. Quintilian wrote of some men that “they would doubtless have become excellent scholars if they had not been so fully persuaded of their own scholarship.”

The church is built by God, and therefore, it must be approached from God's perspective. God's wisdom is the only proper tool to be used here. If the church was built on man's wisdom, then it would make sense to give your loyalty to those men you viewed as wise. But the only wisdom that's actually relevant here is God's wisdom. The wisdom of Paul and Apollos—the wisdom they used in their preaching—was not their own but God's. They were builders whose work only mattered when the materials were good, and the only good materials came from God. That is why verse 21 begins: “Therefore let no man glory in men.” All this emphasis on individual preachers, this glorying and boasting about who had preached to you or who had baptized you, was missing the point. As Christians, we have the same access to God and God's wisdom as anyone else.

Of course, we should listen to others, and we should try to find those who can best present the truth, but ultimately, it is the truth that matters, not the presenters.

Finally, there is a third thing we see about the church. And that is that the church has an importance and a glory all its own. To be a Christian is to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and that brings not only the warning we saw earlier but an unspeakable glory.

“All things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas.” They were rallying around different preachers, boasting of having heard or been baptized by one of them, emphasizing their individual teaching—but Paul says that all of this is backward. He and Apollos hadn't come to Corinth to gain followers; they had come because God had sent them in order to minister to the Corinthians. Paul and Apollos (and Peter, if Peter had visited Corinth which is unclear) had been working for the sake of the Corinthians, not their own sakes—they were building the church, not building a following for themselves.

But it isn't just individuals like Paul. The world, life and death, the present and the future—all of those things belong to the Corinthians. What does that mean? "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28) God uses all things to build up those who are part of his plan, to build up his church. As Christians, the Corinthians had the entire universe at their disposal in this sense—in the sense that God was using everything to build them up as a church. Everything belonged to them, and they belonged to Christ, and Christ belonged to the Father; they had a connection to the Most High, and He had appointed the cosmos as their minister.

And to go from THAT to fighting over trivial church politics was a terrible anticlimax. William Barclay writes: “The man who gives his strength and his heart to some little splinter of a party has surrendered everything to a petty thing, when he could have entered into possession of a fellowship and a love as wide as the universe. He has confined into narrow limits a life which should be limitless in its outlook.”