14The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. 15The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment:
16"For who has known the mind of the Lord
that he may instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.
On Divisions in the Church
1Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly—mere infants in Christ. 2I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. 3You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men? 4For when one says, "I follow Paul," and another, "I follow Apollos," are you not mere men?
Dig Deeper
As a high school teacher at an inner-city school, it was not completely uncommon to have students come to class high, especially after lunch. Of course, we sent them to the office to be suspended, but I always wondered why they thought that was okay to do. When asked, nearly every one of them came up with the same reason. They all felt that the drugs made them better students and sharper mentally. The effect was quite the opposite, really. They thought the drugs were making them better and more attuned to what was going on, but they actually made them noticeably worse.
When the Corinthians were giving into the mind set of the world around them, this is exactly what they were doing. They were accepting that the wisdom of the sophists and philosophers, with all of its accompanying arrogance and arguments, made them more spiritual. The reality was, however, that it made them less spiritual. It, in fact, made them incapable of discerning the true spiritual wisdom for which they should be craving. They evidently believed that a bit of Christian truth mixed with the flash and belief system of the sophists might make them even better Christians; yet the truth was it did nothing but expose their immaturity and lack of spiritual discernment. The evidence of this immaturity was their in-fighting over who followed who.
This fighting, in fact, was evidence that they had not fully accepted their death and new life in Christ. They were trying to operate in the life of Christ while still embracing the values and mentality of the present world. That simply won’t work. That’s why Paul called on his readers in his letter to the Romans to no longer “conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is” (Rom. 12:2). Earlier in that same letter Paul reminds them that “Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind controlled by the sinful nature is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace. The sinful mind is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God” (Rom. 8:5-8). The Corinthians were faced with this choice. Were they going to seek after the values of the flesh or were they going to learn to operate from the mindset of the Spirit?
In making his argument, Paul sets up a distinction between two types of people. He refers to those who are driven and led by the Spirit of God as spiritual. The other group is translated as ‘worldly’ here but could also be rendered ‘merely human’ or better yet, ‘soul-ish’. The meaning that Paul wants to convey is worldly as opposed to spiritual. The spiritual person is controlled and led by the Spirit, but the worldly person is controlled and led by their own soul or nature, the normal human way of thinking and acting. The spiritual person lives in a different realm of understanding than does the worldly individual. It would be like listening to a speech in Russian, which you understand, in a room full of people who only understand English. The spiritual person will see and understand things that are foolish babblings to the worldly man.
This is not to say that Paul believes that this should puff up the spiritual person in any way. The fact is, however, that the spiritual person lives and operates on a different plane. He makes judgments from a spiritual perspective rather than a mere natural perspective. The judgments that worldly men make, and their opinions, should have no effect on the man who is operating in the spiritual perspective. Paul uses the words of Isaiah 40:13, “For who has known the mind of the LORD, that he may instruct him,” to make this point. The expected answer would be that no human can know the mind of the LORD, but Paul answers that the spiritual person has the mind of Christ. Paul has already said that the Messiah has “become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). It is not a big leap, then, for Paul to argue that we also have access to the mind of the Messiah. That means that there is no limit, if we have the Spirit within us, to the depth of wisdom that we can explore.
The Corinthians may have been supposing that Paul was including them as part of the spiritual people. When he came to them, he could only teach them basic things, because they were not yet ready for the deeper teaching. This may also answer a charge leveled against Paul, that he only taught them basic things while the other teachers that came later were much deeper and more exciting. The deeper teaching of the other teachers had only appealed to their eagerness for social and spiritual status. It had appealed to their pride not strengthened their spirits, which of course, was a charge against them, not the teachers. This was a demonstration they were still not ready. Their behavior was putting on display the fact that they were still thinking as natural, worldly humans, not a spiritual people with the mind of Christ. In fact, Paul subtly shifts in this passage from them behaving as mere humans (2:14), to being so human that anyone would notice (3:1), to making a conscious decision to resist the spirit rather than showing no evidence of it (3:3). When the church engaged in the cult of personality, they were demonstrating that they were unspiritual and not ready for the deeper wisdom and teaching that he deeply desired to give to them. The real irony of this situation is that the more they argued about who they followed, and who was more spiritual, they more they displayed that they were not spiritual at all.
Devotional Thought
Are there any areas of your life that you have switched things around like the Corinthians did? Some times the things we do, which we think makes us look spiritual, actually demonstrate our lack of spiritual discernment and maturity. Think of one specific area in your life in which you have been operating on the merely human level and need more spiritual maturity. What do you need to do to develop a deeper spiritual maturity in that area?
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