It will not however be out of place to advise the interested reader, that a careful and fairly full exposition of

Galatians, with complete structural outlines, will be found in The Berean Expositor, Volumes 37, 38 and 39. Also it

is given an exposition in The Apostle of the Reconciliation, and in An Alphabetical Analysis Part Two.

We therefore leave this exhibition of the place that Christ occupies in the epistle to the Galatians, to pursue the

same line of investigation in the epistle to the Corinthians.

CHRIST, in the Epistles of Paul

While the Scriptures are for all time, nevertheless they all have had a primary and individual origin. Galatians as

we can see was written to rescue these new converts to the faith from the snare of legalism and ceremony. Then, in

a sense which the apostle may not have conceived, it has and should minister as the Word of God to each succeeding

generation in this age of grace.

So, when we read the epistle to the Corinthians, we are conscious that `the house of Chloe', and those who

ranged themselves under the names of Paul, Apollos or Cephas, and such as were baptized like Crispus and Gaius

and Stephanas, were all historic individual members of the Church at Corinth, a literal seaport of Greece.

Nevertheless the problems that beset this early company, and the solutions given by the apostle have been repeated,

and will be repeated, until these frail bodies of our humiliation are transfigured into the likeness of the Lord' s own

body of glory, and the limited vision, seen by means of a mirror enigmatically, and partial knowledge, give place to

that which is full and complete (1 Cor. 13:12).

If law, misunderstood and misapplied, emptied the cross of Christ of its intrinsic value to Galatians; philosophy

was doing the same thing in Greek-speaking Corinth and Colosse.

Consequently, `wisdom of words', `wisdom', `foolishness', `enticing words of man's wisdom', `the wisdom of

God in a mystery', meet us as we read chapters 1 and 2.

`For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ

should be made of none effect' (1 Cor. 1:17).

Paul uses the word logos `word' more times than the Authorized Version reveals. Let us see for ourselves:

`Not with wisdom of words' (1 Cor. 1:17).

`The preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God'

(1 Cor. 1:18).

`Not with excellency of speech' (1 Cor. 2:1).

`My speech ` was not with enticing words' (1 Cor. 2:4).

`Not in the words ` man's wisdom'. (1 Cor. 2:13).

`But which (ref. to logos) the Holy Ghost teacheth' (1 Cor. 2:13).

The apostle Paul, possibly knowing the addiction these Corinthians had to juggle with words, uses a startling

figure of speech, known to the Greeks as Catachresis or Incongruity; and speaks of the `foolishness' of God as being

wiser than men, and of the `weakness' of God as being stronger than men, and in contrast to all attempts to boast in

the flesh, he places the completeness that is found alone in Christ. There is, in verse 30, a small particle te translated

`both' in 1 Corinthians 1:2 which is not expressed in the translation of the A. V. and which, by taking a small liberty

with the idiom, would be rendered quite plain and pointed, as in the following paraphrase:

`But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification AS

WELL AS initial redemption'

which sentiment is again found at the close of chapter 3,