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"And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, as
unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk and not with meat. For hitherto ye were
not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal; for whereas there is
among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk according to
man? For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?"
This thought is in 2: 10-14. It is quite true that the unsaved cannot understand the
things of the Spirit (we are told so in 1: 23--"to the Greeks foolishness"), but the sad part
is that many of the Lord's people approximate to the unsaved in their attitude toward
anything beyond what they are pleased to call "the simple gospel!" for in 2: 14 such
things are said to be foolishness to the natural man. By looking at verse 13, which
correctly translated reads, "Explaining (or declaring) to spiritual ones (i.e. spiritual
believers), spiritual things," we see that the Corinthian believers placed themselves on the
level of the "natural" man, and had to be addressed as unto carnal, and not as unto
spiritual. The "milk," or "Christ crucified," was all they could receive, the "meat" which
they could not relish or digest was the preparatory teaching to the great mystery
concerning Christ and His church. This could only be presented, at the time of writing, to
those who were perfect or full grown.
The apostle goes on in chapter 3: to show how the forgetting of Christ, and the
magnifying of His ministers, was a clear symptom of their failure. It is still the same to-
day. Men fight over their denominations, they make little gods of their leaders, they lose
sight of Christ in their zeal for ordinances of eating, drinking, and doing, and they are so
consumed with eagerness to form their conceptions of unity, that the risen Lord, without
whom unity is a farce, is neglected and forgotten.
I Cor. 3: 10, 11 brings us to the one foundation, and bids us give heed as to how we
build thereon, for everything except the temple of God which is "God's building" will be
destroyed. We know personally many saints, and are quite sure that they are building
upon the true foundation, but we are also equally sure that they are building that which
God has thrown down, and consequently, through their failure to "rightly divide the
Word of truth," they will have need to be "ashamed," as workmen who have neglected
the plans and instructions of the Great Architect. The writer knows from personal
experience a meeting where for fifteen months the message for the Sunday morning was
an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount! Would that such zeal could be directed to
"know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance
in the holiest."
Let us now turn to Hebrews 5: and 6: Here we meet with a similar state of affairs to
that at Corinth. The Hebrew believers were not magnifying Paul, Apollos, or Cephas, but
were magnifying angels, Moses, their fathers, their temple, their ritual, their priesthood,
and their sacrifices, and the result was equally disastrous, for just as the carnality of the
Corinthians rendered them unable to understand the deep things of God, so with the
Hebrews.
The predominant note of Hebrews is that "in all things HE might have the
pre-eminence." In chapter 1: Christ is seen to be above angels; in 3: above Moses;