1 CORINTHIANS 4 — STEWARDS OF GOD'S MYSTERIES AND A FATHER'S APPEAL

Chapters 1–4 form a unit addressing the divisions in Corinth. Having shown that human wisdom is folly (chapters 1–2) and that teachers are only servants (chapter 3), Paul now addresses the Corinthians' habit of sitting in judgment on their leaders. Some in Corinth apparently were evaluating Paul and others by standards of rhetoric and prestige and finding Paul wanting (compare 2 Corinthians 10:10). In the ancient world, status and honor were the chief social currency, and boasting was a normal way of competing. Paul turns this system upside down by pointing to the apostles' humble condition: they are the last in line, treated as scum, while the Corinthians imagine themselves kings. The chapter is a model of pastoral rebuke, mixing sharp irony with deep affection, and it prepares for the specific moral issues Paul will address beginning in chapter 5.

Paul's catalog of hardship is a powerful testimony to the sincerity of the apostles. These were people who gained nothing in worldly terms from their message: they were hungry, beaten, homeless, and slandered. If the resurrection had been a fabrication, such sufferings would be difficult to explain; people may die for a lie they believe is true, but it is very hard to imagine them enduring a lifetime of deprivation for something they knew was false. Paul's own conversion from persecutor to apostle came at great personal cost, and his claim to have seen the risen Lord (9:1; 15:8) was made in the knowledge that many of the witnesses could be questioned (15:6). The pattern of the apostles' lives fits a movement that was convinced by powerful evidence.