The Tree of Knowledge
The Corinthians for all their giftedness were missing the person and character of the God who had shown himself in and as Christ. Knowledge had become the centre-piece of their religion and by their intellectual ability they found themselves separated from the pagan world around them. Not really by Christ, you understand, but by their grasp of the truth about Christ. They had found truth; they had become knowing ones! But, in sinners, the capacity to know, and knowledge as its fruit, has the almost invariable effect of "puffing up" (8:1).
Their intellectual grasp had freed them from polytheism and other pagan superstitions but it was this very sense of freedom that was going to their heads. F.W. Robertson said:
"The real emancipation from false gods is reverence for the true God. For high knowledge is not negative, but positive; it is to be freed from the fear of the Many in order to adore and love the One. [in youth] the pride of intellect sustains us strongly; but a time comes when we feel terribly that the Tree of Knowledge is not the Tree of Life...Separate from love, the more we know, the profounder the mystery of life becomes; the more dreary and the more horrible becomes existence. I can conceive no dying hour more awful than that of one who has aspired to know instead of to love, and finds himself at last amidst a world of barren facts and lifeless theories, loving none and adoring nothing."
A man isn't getting to know God if the more he learns he more he leans on himself. An expanding stock of knowledge isn't the same as an expanding heart. True knowledge should increase the mystery of what is wondered at. This is true of God or a dandelion. If looking at a fluffy dandelion drives us to wonder, we ought to be casting a glance heavenward and wondering about the God who made the dandelion. We ought to have the experience of one boy who grew up and found:
As wider skies broke on his view,
God greatened in his growing mind,
Each year he dreamed his God anew,
And left his older God behind.
And how could someone know "there is no God but one; and there is one Lord Jesus" and still hold his brothers and sisters in contempt? Once they were all fellow-pagans, filled with ignorant superstition, self-service and happy immorality. Friends together in a great moral and spiritual darkness. Then they met God! The God who made himself known in and as the crucified One; and everything was filled with light. Caught up by grandeur of the message they joined it (not quite) as they would join a new school of thought. And when they discovered some of their brothers and sisters couldn't grasp the exalted concepts of one God and one Lord, they came to despise them. Through the cross (!) they learned to despise those for whom Christ died on the cross?
This whole section shows there were tensions and cracks in the fellowship between the "strong" and the "weak". The strong thought the stupidity of polytheism was obvious (compare 8:4) so the only thing for the weak was for the strong to teach them and for them to grow to be like the strong. In the meantime, not everyone had the freedom that comes with correct views (8:7).
These were weak in knowledge, but that's not the same as being weak in purpose to please God (compare Romans 14:6-8). If the strong, claiming to "know" God walk all over their weaker brothers and sisters to their destruction (8:11), they are despising and slaying those ignorant ones for whom Christ died. If that's the case, then who are the truly strong and weak? The cross is strength operating from the position of weakness. The cross is God siding with the weak. The cross says the weak are worth dying for. To act in opposition to that in the name of "knowing" God is not to know the God of the cross who died for the weak and ignorant (among whom the knowing ones were once numbered).
Jeremiah 9:24 (quoted twice by Paul in the Corinthian literature) says: "'Let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,' declares the Lord."
The job of the strong is to make the weak strong (no bad thing) but they wanted to carry it out from a position of power and strength rather than to become weak. "Make them come up; after all they're the ones with the problem, they're the weak and we are the strong. We have truth on our side." In this they refuse the pattern of the Christ who was crucified "in weakness" (2 Corinthians 13:4) and who in becoming weak became strong to carry out God's purpose. If He who knew God in completeness made the ultimate move toward weakness to gain the weak what does that say about the knowing ones who despise and isolate the weak and the ignorant?
Paul makes the point that because of Christ's example in showing us what knowing God means (1 Corinthians 11:1) the weak have veto power over our knowledge and the liberties that come from it.
Well, it isn't quite veto power over our knowledge, but veto power over some of the things we do with that greater knowledge (which is the potential for greater power). The needs and vulnerability of others places limits on our power and puts a fence around our liberties. The loveless heart that worships knowledge will resent such restraints, but the lover doesn't wish to be completely free.
Greater knowledge is not despised, nor is it ever consigned to oblivion. It is given a context it is knowledge "en Christo" and its purpose is to serve the God who has shown himself as the reconciler of the world in and as the crucified Christ, the one who identified with the weak.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.