Commentary on 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

In 1 Corinthians Paul deals with a wide range of issues in the life of the church, where he discerns a significant gap between behavior consistent with the truth of the gospel and what is happening in the Corinthian church. This is unsurprising: Not only is the church relatively new, and now lacking in-person guidance from Paul and his co-workers. There is also a culture gap because the church is largely made up of gentile believers in a Jewish Messiah, and their assumptions about appropriate behavior will naturally reflect the patterns of their own social world. Paul repeatedly challenges his readers to revise their assumptions so they align more closely with their new faith.

First Corinthians 12–14 is a major unit of such material. It focuses on how the gifts of the Spirit are being used in worship at Corinth (12:1). The Corinthians exalt speaking in tongues and treat being able to do so as a sign of personal status. Paul directs them away from treating the gifts competitively and as a source of personal honor, something with which ancient culture was deeply concerned. The Spirit’s purpose in giving gifts is to build up the church, not to exalt the recipient. The value that the Corinthians place on tongues is excessive, given that uninterpreted tongues, which those who hear them cannot understand, cannot achieve this purpose (14:13–19).

Paul does not forbid speaking in tongues (14:39), and he does not deny that some gifts are greater than others (12:31), or that some are gifted by God to exercise leadership (12:28). But he does insist that how the gifts are used must be shaped by love (1 Corinthians 13). The true index of greatness lies in concern for the community.

Here in 12:3b–13 Paul lays the foundation for this wider argument. His fundamental concern is to insist that it is the Spirit who distributes gifts and that all Christians have received the Spirit. At the outset, Paul points to the confession of faith that all believers share. To say “Jesus is Lord” is itself spiritual speech, empowered by the Spirit (12:3b). Paul does not mean that the mouthing of these words is impossible for unbelievers, but that it is impossible to intend them as “a self-involving confession of the lordship of Jesus” except by the Spirit.¹ Whoever makes such a self-involving confession is already a spiritual person irrespective of which gifts they receive.

Conversely, anyone who curses Jesus (12:3a) in a self-involving way by definition lacks the Spirit, as did the Corinthians themselves when they used to worship the deities of Greece and Rome (12:2). The Spirit speaks in the church, but the idols were mute. In a context where the Corinthians unduly exalt those who speak in tongues, Paul wants to remind them that the true boundary between what is spiritual and what is unspiritual does not lie between those believers perceived to be more gifted and the rest, but instead between those who confess the lordship of Jesus and those who do not.

It is in this context that the gifts of the Spirit should be understood. There is remarkable diversity in divine activity within the church, with different gifts, ministries, and activities (12:4–6), yet they all come from the same God, and they are all for the common good of the community (12:7). Here Paul speaks not just of the same Spirit but also of the same Lord and the same God. He describes how the work of God is experienced in the church in a trinitarian way. The purpose is not to allocate different aspects of this work among the members of the Trinity, as if they operated separately from each other, but instead to emphasize that the unity of the Godhead underlies the diversity of ways in which that work happens.

Paul goes on to list some of the diverse gifts granted by the Spirit (12:8–10). There are others, as the similar lists at Romans 12:6–8 and Ephesians 4:11–13 demonstrate, so Paul is not by any means exhaustive here, but what he says is instructive:

• It is probably right to infer that he places tongues and their interpretation last (12:10) because of the Corinthians’ tendency to overvalue them.
• The utterance of knowledge and the utterance of wisdom probably relate to the granting of insight into God’s working of salvation through Jesus. Paul has earlier rebuked the Corinthians’ attraction to the wisdom of the world (1:20), and to human knowledge that merely puffs up (8:1), and here they are reminded that true knowledge and wisdom are granted by God.
• Next comes faith—which, since it is here a gift granted only to some and not the saving faith received by all, presumably must relate to miracles (see 13:2 and the faith to move mountains), as the fact that it is followed by the gift of miracles and that of healings suggests.
• The nature of prophecy (12:10) is much discussed, but it seems likely to be a God-given insight into the life of the community and its members that challenges or comforts, warns of judgment, or offers consolation. The discernment of spirits that follows involves testing prophecy and separating the true from the false.

Paul concludes the list by pointing out that not only do all the gifts come from the same Spirit but that the Spirit acts sovereignly in allocating the gifts to individuals (12:11). Yet the Spirit does not seem to will that some in Christ should receive gifts and others not. It is only which gifts they receive that varies, for their relationship in Christ is like that between the different parts of the body of a single person (12:12). Just as they all confessed Jesus as Lord (12:3), so they all received the same baptism (12:2), whatever their ethnicity or social status, and through that baptism they all received the same Spirit (see also Mark 1:8 and John 1:33).

Paul returns again and again to the same point that it is imperative for the Corinthians and for us to grasp: The gifts come from the Spirit, and the Spirit is given to all who believe.

Notes

1. Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 208.