1 Corinthians 13:8

1Co_13:8-10

Charity never faileth;… prophecies shall fail;… tongues shall cease;… knowledge shall vanish away.

Charity never faileth

I. As the living principle in the heart of believers. In its essence it is the love of God within a man. It may vary indeed in its apparent intensity. It may seem almost extinguished; but, like the fire on the altar of sacrifice, it still exists, and is soon fanned up again into a flame when Jesus smiles. Of itself, says Poole, it will never desert a man in this life, unless it be first deserted by him through deadly sin.

II. As an active grace of the Christian life on earth.

1. View it in any of its manifestations.

(1) Beneficence and self-denying liberality--the poor ye have always with you; and a claim ever arises from these.

(2) Forgiveness of injuries, while these abound--and so long as human nature is what it is they will abound--every day affords occasions in which it is called for.

(3) Kindness and forbearance to the faults and failings of others: in the present imperfect state such must ever be expected.

2. Nor less than this is it adapted to all circumstances and situations of life: to the poor and the rich, etc. There is no position in which the believer can possibly be found in which charity will not be an ornament and a delight. It will add glory to, and preserve the soul from, the dangers of the day of prosperity; and it will equally cheer it in the day of adversity.

3. It is adapted to every period of time, to the hour of death, to the day of judgment, yea, to heaven itself.

4. And so, in a more extended sense, and as regards the condition of the Church, no less than in individual cases. It is adapted to times of persecution and to times of peace; when the world frowns or when the world smiles. Charity is the best preservative against, as it is the only cure for, those petty jealousies which equally disgrace the Church and dishonour God.

III. In supplying motives to exertion in the Redeemers cause. In its comprehensiveness, it takes in the entire race, and aims at no lower object than to make known His ways upon earth; His saving health among all nations.

IV. As to the durability of its existence. It will last for ever, and live in heaven, as the life of glory there. Death cannot annihilate it. Love is heaven, and heaven is love. To have it, therefore, now is to possess the foretaste of eternal joys. (J. T. Smith, M.A.)

Charity never faileth

Observe--

I. How gifts fail.

1. Prophecy must be accomplished.

2. Tongues superseded.

3. Knowledge vanish before a brighter manifestation.

II. How love never fails.

1. Its work is never done.

2. Its necessity can never be superseded.

3. Its expression may be perfected, but in heaven as on earth its nature is the same.

III. The inference.

1. Love is better than gifts.

2. Should be more earnestly desired. (J. Lyth, D.D.)

Charity never faileth

I. As a gift.

1. The apostle had been speaking of temporary gifts. Supernatural endowments were granted to the Church for a season only. The apostle intimates that there is a gift of richer value, and that the time would come when these would be bestowed no longer, and when that only would remain.

2. What a catastrophe would it be were it to become extinct! But it cannot fail. So wide a channel was made for it by the mission of the Son of God, that to stop its onward flow were as impossible as to prevent the rolling of the oceans waves. Love as it dwells in the believers breast is only a reflection of the love of the Creator. Hence it is a gift which never fails.

3. The gift of charity will never fail on earth, how then is it possible that it should fail in heaven? The period will arrive when not only miracles will cease, but even the ordinary means for the edification of the Church. But love will even then abide. Upon the blessed inhabitant of the upper sanctuary it will stream in richest plenitude, direct from the eternal throne.

II. An active virtue.

1. It is a gift, but it is a gift to be employed, and on its exercise depends its value. Nor does it ever fail in this respect. It is ever seeking to do good, and to pour its gifts and blessings on the hapless sons of man.

(1) Its pity never fails. Wherever it beholds an object of distress, its efforts are put forth to give relief.

(2) Its liberality never fails. It is like an angel of mercy, which is never wearied with conferring favours, and never says you ask too much.

(3) Its ingenuities never fail. It is ever occupied in forming schemes to carry out its generous designs. Spurious or defective charity may fail, but true charity will never fail.

2. Look again into the eternal world. How active is the principle of love among the hosts of heaven! On earth, love is more or less mixed up with other things; in heaven it will be free from all defect. The family will be one. They will have one common interest. Each will contribute to the happiness of all. Jealousies will not be there. No envious feelings can be there indulged.

III. A source of pure and elevated enjoyment. What is so constant as the joy that springs from the activities of benevolence? Mans happiness will ever be increased in proportion to the largeness of his soul. When other springs of pleasure are dried up, this will continue to flow in copious and refreshing streams. In heaven, our Fathers house, love will be more pure, more elevated, and more fervent; and hence it will be there, as it is on earth, but in a far higher measure, the source of never-ending satisfaction and delight. (Thornley Smith.)

Charity never faileth

It is a noble plant, full of vigorous life, that allows insects and reptiles to feed upon its bark and leaves, but grows on in silence and rears its head in beauty and majesty, and throws out its branches on all sides to the wind and the light, bright and fragrant with bloom and bending with abundant fruit. (J. A. James.)

Love never fails

I. As an evidence of pardon (Luk_7:47). The woman who was a sinner loved much because she had much forgiven. To whom little is forgiven the same loveth little.

II. As an element of acceptable obedience (1Co_13:3). The acts of the unconverted are not considered by God. There is but meagre satisfaction in this passage for the moralist. Without love to Jesus our best deeds do not avail before God (Mat_25:40). Doing for the brethren is doing for Jesus. An act of kindness or deed of love done for a child, far away from home and in need of sympathy and care, is regarded by the parent as a favour done to him. The mother is better pleased than if the deed of love had been done unto her.

III. As an element of acceptable service (Rev_2:4-5). The Church at Ephesus had left her first love; therefore the service she rendered was not pleasing to God. She must do her first works, which were seasoned with love, and cease to perform her duties mechanically in order that her efforts might be acceptable to God (1Co_13:1-2). Love is also the power-element of service.

IV. As a sin resisting power (Joh_14:15). Love to Jesus produces righteousness. It enables us to keep the commandments, and is therefore a sin-resisting power (Joh_14:21).

V. As an aggressive power (2Co_5:14). The constraining love of Jesus made Paul the aggressive man he was.

VI. As a sustaining power (Joh_21:17). Peter repented, because he had in him the germ of true love for Jesus, and was sustained. Judas repented from remorse, and ultimately destroyed himself. Love to Jesus sustained Polycarp, Stephen, Latimer, Ridley, the martyrs, and the persecuted in all ages.

VII. In producing confession (Joh_12:42-43). When men love position and power and the praise of men more than Christ they will not confess Him. When men love Jesus supremely they are swift to confess Him as Lord and Saviour (Rom_10:10).

VIII. As a preparation for heaven (1Co_16:22). Without love to Christ no one is meet for heaven, but is devoted to destruction. The wrath of God abideth on him. (Hom. Review.)

The immortality of love

It will never fail as--

I. An element of moral power. It is the strongest--

1. Sustaining power.

2. Resisting power. Love builds around the soul a rampart, invulnerable.

3. Aggressive power. We have not only to bear up under trials, and to resist temptations, but we have battles to fight. There is nothing so aggressive in the moral world as love. Man can stand before anything sooner than love.

II. A principle of social unity. Deep in the heart of man is the desire for union with his fellow, isolation and division are naturally repugnant to his social nature. His ingenuity has been taxed for ages in the invention of schemes for union. As the result we have confederations based on political sympathy, material interests, theological dogmas, mere carnal affinities; but we are only one with those we love. But we can only love the lovable.

III. A source of spiritual happiness. Love is joy.

1. It expels from the mind all the elements unfavourable to happiness.

2. It generates in the mind all the elements of spiritual joy. (D. Thomas, D.D.)

The imperishableness of love

Either of the two explanations of this word faileth, viz., falls down, or is hissed off the stage, conveys the same impression concerning love, namely, that it is permanent, it will never fall down from inanition, nor be hissed off because superseded. All the beauties of love, unlike those of face or landscape, are permanent. The imperishableness of love--

I. Is indicated by its capacity of meeting all demands made upon it.

1. This is the conclusion from the previous assertions of this passage.

2. This is the result of our observation of every-day life. True levels equal to any exigency. It survives all else.

II. Is a striking contrast to almost all else in human experience.

1. This is the declaration of the passage following our text. All else ceases, vanishes, is done away.

2. This is confirmed by human experience. Love is the great protest of our immortality.

III. Is explained by its being divine not only in its origin and sustenance, but in its nature. Love is of God, and Gods love never faileth, His mercy endureth for ever. Ours is not an imitation of His, but an inspiration from it. His love is the life of ours. Hence ours is deathless. (U. R. Thomas.)

Charity unfailing and everlasting

Immortality is the crown of virtue. Riches perish, laurels wither, beauty fades, the fires of genius burn out, and the proudest monuments crumble. Even in Christianity there are many things which are only of temporary utility. Already all that splendid array of miraculous powers that distinguished the Apostolic Church is numbered with the things that were. For these were only the instruments and auxiliaries of that Divine system of which charity is the vital principle. These were only the temporary scaffolds of that spiritual temple of which charity is the precious material. We may change many of our opinions and practicers, and yet be Christians. But this great central principle of our religion cannot be sacrificed, without the subversion of Christs throne on earth. It was proverbially the spirit of the first believers, and will be equally the temper of the last. (J. Cross, D.D.)

Charity towards the dead

The Duke of Marlborough and Lord Bolingbroke were in opposite political interests, and on most occasions ranged against each other. Some gentleman, after the death of the great commander, speaking of his character and avarice, appealed to Bolingbroke for confirmation. To his honor, he replied, The Duke of Marlborough was so great a man that I quite forget his failings. (W. Baxendale.)

The Holy Spirit for ever

I. The Spirit of Christ is given to His people everlastingly, to influence and dwell in them (Joh_14:16-17).

II. There are other fruits of the Spirit besides that which summarily consists in love, wherein the Spirit of God is communicated to His Church.

1. Extraordinary gifts, miracles, inspiration, etc.

2. Ordinary gifts. These, in all ages, have more or less been bestowed on many unconverted men, in common convictions of sin, common illuminations, and religious affections.

III. All these other fruits of the Spirit are but for a season, and either have already ceased, or at some time will cease. As to the miraculous gifts, they are but of a temporary use, and cannot be continued in heaven. And as to the common fruits of the Spirit, with respect to the persons that have them, they will cease when they come to die; and with respect to the Church, they wil1 cease after the day of judgment.

IV. Love is that great fruit of the Spirit that never fails. Consider the Church--

1. With respect to its members, as--

(1) It never fails in this world (Rom_8:38-39).

(2) And it ceases not when the saints come to die. When the apostles went to heaven, they left all their miraculous gifts behind. But they carried love with them to heaven, where it was perfected.

2. As a body. Though other fruits of the Spirit fail in it, this shall never fail. Of old, when there were interruptions of the miraculous gifts of the Spirit there never was any interruption of this. And at the end of the world when the Church shall be settled in its eternal state, and all common and miraculous gifts shall be at an end, love shall be brought to its most glorious perfection in every individual member of the ransomed Church above.

V. This reason for the truth of the doctrine which has thus been presented, viz., that love is the great end of all the other fruits and gifts of the Spirit. It is the end to which all the miraculous gifts that ever were in the world, are but the means. They were only means of grace, but love is grace itself; and not only so, but the sum of all grace. Application:

1. There seems to be no reason to think that the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit are to be restored to the Church in the times of her latter-day prosperity and blessedness. Prophecy and miracles argue the imperfection of the state of the Church, rather than its perfection. For they are designed as a support, or as a leading-string, to the Church in its infancy, rather than as means adapted to it in its full growth. And then again that state will not be more glorious than the heavenly state; and yet the apostle teaches, that in the heavenly state all these gifts shall be at an end, and the influence of the Spirit in producing Divine love only shall remain.

2. The subject should make persons exceedingly cautious how they give heed to anything that may look like a new revelation, or that may claim to be any extraordinary gift of the Spirit.

3. The subject teaches how greatly we should value those influences and fruits of the Spirit which are evidences of true grace in the soul, and which are all summarily included in love. (Jon. Edwards.)

Heaven, a world of love

I. The cause and fountain of love in heaven.--The God of love Himself dwells there, and this renders heaven a world of love; for God is the fountain of love, as the sun is the fountain of light.

II. The objects of love that it contains.

1. There are none but lovely objects in heaven (Rev_21:27). All the persons that belong to the blessed society of heaven are lovely. The Father of the family is lovely, and so are all His children. There are no false professors or hypocrites there.

2. They shall be perfectly lovely. There are many things in this world that in the general are lovely, but yet are not perfectly free from that which is the contrary.

3. All those objects that the saints have loved above all things here while in this world shall be in heaven.

III. The subjects of love in heaven. And these are the hearts in which it dwells. In every heart in heaven love dwells and reigns. The heart of God is the original seat or subject of love. The love of God the Father flows out toward Christ the head, and to all the members through Him. And the light of their love is reflected in the first place, and chiefly back to its great source. There is no enemy of God in heaven; but all, as His children, love Him as their Father.

IV. The principle of love in heaven.

1. As to its nature. It is altogether holy and Divine.

2. As to its degree. It is perfect. The love that dwells in the heart of God is absolutely perfect. The love of angels and saints to God and Christ is perfect in its kind, or with such a perfection as is proper to their nature. It is perfect with a sinless perfection, and perfect in that it is commensurate to the capacities of their nature.

V. The excellent circumstances in which love shall be expressed and enjoyed in heaven.

1. It is always mutual. It is always met with answerable returns of love--with returns proportioned to its exercise.

2. Its joy shall never be interrupted or damped by jealousy.

3. There shall be nothing within themselves to clog or hinder it in the saints. In this world they find much to hinder them in this respect.

4. It will be expressed with perfect decency and wisdom.

5. There shall be nothing to keep us at a distance from each other, or to hinder our most perfect enjoyment of each others love.

6. We shall all he united in very near and dear relations.

7. All shall have property and ownership in each other. Love seeks to have the beloved its own; and Divine love rejoices in saying, My beloved is mine, and I am his.

8. We shall enjoy each others love in perfect and uninterrupted prosperity.

9. All things shall conspire to promote our love, and give advantage for mutual enjoyment.

10. We shall know that we shall for ever be continued in the perfect enjoyment of each others love.

VI. The blessed effects and fruits of this love, as exercised and enjoyed in these circumstances.

1. The most excellent and perfect behaviour of all the inhabitants of heaven toward God and each other.

2. Perfect tranquillity and joy.

Conclusion:

1. If heaven be such a world as has been described, then we may see reason why contention and strife tend to darken our evidence of fitness for its possession.

2. How happy those are who are entitled to heaven! But here some may be ready to say, Without doubt; but who are these persons? By what marks may they be distinguished?

(1) They are those that have had the principle or seed of the same love that reigns in heaven implanted in their hearts in regeneration.

(2). They are those who have freely chosen the happiness that flows from the exercise and enjoyment of such love as is in heaven, above all other conceivable happiness.

(3) They are those who, from the love that is in them, are, in heart and life, in principle and practice, struggling after holiness.

3. What has been said on this subject may well awaken and alarm the impenitent.

(1) By putting them in mind of their misery, in that they have no portion or right in this world of love (Rev_22:15).

(2) By showing that they are in danger of hell, which is a world of hatred. (J. Edwards.)

Transitiveness of gifts

All our present knowledge is limited in its range, defective in its evidence, incomplete in its nomenclature, and inadequate in its current media of communication; and these must be exchanged for clearer conceptions, ampler comprehensions, fuller demonstrations, better forms of expression, and easier methods of acquisition; and that which we value ourselves so much for possessing will vanish away in the superior revelations of eternity, as vanish the stars in the light of the rising sun. The practical sciences, the mechanic and aesthetic arts, and the teeming literature of the world--what will be their utility in the glorious life to come? If they were not necessary to man in the innocence of Eden, how can they be necessary to him in his paradise regained? What need of your agricultural, horticultural, and botanical systems, when the earth is restored to its original fertility, adorned with flowers that never fade, and fruits that never fail, among which wander all animals in the perfection of their strength and beauty? What demand for your theories of political economy, and the science of government, when God shall set His own King upon His holy hill of Zion? What call for architectural skill, and the arts of the sculptor and the painter--of the lapidary, the jeweller, and the chemist--amid the perfect forms and faultless hues of the New Jerusalem? How shall your lame and limping poetry and your feeble and faltering music presume to lift a note or strike a string amid the joyous minstrelsy of the redeemed and the unfallen, rolling forth as the sound of many waters and mighty thunderings? And what work shall be found for the legal profession where all: obey the royal law of love? and what service for the medical faculty where the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick? And what use will there be for their geographical and astronomical books--your maps of the earth and charts of the sky--when men shall be as angels, with glorious spiritual bodies, quick as the light and discursive as thought? And how shall the historian and the philologist employ their ample lore, when the confluent streams of history are lost in the ocean of eternity, and all the languages and dialects of the babbling earth have given place to the one tongue of the universal kingdom? And the author and the orator--what will they do when there is no more error to be corrected nor vice to overcome--when truth requires no farther apology and virtue no further vindication? And the statesman and the warrior--where shall their vocation be when all power and authority are given to the glorified Son of man--when nation shall never again lift up sword against nation, but the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance for ever? And the preacher, the theologian, and the critical commentator--what shall become of their functions when the tabernacle of God shall be with men, and He shall dwell among them--when the knowledge of the Lord shall fill the world as the waters cover the sea--when all shall know Him from the least even unto the greatest? And all your schools, colleges, universities, what place will be found for these in the original fatherland and everlasting dwelling of truth? Yea, and the very Bible; what is it but a primer for children, an elementary treatise for those who have just entered their novitiate and begun their studies for eternity, to be laid aside when we graduate into the higher spheres of intellectual and moral perfection? (J. Cross, D.D.)

Charity enduring: gifts transient

Observe--

I. Gifts are temporary.

1. Imperfect in their nature.

2. Adapted to an imperfect state.

3. Must consequently pass away.

II. Love is eternal.

1. In its own nature.

2. Is the end of all gifts.

3. Must endure in a perfect state of being. (J. Lyth, D.D.)

Charity abiding: gifts transient

When Eliot the missionary to the Indians was an old man, his energy never sustained the slightest abatement, but, on the contrary, evinced a steady and vigorous increase. As his bodily strength decayed, the energy of his being seemed to retreat into his soul, and at length all his faculties seemed absorbed in holy love. Being asked shortly before his departure how he did, he replied, I have lost everything; my understanding leaves me, my utterance fails me, my memory fails me; but I thank God my charity holds out still; and I find that it rather grows than fails. (J. H. Hinton.)

Knowledge vanisheth away

In my time in the University of Edinburgh, the greatest figure in the faculty was Sir James Simpson, the discoverer of chloroform. The other day, just before I left Scotland, his successor and nephew, Professor Simpson, was asked by the librarian of the University to go to the library and pick out the books on his subject (midwifery) that were no longer needed. And his reply to the librarian was this: Take every book that is more than ten years old and put it down in the cellar. Knowledge has vanished away. Sir James Simpson was a great authority ten years ago--twelve years ago; men came from all parts of the earth to consult him; and the whole knowledge of that day, within that short period, is now consigned by the science of to-day to the cellar. How true are the words of Paul: We know in part, and we prophesy in part! (Prof. Henry Drummond.)

The vanishing gnosis

How can knowledge ever vanish away? As long as there are sentient beings in the universe, so long must there needs remain the objects of the emotional faculty; as long as there are intelligent beings, so long must the objects of the intellectual faculties survive. The imperfect knowledge of yesterday may become less imperfect to-day, and may approximate to fulness of knowledge to-morrow. Unless we can conceive of a life--the higher life--without consciousness and intelligence, we cannot conceive how there should ever come a time, or ever exist conditions, when (for personal beings whose personality is not annihilated) knowledge should ever vanish away. Of all men that ever lived the apostle was the last man who would have put forth so dreary a view of the future state as his words at first sight seem to indicate. To him the blessedness of the life beyond the veil was supremely desirable, because in the spiritual world darkness and error would vanish, not light and knowledge. Who is content with the utmost range of knowledge attainable by creatures such as we? Who would care for a life where the yearning to know would find itself without an object? But how if this word γνῶσις, which our translators have rendered by the word knowledge, connote an idea which its English representative fails to convey? How if the γνῶσις of the apostle has proved untranslateable because we have never seriously studied its history, and so have failed to grasp its meaning? What then? Then may not a more careful scrutiny get rid of the difficulty which the passage as it stands represents? Nay! May not that passage contain the enunciation of a great law which the Church of Christ, by losing sight of, would be sure to suffer serious damage? Now it would be unadvisable to attempt anything like an exhaustive examination of the use of this word by St, Paul, or of the meaning it may be found to bear in the several passages in which it occurs. This much, however, is apparent to any careful reader of the Epistles, that the word γνῶσις was a term which was very familiar to St. Pauls readers, and that it was an ambiguous term of whose ambiguity the apostle on occasion did not disdain to avail himself. He speaks of a γνῶσις which is none other than the beatific vision which the saints of God have dreamt of, and which is the object of their loftiest hopes. But he speaks of a γνῶσις, too, which does not deserve to be called such. He speaks of a γνῶσις which will admit of no addition and no imperfection in its fruition, and of a γνῶσις which is by no means inseparable from the notion of childish dependence, of defective methods in arriving at it, even of a certain measure of empiricism. Nor is this all; it becomes evident on further examination that this ambiguous term was used at times to connote not merely intellectual apprehension, but a formulated summary of conclusions arrived at, the result of speculations which, when thus formulated, the intellectual faculty was required to accept as an authoritative setting forth of truth. In other words, this γνῶσις was a summary of dogmatic teaching which might be imperfect in its statements and yet serve a worthy purpose, though essentially limited in its view, and intended only as a step in the right road; or it might be not only imperfect but dangerous, delusive and mischievous, because it expressed conclusions arrived at from assumptions which were mere dreams, and so would necessarily be a γνῶσις falsely so called. In the one case it might be a Christian γνῶσις, which was good as far as it went. In the other case it was a competitive γνῶσις which its supporters set up as antagonistic to any expression of Christian belief, a summary of theosophic or mystical dogma with no real basis of truth on which to stand. Yet of both one and the other, the first being partial and so inadequate, the second being erroneous and so having no real vitality, the apostle says--As for knowledge it shall vanish away. But is not this the great law abundantly observable in the history of all science in its various branches? Is it not the fact that in the department of pure mathematics the science of algebra slumbered for centuries, and when the awakened intellect of men resumed inquiries which for ages had been laid aside, the new discoveries or the new methods compelled the new thinkers to use new formulae, such new formlae being necessitated by established facts on the one hand and becoming the very conditions of progress in the apprehension of truth on the other? The dogma of yesterday had served its purpose, it expressed elementary truths which the childhood of the human mind had arrived at, but that which seemed final yesterday became antiquated or rudimentary to-day. When men are brought face to face with new truths, or with new aspects of truth, or compelled to investigate truth from a new standpoint, that moment they are compelled to resort to new expressions, to adopt new formulae, that is, to enunciate new dogmas, the old knowledge is in process of vanishing away. But truth is one thing, dogma is another. The formulae may suffer change, but the truth formulated changes not. But here it may be suggested that a distinction must be made between such truths as are formulated in theological dogmas, and those which are arrived at by the methods employed in the exact sciences. In fact so loose is our language and so vague is our vocabulary when we approach the discussion of questions in which our religious convictions and sentiments are supposed to be concerned, that nothing is more common than the assumption expressed or implied that scientific truth and what people call Divine truth are in some mysterious way moving as it were in different orbits, in different planes, and that what holds good of the one does not at all hold good of the other. What! Is not all truth Divine--all or none? Yes, and is not all truth a truth of science--all or none?--truth, that is, which is once formulated with sufficient precision for the logical faculty to exercise itself upon, however much or however little the higher reason may have helped us to embrace it before we had learnt to express it in scientific terms? It is in vain to attempt to evade the question which is being more and more rudely forced upon us. The question, Is there such a science as theology? science based upon axioms which are indisputable, requiring postulates which are reasonable, pursuing its inquiries according to strictly logical methods, engaged upon the investigation of facts and their correlation, weighing the significance of conflicting testimony, and fearlessly hailing the discovery of any new law? Is it a science whereby our race may hope to advance to the apprehension of some eternal truths? a science not one whit the less a science because it has a domain of its own? If not, it is hardly worth our while to trouble ourselves about it. Though even then observe, that the facts of the spiritual life remain. On the other hand, if it be a science, no matter in what stage it may at any moment be said to be, then assuredly it is only what we should expect, that this same story which history has to tell of other sciences should be found to be true of this one also. And that is exactly what we do find. Take whatever science you please, music, medicine, astronomy, and what is more certain than that that science has arrived at a certain point and then has ceased to be studied by competent students, and its further advance been arrested for centuries; the dogmas of such science, formulated a thousand years ago, being accepted as absolutely true, and assumed to have something like finality. For ages astronomers assumed that the sun moved round the earth--that was at any rate a dogma about which there could not conceivably be any dispute--a dogma above all others which could claim for itself catholicity, and stood alone as answering the most rigid conditions of catholicity. For ages the formulated science of architecture helped men to raise up to heaven those stupendous structures which are likely to last as the wonder and envy of mankind as long as the race lasts. And yet into that formulated science the very conception of the properties of the arch never entered. What appear to us the elementary truths of the science had no place in the early dogmas of architecture. In all these instances we are met by the historic fact that every science which deserves to be called such has had, must have, its periods of growth and rapid development, and its periods of torpor and repose. Men have grown weary or despairing of solving certain great problems, and have thrown them aside to deal with others. Then the tide has turned, and they have gone back with fresh enthusiasm and reawakened curiosity to the old difficulties, prepared themselves to attack them, perhaps from new points of view, perhaps according to new methods. And then new discoveries have been made, sometimes the results of patient years of research, sometimes by a flash of what we call genius, and sometimes they had been forced upon those who, by earnest toil and seriousness of aim and greatness of purpose, have put themselves into the attitude or receiving new truths and qualified themselves for expressing those truths in formulae which were necessary expansions of the development from previous dogmas. The time had come for the old γνῶσις to vanish away! And now another question comes to us. Granted that theology too is a science. In what stage may we venture to say that we find it now? The more we reflect upon it the more do we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge that theology, as a science, is, and has been for long, in a condition of torpor; it is, as it were, taking its repose, it has gone to sleep. But if theology as a science may be said to be asleep, even though it be exhibiting no signs or evidence of awakening activity, slumber is not death, it need not even imply exhaustion; it may be only heathful repose before the dawning of a new day. Even though they would persuade you that the old theology has received its quietus and the old dogmas are moribund or dead, be not afraid. It is the great law that every γνῶσις when it has served its purpose must vanish away, but only to be replaced by another γνῶσις which shall be grander and larger and more profound than that which we possess. Be not afraid to say the theology of the fourth century may not have been the theology of the second, nor the theology of the sixteenth century the theology of the twelfth, and peradventure the theology of the twentieth century may be very, very different in its dogmas and its formulae from anything that we can conceive of now. This science, too, may find another Copernicus to whom God may grant strange revelations, revelations, or if you dislike the word, discoveries, such as come to the holy and humble men of heart, guileless and true, such revelations as may perforce necessitate revolutions in our methods of investigation, in the terminology we employ, in the calculus which may be placed at our disposal. At least assure yourselves that imperfect light is better than darkness, and cloudland a better region to live in than chaos. (A. Jessopp, M.A.)

We know in part

The illuminated page of nature, on which God has written so many disclosures of His power and love--how small a portion of its wonders is man yet able to understand! Look at the tree which rises before your window, and shields you from the summer sun. You are familiar with its form, its foliage, and its flowers. But can you tell what is going on within it? Can you explain how it is, that, when the winds of autumn are singing their vesper hymn, the tree listens to their warning--how it forms and folds its leaves and blossoms, to have them ready for another spring? No. In the history of the simplest things in the vegetable and animal world there is much that man does not and cannot understand. Come, then, to our knowledge of human nature itself--how imperfect it is! how many new pages are opened from time to time which fill us with wonder and dismay! Perhaps you are able to tell how men will feel and act under the common circumstances of life; but who can tell the measure of the soul, or how deep and far mans powers and passions, in their wild energy, can go? We can understand benevolence in its common measure, when it gives what it does not want to others; but can we comprehend that love which warms and fills the martyrs heart? Passing finally to the knowledge of the Most High--are not clouds and darkness round about Him as of old? Canst thou by searching find out God? Let those who have tried it reply. A short time before his death, Newton said, I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. Here, then, we shall be told to reflect on human imperfection and be humble; for we see how little way the sight of man extends, how little man is able to know. But let us read our own nature aright. That we know in part is not humiliating; it is the ground and necessary condition of mans chief prerogative, and of the only perfection of which he is capable. Consider the difference between human and Divine perfection, and this will be plain to every eye. Divine perfection consists in attributes, each and all of them unbounded, except by the impossibility of being greater. Divine power extends to all things that power can do; Divine wisdom embraces everything that exists, or will exist, or ever has existed; Divine holiness is holiness which cannot be enlarged nor exceeded. The perfection of these attributes is, that they can be no greater than they are. To God nothing can be added. But human perfection, by which I mean the greatest height to which humanity can aspire, consists in continual progress--in continually advancing towards perfection. It is plain, then, that to know in part is not humiliating; it is not even an imperfection; it is a happy and honourable condition of our existence, for which we should be grateful to Him who made us. Had we been differently created, it must have been like the animals. What they know, they know in full; to them there is nothing in part. What they know, they know as well in the first years of their existence as the last. And if man had not been created as he is, to know in part, it must have been so with him; he must have had the instinct of an animal, the perfection of animals, for he could not have the perfection of God. Seeing, then, that improvement is the perfection to which human nature must aspire, let us next observe how this limited knowledge tends to induce and encourage it in every field of thought. Look again at the world of nature. Its wonders do not manifest themselves at once; if they did, the mind could not embrace them, or if it could, a heavy satiety, a lethargic self-satisfaction, would take the place of that restless energy which makes man labour and suffer to extend his knowledge. Everything opens gradually, as the sun rises, not full-orbed and fiery red, but gently heralded by the grey light and the kindling clouds. When you first point out to an intelligent child the wonders of nature, he fixes upon you his soft, dark, earnest eyes. The world seems enchanted. He asks where these things were hidden, that he never saw them before. He enjoys a deep delight, he finds a luxury in this gradual illumination of mind, to which he would have been a stranger had not God created him to know but in part. And so in maturer years, if the mind is kept from stagnation, into which it too readily subsides. Let a man give his attention to any department of knowledge, and he soon gives it his heart. He will leave all man loves at home, and encounter all man dreads abroad. The least new discovery fills him with rapturous joy. The glad energy, the intense devotion, with which he engages in the chase of knowledge, gives an idea of the manner in which the souls of the just will study the works and ways of God, and find everything radiant with happiness and eloquent with praise. It is the same with moral truth; by which I mean all truth which relates to God and to the nature and destiny of men. Our knowing but in part inspires that earnest desire to know more, which is compared to hunger and thirst for wisdom--a desire of truth which always burns in the breasts of those who are enlightened by the Word of God. With respect to mankind, also, it is true that partial knowledge inspires a desire to know more. I mean a real knowledge, for I would not give this name to that meaner sagacity which teaches us to distrust mankind. Who are they that complain most of men? They are those who dwell apart, who have none but selfish interests and pleasures, who never lift a hand to do good for others--these are they who talk of the fraud and falsehood of their race, while the lovers of mankind are those who go about doing good. The young always have this desire to know more of others. Alas, that rids generous affection should be driven back to their hearts, disappointed and dismayed, by what they see and hear! They find their parents talking with cold severity of others--of all others--of any others--even their nearest friends; and they listen with wonder and pain. Mankind are thrown apart and kept so; those cords of humanity, which untied would have been strong as the sheet-anchors cable, become singly as weak as the silk-worms thread, and the purpose of Christianity is not answered, which is to reconcile them to each other and make the divided one. So our knowing God but in part inspires an earnest desire to know more. It leads us on in religious improvement, and it makes that improvement a succession of bright revelations, in which man is continually learning what he thirsted to know. There are many things in the dispensations of Heaven which the thoughtful long to know, as the prophets and kings of ages past desired to look into the mysteries of God. What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter. This hope of knowing hereafter is an anchor to the soul; it saves it from being wrecked in its own doubts and fears; it keeps it true to itself and its destiny, till it reaches the world where the wonders of Providence are unfolded to its astonished view, and it can read and understand them all. Above all, I would say that we cannot complain of the limitation of our knowledge till we make a better improvement of what we already know. Enough is already known to make us wise unto salvation. It remains that we apply it to our hearts and lives. (W. B. O. Peabody, D.D.)

Now I know in part

The Scriptures abound in reflections upon the weakness and short-sightedness of the human mind. Now, it is observable that the atheist and sceptic have taken up the strain of Scripture, and striven to turn,, its weapons against itself and its friends. How blind and weak, how poor and miserable, they repeat, the creature to whom you yet assign so splendid a destiny! I accept the issue which atheism and infidelity thus present. I will reason for the magnificent prospects of man on the very ground here taken, of his weaknesses and diseases, his griefs and fears. I will show that there is no incongruity in Holy Writ, when in one breath it tells of mans miseries and vanities, and in the next of his unending life and glories. For, I know in part: what does this mean, but that I have an idea of more knowledge than I actually possess, believe myself capable of greater acquisitions, and see the domain of wisdom stretching out beyond my present reach, and inviting my further pursuit? Why be straitened in my limits, but that my true element is the unbounded? Could we glorify mans present spiritual advances, and celebrate the complete beauty of his intellectual furniture, the argument for immortality would not be so strong. We might think the mind had drunk its fill here, and accomplished its destiny. The same argument might be pushed as to all the limitations, sadnesses, and defects of our nature. With what a wreck of plans and hopes, enterprises and calculations, is the shore of eternity strewn! If the souls measure be in this weavers shuttle of time, with no threads woven to reach across the span of earth, death is untimely and the tomb premature. Look out upon all nature, and see the exquisite perfection of every object there. From the blade of grass to the everlasting stars, there is no deviation from the law of order or the line of beauty. Everything seems to accomplish its work, and fulfil its design. There is nothing more to be wished or expected. The astronomer detects no lawless course, no really, however for a time apparently, irregular or straying motion. So perfect is nature, from the fine dust of the balance to the revolutions of the sky. But the human mind rises up the vast, lonely exception to this hair-breadth completeness of the world. Recogniser of the perfection of all things else, itself alone is imperfect. It conceives of a knowledge transcendent. It conceives of a purity shaming its pollution. It conceives of a blessedness to which earths joys are but glimpses of light and breakings in a stormy sky. Now God, the perfect One, deals not in fragments, like some weak human artist who may overlay the walls of his chamber with attempts at an entire beauty. But if this human soul, in the very beginning of its aspirings, is to cease at death, then there is a fragment indeed, one colossal frustration and stupendous anomaly. Man, whom He made the lord of the universe, is the broken column, while everything beside is whole! Were there any sign of the souls filling out its defects and putting away its limitations, the argument would be less strong. But its growth, marked at any point, followed in any direction, requires still a lengthened being. A late traveller observed in the city of Jerusalem the fragment of an arch on the wall of the temple; and, tracing it according to the principles of its construction, concluded it must have been designed to spring as a bridge across the adjoining valley. So, if this little arc of the human mind, which we can here trace, be constructed upon true principles, it must mount over the dark valley of the shadow of death, the stream of time must flow away beneath it while the course of an immortal destination opens before it. Else, denying this, we charge the Supreme Architect with fault. I would, then, found an argument for immortality on the apostles declaration, Now I know in part. Even did I adopt Humes philosophy of universal scepticism, I should still say the intellect is made for truth, and must have time for its inquiry and doubt to end in the satisfactions of knowledge. I know this is the commonly accepted mode of reasoning. I know it is usual to draw religious arguments from mans positive abilities; but I would draw them from his vast defects. It is usual to draw them from his great triumphs; I would draw them from his signal failures. The train of reflections to which our text has led, accords with the old tenor of Scripture. The gospel of Christ speaks no flattering words to our vanity; it paints in no high colours our powers and acquirements. It rather digs beneath the highblown pride, fond fancy, and blind self-complacency of the human soul, to lay the foundation of that structure, which shall reach to heaven, in its feeling of weakness, in its confession of ignorance, in its sense of unworthiness, in its pangs of grief, and prayers for Divine aid. (C. A. Bartol.)

Life: partial and perfect

The Christians experience of Christ is in this life only partial: partial love is followed by partial knowledge.

1. He knows something of the welcome of Jesus.

2. He knows something of communion with Jesus.

3. He knows, too, in part, the spirit of service to Jesus.

4. A Christian knows also, in part, likeness to Christ.

But all these brightest moments, these deepest joys, these noblest moods, are to be eclipsed, forgotten, counted as nothing, when that which is perfect is come. To the Christian this is coming. All else is going. What, then, can compare with the claims and the charms of the spiritual life? Suppose there were on earth a country where, in health, that which is perfect had come; where, in purity of character, that which is perfect had come; where, in all the tender relations of domestic life, that which was perfect had come; where, in society and in government, in cottage and in palace, that which is perfect had come; where, in man, and field, and air and sky, that which was perfect had come;--how ships would groan with human cargoes destined for its shores! In comparison, fields of gold and seas of pearl would cease to draw. Yet the brightest conception of such a state falls immeasurably below what the dying Christian finds in heaven. (Benjamin Waugh.)

The limitations of knowledge

The familiar context in which these words occur gives a peculiar colour to them. St. Paul in his estimate of the most conspicuous endowments of a Christian, places knowledge--the progressive knowledge of observation and reflection--in contrast with love. He sets the intellectual over against the moral. He implies that the knowledge of which he speaks belongs to the present in its essence, while love belongs to the present only in its form. But in doing this he does not disparage knowledge; on the contrary he reveals it in its true nobility. Christ declared (Joh_17:17) truth to be the medium of mans consecration. Under the necessary conditions of life knowledge is the minister of love. I wish to consider the limitation of knowledge and not the destination of knowledge. We know in part. The fact itself is one which we shall do well to realise more distinctly than by a general acknowledgment. When this is done I hope that we shall see sufficient reasons for holding that this necessary incompleteness of our knowledge, which is at first sight disappointing, is, when duly weighed, fitted to bring stability to the results of labour, that it satisfies the conditions of progress, that it offers hope in the face of the dark problems of the present age.

1. We know in part. This limitation is imposed upon us triply. Of all that is, of all that even we with our present faculties feel must be, we can know but a small fraction. Our knowledge is limited in range. And, again, our knowledge of that small fraction of being which is in any way accessible to us is bounded and conditioned by our human powers. Our knowledge is limited in form. And, yet once more, of theft which man could know, being what he is, if the personal powers and the personal experience of the race were concentrated in a single representative, what an infinitely small portion is embraced by one mind! Our knowledge is limited by the circumstances of life. So far the fact itself that we know in part is unquestionable and unquestioned. No one who ever presumptuously maintained that man is the measure of all things, ventured also to assert that all things which he measures owe their being to him. No one who has considered the slow development of the powers which man now enjoys in what appears to us to be his maturity would be willing to admit that his faculties exhaust in kind or in degree the possible action of being. Our knowledge, I repeat, is inevitably partial in regard of the object, and of the subject, and of the conditions of its acquisition. In each respect an infinite mystery enwraps a little spot of light. But while upon reflection we admit that our knowledge is thus limited, we do not, I think, commonly take account of the momentous significance of the fact. Many of us who are ceaselessly busy with our daily occupations do not habitually feel it. Many who have distinctly realised it, deliberately put it out of sight. That which we cannot know in the way of earthly knowledge is for us, they say, as if it were not. St. Paul follows a better way. He teaches us to see that these mysteries, and the full sense of limitation which they bring with them, are an important factor in our lives. He rounds life off on this side and that, not with a sleep, but with the glory of the invisible. And is it not true that we are made stronger as well as humbler by lifting up our eyes to the sky which opens with measurable depths above the earth on which we are set to work?

2. We know in part the fullest recognition of this fact is not only helpful but essential for the fulfilment of our several tasks. The practical or deliberate disregard of this relation of all our knowledge to the unknown brings with it urgent dangers. On the one hand we are tempted to make our own knowledge, our own thoughts, our own experience, an absolute standard. On the other hand we are tempted to apply a dominant method to subjects which do not admit it. There is no one, I suppose, who has not been sorely tried by both temptations. It requires a serious effort to enter with a living sympathy into the character of another man, or of another class, or of another nation, or of another course of thought: to feel, not with a sense of gracious superiority but of devout thankfulness, that here and there that is supplied which we could not have provided: to acknowledge how peculiar gifts or a peculiar environment, how long discipline or an intense struggle, have conferred upon others the power of seeing that which we cannot see. But it is to breadth of hope, to self-denial, to patience that we are called, as those who believe and seek to live as believing that we know in part. The immediate circumstances in which we are placed need, as we must feel, the exercise of such graces. There is on all sides an overpowering passion for clearness, for decision, for results which can be measured on demand. Art and history are trammeled by realism. A restless anxiety for fulness and superficial accuracy of detail diverts the forces which should be given to an interpretation of the life. We begin to think that when we can picture to ourselves the outside of things we have mastered them. So it is also in many respects with opinion. We are told that we must make our choice definitely between this extreme and that; that there can be no mean; that a logical necessity demands one precise conclusion or the other. In this way we lose insensibly the present consciousness of the great deeps of life. Portraiture becomes photography, and faith is represented by a phrase. The reflections from the mirror, the shadows on the wall of the cave, are taken for the realities which these fleeting signs should move us to seek. There is no outline in nature, however convenient or even necessary we may find it to draw one. A closer view of this one-sided and dominant realism, which is characteristic of our generation, shows what is at once its final issue and its remedy. For it is not fanciful, I think, to connect it with the great successes of the method of physical inquiry. We try, perhaps even without knowing of what spirit we are, to make the same method supreme over all knowledge. Meanwhile we are neglecting a different lesson which physics have to teach us and which we have not yet learnt. However paradoxical the statement may appear, physical study more than any other brings the invisible vividly before us. The world of the man of science is not the scene of conflict and disorder which we look upon with our untrained eyes, but an order of absolute law which he finds by the interpretation of a larger experience. He pierces beneath the seen to that which it indicates. So far he has read the thought of God. His partial knowledge is a sign for the moralist and for the theologian.

3. We know in part. We have seen that acceptance of this fact enables us to meet and to use the dangers and the lessons of limited views. The same words describe the process by which our efforts are made effective. We advance towards the limits of our attainable knowledge by the help of every fragmentary movement. We look upon the fullest vision of the truth in the combination of parts held separately. This is the Divine law of spiritual progress and of spiritual apprehension. It is not that any one mind or any one race can evolve the last deductions from the primal facts. The manifold endowments of the nations are made contributory in due order to the unfolding of the universal gospel. The history of Judaism and the history of Christianity prove the truth beyond doubt. Spiritual knowledge and with it spiritual life is furthered by the introduction into it of new elements from without. The seed which has the principle of life gathers from all around that by which the life is manifested in the fulness of its beauty. It has often been pointed out how every critical stage in the progress of earlier revelation was marked by the action of new races upon the people of God. Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, quickened fresh thoughts in Israel, and brought to light fresh mysteries in the Law. The Son of Man entered on the patrimony of the race made ready for His use. The course of Christianity up to the present time exhibits the accomplishment of the same law on a larger scale and with a more pervading application. Judaism was limited and preparatory. The Divine Presence was symbolised for the fathers by a cloud or by a glory. But Christianity is absolute and final. For us the Divine Presence is the Word made flesh, the man Christ Jesus. It is no longer any part of man, or any part of mankind to which the message of God is addressed or entrusted. The experience of our own lives offers an illustration of this growth through assimilation and loss. The unfolding of our separate powers is able to bring home to us what is fulfilled on a colossal scale in the broad history of human progress. One faculty after another is called into dominant activity, and yields in its turn to some fresh claimant. And here comes the trial of faith. We are tempted, as it may be, to linger with a vain regret round that which is ready to vanish away or to hasten prematurely the advent of that which is not yet mature. But the faith deals with all in a process of life. The conviction that every result, every triumph, every prize is given us to use and not to keep, saves us from the peril of stationariness and from the peril of innovation. He cannot rest who knows that the counsel of God is not yet accomplished.

4. And surely this paradox is the very joy of life. We know all: and we have still much to learn. Our strength is to feel that the end which is given to us is not yet gained. As long as there is movement there is hope. Because the central fact of our faith reaches to the utmost bounds of our being: because to the last our knowledge is limited, we bring together with loving reverence all that has been accumulated in the past, and we stand ready to welcome the new light which shall reveal the old treasures in fresh glory. It is not strange then that there should at all times be difficulties. Difficulties guide men to new regions of work for Christs sake. We can feel, I repeat, in these different directions, in the spheres of personal life, of human fellowship, of cosmical dependence, how our partial knowledge witnesses to the existence of regions of vital energy not essentially unattainable but hitherto necessarily unexplored: we can feel that the darkest riddles of life lose their final gloom when we refuse to acknowledge that their solution must be found in the facts which we have been so far able to grasp: we can feel that the gospel of Christ incarnate and ascended deals with these latest questionings not by accident or by accommodation, but in its inmost nature: we can feel as the problems rise before us that our historic creed contains the answer to them, though it has not yet been drawn out, that our needs have not been left uncared for by eternal love, that it is through the sternest searchings of heart that the growing fulness of the truth is realised. The sorest trial of very many now is the sad suspicion that Christianity does not cover all which we know to be. Perhaps we have given colour to the fear by our own narrowness of sympathy. But from the first it was not so. And it is true still, true always, that our faith conquers not by the suppression or by the dissimulation of difficulties, but by interpreting them or by placing them in their right relation to what we see of the whole constitution and circumstances of the world. We do not then appeal to ignorance, but to the conditions of a partial knowledge: we do not transfer our hope to an imaginary scene, but find the pledge of its fulfilment in a completer revelation of this in which we toil and suffer: we do not offer any intellectual formulas as exhaustive and absolute, but we claim that now and at all times the faith should be regarded in connection with every human interest; we do not affirm the limitation of knowledge as a bar to inquiry, but as a bar to finality.

We know in part.

1. The words are a consolation. No one has ever set before himself a high ideal of work for the truths sake without sadly noting at the close of his labour the scantiness of his achievements. His difficulties, perhaps, have grown clearer, but they have not grown less. At last he finds himself left face to face with mysteries, which appear in the form of irreconcilable opposites. The fundamental mystery of his finite being responsible to the Infinite repeats itself in many forms. There is no escape from conditions of thought which he feels to be inapplicable to spiritual existences. Happy is he only when he knows that what he sees, what he can see, is but a fragment of that glory which all the powers of all the ages will not exhaust in its fulness. We inherit and we transmit our inheritance to others, with the slender accessions we have made. So it is that we are bound one to another, and while we contend to the uttermost for the truth which is given to us, we find a place opened for other labourers.

2. They are a promise. The knowledge is partial, but the object is not illusory. We may not he able to see much, but the appearances which we observe answer to something which is eternal. This conviction is sufficient to inspire us with hope. We are so constituted that we cannot but group together the scattered facts which come before us, and interpret them in some fashion. Looking to them we can cherish the signs of a wider order in the moral world which has not yet been realised.

3. They are a prophecy. Now we see in a mirror darkly, but then face to face. The mode of knowledge will be changed, but He who is revealed in many parts and in many ways is Himself unchangeable. Perfect knowledge now would be the sentence of spiritual death: the whole can increase no more, is dwarfed and dies. But, let us thank God, we know in part; and we know Him that is true. We do not rest in what we are, or in what we can attain to, but in what God is, in whose imago we are made. (Bp. Westcott.)

Knowledge in part

In guarding our talk thus, we are helped by the analogies of those who know less than we do, and who cannot know as much as we do. A blind man, for instance, does not know as much about colour as people who see. Nor does a man who is colour-blind. They may imagine what colour is, and they can talk about their imaginations. But they must not prophesy. That is, they must not proclaim the truth about colour. They do not know what the truth is, and they do not even know the meaning of the words they use. The analogy with our ignorance is precise. For such people sometimes think they know. In the same direction is the advance which mankind has made since those prehistoric days of the cave-dweller. If to the poor savage of the limited experience of that early time I said, Your God can give at the same instant His present command to you who are here and to other men on the other side of the world, he would hardly understand my language; and, so far as he did understand it, he would tell me I lied. In the first place, he would not know what I meant by the other side of the world. In the second place, he would say that one God could not be in two places. But, with the steady progress of the world, all this changes. Any telegraph boy sees one will acting in a dozen places, and his imagination and conception carry him into a much wider range than that which he sees. On a thousand lines the world understands that it has advanced from that feeble knowledge of that savage life. Just so far as it understands this, does the same world make out that it knows only in part now, and looks forward, with a confidence akin to certainty, to a coming time and a larger life, in which it shall know more. All such instances from history help us in our lives of to-day, and in looking forward for to-morrow. History, indeed, is always useless, unless we extort from it such lessons. If the cave-dweller or the Eskimo of to-day knew only in part what seems wholly necessary to your life and mine, in just the same fashion is it probable--it is well-nigh certain--that where I know only in part there is more knowledge which my successors will have--nay, which I myself may have, in a life not cumbered by this body. (E. E. Hale, D.D.)

The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Co 13:8-10. Love never faileth — It accompanies us to, prepares us for, and adorns us in eternity; nay, it is the very felicity of heaven. In these respects it materially differs from, and has an apparent advantage over, many of those gifts which some are so ready to emulate and pursue, to the neglect and injury of this love. For whether there be prophecies, they shall fail — When all things foretold are accomplished, and God is all in all. Whether there be tongues, they shall cease — For one language shall prevail among all the inhabitants of heaven, and all the low and imperfect languages of earth shall be forgotten. Whether there be knowledge — Such as we now pursue with the greatest eagerness, the knowledge of the fleeting, transitory things of earth, and affairs of men, conducive as it is to our present usefulness; it shall vanish away — As starlight is lost in that of the mid-day sun, so our present knowledge in the light of eternity. For we know in part, we prophesy in part — The wisest of men have here but short, narrow, and imperfect conceptions, even of the things round about them, and much more of the deep things of God. And even the prophecies which men deliver from God are far from taking in the whole of future events, or of that wisdom and knowledge of God which is treasured up in the Scripture revelation. But when that which is perfect is come — As in the heavenly state it shall; then that which is only in part shall be done away — Both that poor, low, imperfect, glimmering light, which is all the knowledge we now can attain to, and these slow and unsatisfactory methods of attaining it, as well as of imparting it to others.

Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

c. The transiency of all charisms contrasted with the permanency and supremacy of Love, 1Co_13:8-13.

8. Never faileth—From divine love in its daily life, Paul now springs at once into its transcendent and eternal nature.

The charisms—prophecies, tongues, knowledge—are all provisional and partial; soon to be merged in the perfect and the universal.

Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1 Corinthians

WHAT LASTS

1Co 13:8, 1Co 13:13.

We discern the run of the Apostle’s thought best by thus omitting the intervening verses and connecting these two. The part omitted is but a buttress of what has been stated in the former of our two verses; and when we thus unite them there is disclosed plainly the Apostle’s intention of contrasting two sets of things, three in each set. The one set is ‘prophecies, tongues, knowledge’; the other, ‘faith, hope, charity.’ There also comes out distinctly that the point mainly intended by the contrast is the transiency of the one and the permanence of the other. Now, that contrast has been obscured and weakened by two mistakes, about which I must say a word.

With regard to the former statement, ‘Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease,’ that has been misunderstood as if it amounted to a declaration that the miraculous gifts in the early Church were intended to be of brief duration. However true that may be, it is not what Paul means here. The cessation to which he refers is their cessation in the light of the perfect Future. With regard to the other statement, the abiding of faith, hope, charity, that, too, has been misapprehended as if it indicated that faith and hope belonged to this state of things only, and that love was the greatest of the three, because it was permanent. The reason for that misconception has mainly lain in the misunderstanding of the force of ‘Now,’ which has been taken to mean ‘for the present,’ as an implied contrast to an unspoken ‘then’; just as in the previous verse we have, ‘Now we see through a glass, then face to face.’ But the ‘now’ in this text is not, as the grammarians say, temporal, but logical. That is, it does not refer to time, but to the sequence of the Apostle’s thought, and is equivalent to ‘so then.’ ‘So then abideth faith, hope, charity.’

The scope of the whole, then, is to contrast the transient with the permanent, in Christian experience. If we firmly grasped the truth involved, our estimates would be rectified and our practice revolutionised.

I. I ask this question-What will drop away?

Paul answers, ‘prophecies, tongues, knowledge.’ Now these three were all extraordinary gifts belonging to the present phase of the Christian life. But inasmuch as these gifts were the heightening of natural capacities and faculties, it is perfectly legitimate to enlarge the declaration and to use these three words in their widest signification. So understood, they come to this, that all our present modes of apprehension and of utterance are transient, and will be left behind.

‘Knowledge, it shall cease,’ and as the Apostle goes on to explain, in the verses which I have passed over for my present purpose, it shall cease because the perfect will absorb into itself the imperfect, as the inrushing tide will obliterate the little pools in the rocks on the seashore. For another reason, the knowledge, the mode of apprehension belonging to the present, will pass-because here it is indirect, and there it will be immediate. ‘We shall know face to face,’ which is what philosophers mean by intuition. Here our knowledge ‘creeps from point to point,’ painfully amassing facts, and thence, with many hesitations and errors, groping its way towards principles and laws. Here it is imperfect, with many a gap in the circumference; or like the thin red line on a map which shows the traveller’s route across a prairie, or like the spider’s thread in the telescope, stretched athwart the blazing disc of the sun-’but then face to face.’ Incomplete knowledge shall be done away; and many of its objects will drop, and much of what makes the science of earth will be antiquated and effete. What would the hand-loom weaver’s knowledge of how to throw his shuttle be worth in a weaving-shed with a thousand looms? Just so much will the knowledges of earth be when we get yonder.

Modes of utterance will cease. With new experiences will come new methods of communication. As a man can speak, and a beast can only growl or bark, so a man in heaven, with new experiences, will have new methods of communication. The comparison between that mode of utterance which we now have, and that which we shall then possess, will be like the difference between the old-fashioned semaphore, that used to wave about clumsy wooden arms in order to convey intelligence, and the telegraph.

Think, then, of a man going into that future life, and saying ‘I knew more about Sanscrit than anybody that ever lived in Europe’; ‘I sang sweet songs’; ‘I was a past master in philology, grammars, and lexicons’; ‘I was a great orator.’ ‘Tongues shall cease’; and the modes of utterance that belonged to earth, and all that holds of them, will drop away, and be of no more use.

If these things are true, brethren, with regard even to the highest form of these high and noble things, how much more and more solemnly true are they with regard to the aims and objects which most of us have in view? They will all drop away, and we shall be left, stripped of what, for most of us, has made the whole interest and activity of our lives.

II. What will last?

‘So then, abideth these three, faith, hope, love.’ When Paul takes three nouns and couples them with a verb in the singular, he is not making a slip of the pen, or committing a grammatical blunder which a child could correct. But there is a great truth in that piece of apparent grammatical irregularity; for the faith, the hope, and the love, for which he can only afford a singular verb, are thereby declared to be in their depth and essence one thing, and it, the triple star, abides, and continues to shine. The three primitive colours are unified in the white beam of light. Do not correct the grammar, and spoil the sense, but discern what he means when he says, ‘Now, abideth faith, hope, love.’ For this is what he means, that the two latter come out of the former, and that without it they are nought, and that it without them is dead.

Faith breeds Hope. There is the difference between earthly hopes and Christian people’s hopes. Our hopes, apart from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, are but the balancing of probabilities, and the scale is often dragged down by the clutch of eager desires. But all is baseless and uncertain, unless our hopes are the outcome of our faith. Which, being translated into other words, is just this, that the one basis on which men can rest-ay! even for the immediate future, and the contingencies of life, as well as for the solemnities and certainties of heaven-any legitimate and substantial hope is trust in Jesus Christ, His word, His love, His power, and for the heavenly future, in His Resurrection and present glory. A man who believes these things, and only that man, has a rock foundation on which he can build his hope.

Faith, in like manner, is the parent of Love. Paul and John, diverse as they are in the whole cast of their minds, the one being speculative and the other mystical, the one argumentative and the other simply gazing and telling what he sees, are precisely agreed in regard to this matter. For, to the Apostle of Love, the foundation of all human love towards God is, ‘We have known and believed the love that God hath to us,’ and ‘We love Him because He first loved us,’ and to Paul the first step is the trusting reception of the love of God, ‘commended to us’ by the fact that ‘whilst we were yet sinners Christ died for us,’ and from that necessarily flows, if the faith be genuine, the love that answers the sacrifice and obeys the Beloved. So faith, hope, love, these three are a trinity in unity, and it abideth. That is the main point of our last text. Let me say a word or two about it.

I have said that the words have often been misunderstood as if the ‘now’ referred only to the present order of things, in which faith and hope are supposed to find their only appropriate sphere. But that is clearly not the Apostle’s meaning here, for many reasons with which I need not trouble you. The abiding of all three is eternal abiding, and there is a heavenly as well as an earthly form of faith and hope as well as of love. Just look at these points for a moment.

‘Faith abides,’ says Paul, yonder, as here. Now, there is a common saying, which I suppose ninety out of a hundred people think comes out of the Bible, about faith being lost in sight. There is no such teaching in Scripture. True, in one aspect, faith is the antithesis of sight. True, Paul does say ‘We walk by faith, not by sight.’ But that antithesis refers only to part of faith’s significance. In so far as it is the opposite of sight, of course it will cease to be in operation when ‘we shall know even as we are known’ and ‘see Him as He is.’ But the essence of faith is not in the absence of the person trusted, but the emotion of trust which goes out to the person, present or absent. And in its deepest meaning of absolute dependence and happy confidence, faith abides through all the glories and the lustres of the heavens, as it burns amidst the dimnesses and the darknesses of earth. For ever and ever, on through the irrevoluble ages of eternity, dependence on God in Christ will be the life of the glorified, as it was the life of the militant, Church. No millenniums of possession, and no imaginable increases in beauty and perfectness and enrichment with the wealth of God, will bring us one inch nearer to casting off the state of filial dependence which is, and ever will be, the condition of our receiving them all. Faith ‘abides.’

Hope ‘abides.’ For it is no more a Scriptural idea that hope is lost in fruition, than it is that faith is lost in sight. Rather that Future presents itself to us as the continual communication of an inexhaustible God to our progressively capacious and capable spirits. In that continual communication there is continual progress. Wherever there is progress there must be hope. And thus the fair form, which has so often danced before us elusive, and has led us into bogs and miry places and then faded away, will move before us through all the long avenues of an endless progress, and will ever and anon come back to tell us of the unseen glories that lie beyond the next turn, and to woo us further into the depths of heaven and the fulness of God. Hope ‘abides.’

Love ‘abides.’ I need not, I suppose, enlarge upon that thought which nobody denies, that love is the eternal form of the human relation to God. It, too, like the mercy which it clasps, ‘endureth for ever.’

But I may remind you of what the Apostle does not explain in our text, that it is greater than its linked sisters, because whilst faith and hope belong only to a creature, and are dependent and expectant of some good to come to themselves, and correspond to something which is in God in Christ, the love which springs from faith and hope not only corresponds to, but resembles, that from which it comes and by which it lives. The fire kindled is cognate with the fire that kindles; and the love that is in man is like the love that is in God. It is the climax of his nature; it is the fulfilling of all duty; it is the crown and jewelled clasp of all perfection. And so ‘abideth faith, hope, love, and the greatest of these is love.’

III. Lastly, what follows from all this?

First, let us be quite sure that we understand what this abiding love is. I dare say you have heard people say ‘Ah! I do not care much about Paul’s theology. Give me the thirteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians. That is beautiful; that praise of Love; that comes home to men.’ Yes, very beautiful. Are you quite sure that you know what Paul means by ‘love’ ? I do not use the word charity, because that lovely word, like a glistening meteor that falls upon the earth, has a rust, as it were, upon its surface that dims its brightness very quickly. Charity has come to mean an indulgent estimate of other people’s faults; or, still more degradingly, the giving of money out of your pockets to other people’s necessities. These are what the people who do not care much about Paul’s theology generally suppose that he means here. But these do not exhaust his meaning. Paul’s notion of love is the response of the human love to the divine, which divine is received into the heart by simple faith in Jesus Christ. And his notion of love which never faileth, and endureth all things, and hopeth all things, is love to men, which is but one stream of the great river of love to God. If we rightly understand what he means by love, we shall find that his praise of love is as theological as anything that he ever wrote. We shall never get further than barren admiration of a beautiful piece of writing, unless our love to men has the source and root to which Paul points us.

Again, let us take this great thought of the permanence of faith, hope, and love as being the highest conception that we can form of our future condition. It is very easy to bewilder ourselves with speculations and theories of another life. I do not care much about them. The great gates keep their secret well. Few stray beams of light find their way through their crevices. The less we say the less likely we are to err. It is easy to let ourselves be led away, by turning rhetoric into revelation, and accepting the symbols of the New Testament as if they carried anything more than images of the realities. But far beyond golden pavements, and harps, and crowns, and white robes, lies this one great thought that the elements of the imperfect, Christlike life of earth are the essence of the perfect, Godlike life in heaven. ‘Now abide these three, faith, hope, love.’

Last of all, let us shape our lives in accordance with these certainties. The dropping away of the transient things is no argument for neglecting or despising them; for our handling of them makes our characters, and our characters abide. But it is a very excellent argument for shaping our lives so as to seek first the first things, and to secure the permanent qualities, and so to use the transient as that it shall all help us towards that which does not pass.

What will a Manchester man that knows nothing except goods and office work, and knows these only in their superficial aspect, and not as related to God, what, in the name of common-sense, will he do with himself when he gets into a world where there is not a single ledger, nor a desk, nor a yard of cloth of any sort? What will some of us do when, in like manner, we are stripped of all the things that we have cared about, and worked for, and have made our aims down here? Suppose that you knew that you were under sailing orders to go somewhere or other, and that at any moment a breathless messenger might appear and say, ‘Come along! we are all waiting for you’; and suppose that you never did a single thing towards getting your outfit ready, or preparing yourself in any way for that which might come at any moment, and could not but come before very long. Would you be a wise man? But that is what a great many of us are doing; doing every day, and all day long, and doing that only. ‘He shall leave them in the midst of his days,’ says a grim text, ‘and at his latter end shall be a fool.’

What will drop? Modes of apprehension, modes of utterance, occupations, duties, relationships, loves; and we shall be left standing naked, stripped, as it were, to the very quick, and only as much left as will keep our souls alive. But if we are clothed with faith, hope, love, we shall not be found naked. Cultivate the high things, the permanent things; then death will not wrench you violently from all that you have been and cared for; but it will usher you into the perfect form of all that you have been and done upon earth. All these things will pass, but faith, hope, love, ‘stay not behind nor in the grave are trod,’ but will last as long as Christ, their Object, lives, and as long as we in Him live also.

Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

charity

i.e. love; and so in 1Co 13:2; 1Co 13:3; 1Co 13:4; 1Co 13:8; 1Co 13:13.

The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

13:8-13 Love, in contrast to spiritual gifts, will last forever.

13:8 Love will last forever, because God is love (cp. 1 Jn 4:7-12, 16).

Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

1Co 13:8. Οὐδέποτε ἐκπίπτει, never faileth) is not destroyed, does not cease, it always holds its place; it is never moved from its position; comp. ἐκπίπτοντες, Mar 13:25, note.—εἴτε δὲ προφητεῖαι, but whether prophecies) viz., there are: so ch. 1Co 15:11. Prophecies in the plural, because they are multifarious.—καταργηθήσονται, they shall be done away with) This is the expression in the case of prophecies and knowledge; but regarding tongues, παύσονται, they shall cease. Tongues are a most charming thing, but the least lasting; they were the first gift on the day of Pentecost, Acts 2, but they did not continue in the primitive church so long as the other miraculous gifts: nor have they anything analogous in a perfect state, as prophecy and knowledge have, to which they ought therefore to yield; whence presently after, respect is shown to those in preference to tongues, when he is speaking of “that which is perfect.”—γλῶσσαι, tongues) These occupy a middle place, because they are the vehicle and appendage of prophecies; but prophecy and knowledge constitute two different genera, 1Co 13:9; 1Co 13:12.

Bengel's Gnomon of the New Testament — English translation (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1860) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Co_13:8. Up to this point the characteristics of love have been given; now on to 1Co_13:13 her imperishableness is described, in contrast to the purely temporary destination of the gifts of the Spirit.

οὐδέποτε πίπτει] (see the critical remarks) never does she fall, i.e. she never falls into decay, remains always stedfast (μένει, 1Co_13:13). The opposite is: καταργηθήσονται, παύσονται. Comp Luk_16:17; Plato, Phil. p. 22 E; Soph. Ant. 474; Polyb. x. 33. 4, i. 35. 5; Dem. 210. 15. The Recept[2081] ἘΚΠΊΠΤΕΙ (Rom_9:6) is to be taken in precisely the same way. Theodoret puts it well: Οὐ ΔΙΑΣΦΆΛΛΕΤΑΙ, ἈΛΛʼ ἈΕῚ ΜΈΝΕΙ ΒΕΒΑΊΑ Κ. ἈΚΊΝΗΤΟς, Ἐς ἈΕῚ ΔΙΑΜΈΝΟΥΣΑ· ΤΟῦΤΟ ΓᾺΡ ΔΙᾺ ΤῶΝ ἘΠΑΓΟΜΈΝΩΝ ἘΔΊΔΑΞΕΝ.

In what follows ΕἼΤΕ opens out in detail the general conception of ΧΑΡΊΣΜΑΤΑ. Be it again (different kinds of) prophesyings, they shall be done away; be it (speaking) tongues, they shall cease, etc. This mode of division and interpunctuation is demanded by δέ (against Luther and others, including Heydenreich). Prophecy, speaking with tongues, and deep knowledge, are only appointed for the good of the church for the time until the Parousia; afterwards these temporary phenomena fall away. Even the gnosis will do so; for then comes in the perfect knowledge (1Co_13:12), and that as the common heritage of all, whereby the deep knowledge of gifted individuals, which is still but imperfect, as it occurs before the Parousia, will necessarily cease to subsist.

[2081] ecepta Textus receptus, or lectio recepta (Elzevir).

Meyer — Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament — English translation by Peter Christie, edited by Frederick Crombie (T&T Clark, 1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Co 13:8 . Love, that bears, also out-wears everything : “Love never faileth”. That πίπτει denotes “falling” in the sense of cessation, dropping out of existence ( cf. 1Co 10:8 , Luk 16:17 ), not moral failure (as in 1Co 10:12 , etc.), is manifest from the parl, clauses and from 1Co 13:13 . The charisms of chh. 12. and 14. are bestowed on the way and serve the way-faring Church, they cease each of them at a determined point; but the Way of Love leads indefinitely beyond them; οὐ διασφάλλεται , ἀλλʼ ἀεὶ μένει βεβαία καὶ ἀκίνητος (Thd [1992] ). “Prophesyings, tongues, and knowledge” faculties inspired, ecstatic, intellectual are the three typical forms of Christian expression. The abolition of Prophecies and Knowledge is explained in 1Co 13:9 ff. as the superseding of the partial by the perfect; they “will be done away” by a completer realisation of the objects they seek, viz., by intuition into the now hidden things of God and of man (1Co 14:24 f.), and by adequate comprehension of the things revealed (see note on 1Co 13:12 ). Of the Tongues it is simply said that “they will stop ” ( παύσονται ), having like other miracles a temporary significance ( cf. 1Co 14:22 ); not giving place to any higher development of the like kind, they lapse and terminate ( desinent , Bg [1993] ).

[1992] Theodoret, Greek Commentator.

[1993] Bengel’s Gnomon Novi Testamenti.

The Expositor's Greek Testament, edited by W. Robertson Nicoll (1897–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Co 13:8-13.

The absolute duration of charity is developed in these last verses: first, in opposition to gifts, then even in contrast to the other two fundamental virtues, faith and hope. Thus the apostle completes the demonstration of his thought: charity is the supremely excellent way.

Vv. 8-10. “Charity never faileth. As to prophecies, they shall be done away; as to tongues, they shall cease; as to knowledges, they shall be done away. 9. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. 10. But when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.”

The first words: never faileth, are, as it were, the theme of the following passage. This is why the subject: charity, is repeated. The best proof of the absolute value of charity is its eternal permanence in contrast to everything else, even the most excellent; and the subjective persistence of charity in the believer (1Co 13:7) is the prelude, as it were, of this objective permanence.

It seems as if the verb ought to be in the future; but the present is here, as often, that of the idea.

The two readings: πίπτει and ἐκπίπτει, have almost the same meaning: the former, however, is the simpler and more probable. An allusion to the spot from which the fall takes place (ἐκ) is unnecessary. The verb πίπτειν, to fall, cannot, as Holsten would have it, refer solely to the value of charity in this sense: It never loses its worth. The following antitheses: shall be done away, shall cease, prove clearly that its duration is the point in question. Prophesying and speaking in tongues will cease, but not loving.

The transient character of gifts, even the most eminent, such as prophecy and knowledge (between which Paul introduces, as an inferior gift, speaking in tongues), proves their relative and secondary value. The Vatic. reads the singular προφητεία; all the other documents have the plural.

To what epoch does the abolition of prophecy belong? If history is consulted, it seems to answer: toward the end of the second and during the third century. For the Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles shows us the prophets still in full activity in the first half of the second century. But the apostle’s answer, in 1Co 13:10, certainly makes the abolition of prophecy, as well as that of tongues and of knowledge, coincident with the advent of the perfect state; consequently with Christ’s glorious coming, which will introduce this state. It is vain to attempt to fix an interval between the abolition announced in 1Co 13:8 and the τὸ τέλειον ἐλθεῖν, the advent of perfection, of 1Co 13:10. But if, according to this text, the total abolition of gifts cannot take place before the end of the present economy, there may come about a modification in their phenomenal manifestation. The very figure which the apostle uses in 1Co 13:11 easily leads to the idea of a gradual metamorphosis, which will pass over their mode of manifestation. For the speaking of the child, its mode of feeling and thinking, do not give place suddenly to the analogous faculties of the mature man; the change in these three respects takes place insensibly and progressively. So the spiritual gifts granted to the primitive Church, while accompanying and supporting the Church to the very threshold of the perfect state, need not do so necessarily in the same form as at the beginning. Prophecy may be transformed into animated preaching; speaking in tongues may appear in the form of religious poetry and music; knowledge continue to accomplish its task by the catechetical and theological teaching of Christian truth (see on chap. 14 conclusion).

In speaking of tongues Paul substitutes for the word καταργεῖσθαι, be done away, the term παύεσθαι, to cease, become silent. This feverish agitation of discoursings in tongues, which uplifted the Church of Corinth, will calm down.

The reading γνώσεις, knowledges, of the Sinaït. and the Greco-Lats., is regarded by most, even by Tischendorf, as an assimilation to the preceding substantives. But sufficient account has not been taken of Rückert’s remarks. It is not the true knowledge which shall cease; it is only the various fragments of knowledge, received here below (γνώσεις), which shall pass away to give place to perfect knowledge (1Co 13:12).

Frédéric Louis Godet — Commentaries on Luke, John, Romans, and 1 Corinthians — English translation (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1870s–1890s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Co_13:8

Charity never faileth: but whether (there be) prophecies, they shall fail; whether (there be) tongues, they shall cease; whether (there be) knowledge, it shall vanish away.

Love never fails, i.e. it endures for ever. It is not designed and adapted, as are the gifts under consideration, merely to the present state of existence, but to our future and immortal state of being. Whether there be prophecies, or be it prophecies, they shall fail, i.e. be done away with. The gift shall cease to be necessary, and therefore shall not be continued. Be it tongues, etc., i.e. the gift of tongues shall cease. Be it knowledge, it shall vanish away, i.e. cease to exist. It is the same word as that used above in reference to prophecies. It is not knowledge in the comprehensive sense of the term that is to cease, but knowledge as a gift; as one of the list of extraordinary endowments mentioned above, 1Co_12:8-11. Knowledge, considered as the intellectual apprehension of truth, is, as the apostle immediately states, hereafter to be rendered perfect. But the λόγος γνώσεως, the word of knowledge, 1Co_12:8, i.e. knowledge in that form in which it was the foundation of the office of teacher, is to be done away with. Whether this means that hereafter there will be no need of the office of teacher, and therefore that the gift which qualified for that office shall cease; or whether Paul means to say that the immediate vision of truth is to be hereafter so different from our present discursive, obscure, and imperfect mode of cognition, that it deserves to be called by a different name, may be matter of doubt. Both are probably true. There will be no ignorance in heaven to be removed through the intervention of human instructors; and there will probably be as great a difference between the knowledge hereafter and what we call knowledge here, as there is between hearing of an object and seeing it. We may hear a description of a person or place and have thereby a certain form of knowledge of him or it; but that form passes away, or is merged in a higher, as soon as we see what we had before only heard about.

Charles Hodge — Commentary on Romans (1835), First Corinthians (1857), and Ephesians (1856) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Again he commendeth the excellency of charity, in that that it shall never be abolished in the Saints, whereas the other gifts which are necessary for the building up of the Church, so long as we live here, shall have no place in the world to come.

The way to get knowledge by prophesying.

Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain. Text via Bolls.life.

Here the apostle goes on to commend charity, and show how much it is preferable to the gifts on which the Corinthians were so apt to pride themselves, to the utter neglect, and almost extinction, of charity. This he makes out,

I. From its longer continuance and duration: Charity never faileth. It is a permanent and perpetual grace, lasting as eternity; whereas the extraordinary gifts on which the Corinthians valued themselves were of short continuance. They were only to edify the church on earth, and that but for a time, not during its whole continuance in this world; but in heaven would be all superseded, which yet is the very seat and element of love. Prophecy must fail, that is, either the prediction of things to come (which is its most common sense) or the interpretation of scripture by immediate inspiration. Tongues will cease, that is, the miraculous power of speaking languages without learning them. There will be but one language in heaven. There is no confusion of tongues in the region of perfect tranquility. And knowledge will vanish away. Not that, in the perfect state above, holy and happy souls shall be unknowing, ignorant: it is a very poor happiness that can consist with utter ignorance. The apostle is plainly speaking of miraculous gifts, and therefore of knowledge to be had out of the common way (see Co1 14:6), a knowledge of mysteries supernaturally communicated. Such knowledge was to vanish away. Some indeed understand it of common knowledge acquired by instruction, taught and learnt. This way of knowing is to vanish away, though the knowledge itself, once acquired, will not be lost. But it is plain that the apostle is here setting the grace of charity in opposition to supernatural gifts. And it is more valuable, because more durable; it shall last, when they shall be no more; it shall enter into heaven, where they will have no place, because they will be of no use, though, in a sense, even our common knowledge may be said to cease in heaven, by reason of the improvement that will then be made in it. The light of a candle is perfectly obscured by the sun shining in its strength.

II. He hints that these gifts are adapted only to a state of imperfection: We know in part, and we prophesy in part, Co1 13:9. Our best knowledge and our greatest abilities are at present like our condition, narrow and temporary. Even the knowledge they had by inspiration was but in part. How little a portion of God, and the unseen world, was heard even by apostles and inspired men! How much short do others come of them! But these gifts were fitted to the present imperfect state of the church, valuable in themselves, but not to be compared with charity, because they were to vanish with the imperfections of the church, nay, and long before, whereas charity was to last for ever.

III. He takes occasion hence to show how much better it will be with the church hereafter than it can be here. A state of perfection is in view (Co1 13:10): When that which is perfect shall come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When the end is once attained, the means will of course be abolished. There will be no need of tongues, and prophecy, and inspired knowledge, in a future life, because then the church will be in a state of perfection, complete both in knowledge and holiness. God will be known then clearly, and in a manner by intuition, and as perfectly as the capacity of glorified minds will allow; not by such transient glimpses, and little portions, as here. The difference between these two states is here pointed at in two particulars: 1. The present state is a state of childhood, the future that of manhood: When I was a child, I spoke as a child (that is, as some think, spoke with tongues), I understood as a child; ephronoun - sapiebam (that is, "I prophesied, I was taught the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, in such an extraordinary way as manifested I was not out of my childish state"), I thought, or reasoned, elogizomēn, as a child; but, when I became a man, I put away childish things. Such is the difference between earth and heaven. What narrow views, what confused and indistinct notions of things, have children, in comparison of grown men! And how naturally do men, when reason is ripened and matured, despise and relinquish their infant thoughts, put them away, reject them, esteem as nothing! Thus shall we think of our most valued gifts and acquisitions in this world, when we come to heaven. We shall despise our childish folly, in priding ourselves in such things when we are grown up to men in Christ. 2. Things are all dark and confused now, in comparison of what they will be hereafter: Now we see through a glass darkly (en ainigmati, in a riddle), then face to face; now we know in part, but then we shall know as we are known. Now we can only discern things at a great distance, as through a telescope, and that involved in clouds and obscurity; but hereafter the things to be known will be near and obvious, open to our eyes; and our knowledge will be free from all obscurity and error. God is to be seen face to face; and we are to know him as we are known by him; not indeed as perfectly, but in some sense in the same manner. We are known to him by mere inspection; he turns his eye towards us, and sees and searches us throughout. We shall then fix our eye on him, and see him as he is, Jo1 3:2. We shall know how we are known, enter into all the mysteries of divine love and grace. O glorious change! To pass from darkness to light, from clouds to the clear sunshine of our Saviour's face, and in God's own light to see light! Psa 36:9. Note, It is the light of heaven only that will remove all clouds and darkness from the face of God. It is at best but twilight while we are in this world; there it will be perfect and eternal day.

IV. To sum up the excellences of charity, he prefers it not only to gifts, but to other graces, to faith and hope (Co1 13:13): And now abide faith, hope, and charity; but the greatest of these is charity. True grace is much more excellent than any spiritual gifts whatever. And faith, hope, and love, are the three principal graces, of which charity is the chief, being the end to which the other two are but means. This is the divine nature, the soul's felicity, or its complacential rest in God, and holy delight in all his saints. And it is everlasting work, when faith and hope shall be no more. Faith fixes on the divine revelation, and assents to that: hope fastens on future felicity, and waits for that: and in heaven faith well be swallowed up in vision, and hope in fruition. There is no room to believe and hope, when we see and enjoy. But love fastens on the divine perfections themselves, and the divine image on the creatures, and our mutual relation both to God and them. These will all shine forth in the most glorious splendours in another world, and there will love be made perfect; there we shall perfectly love God, because he will appear amiable for ever, and our hearts will kindle at the sight, and glow with perpetual devotion. And there shall we perfectly love one another, when all the saints meet there, when none but saints are there, and saints made perfect. O blessed state! How much surpassing the best below! O amiable and excellent grace of charity! How much does it exceed the most valuable gift, when it outshines every grace, and is the everlasting consummation of them! When faith and hope are at an end, true charity will burn for ever with the brightest flame. Note, Those border most upon the heavenly state and perfection whose hearts are fullest of this divine principle, and burn with the most fervent charity. It is the surest offspring of God, and bears his fairest impression. For God is love, Jo1 4:8, Jo1 4:16. And where God is to be seen as he is, and face to face, there charity is in its greatest height - there, and there only, will it be perfected.

Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

never faileth--never is to be out of use; it always holds its place.

shall fail . . . vanish away--The same Greek verb is used for both; and that different from the Greek verb for "faileth." Translate, "Shall be done away with," that is, shall be dispensed with at the Lord's coming, being superseded by their more perfect heavenly analogues; for instance, knowledge by intuition. Of "tongues," which are still more temporary, the verb is "shall cease." A primary fulfilment of Paul's statement took place when the Church attained its maturity; then "tongues" entirely "ceased," and "prophesyings" and "knowledge," so far as they were supernatural gifts of the Spirit, were superseded as no longer required when the ordinary preaching of the word, and the Scriptures of the New Testament collected together, had become established institutions.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

Verse 8. (16.) Charity never faileth] Ἡ αγαπη ουδεποτε εκπιπτει· This love never falleth off, because it bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things; and while it does so it cannot fail; it is the means of preserving all other graces; indeed, properly speaking, it includes them all; and all receive their perfection from it. Love to God and man can never be dispensed with. It is essential to social and religious life; without it no communion can be kept up with God; nor can any man have a preparation for eternal glory whose heart and soul are not deeply imbued with it. Without it there never was true religion, nor ever can be; and it not only is necessary through life, but will exist throughout eternity. What were a state of blessedness if it did not comprehend love to God and human spirits in the most exquisite, refined, and perfect degrees?

Prophecies - shall fail] Whether the word imply predicting future events, or teaching the truths of religion to men, all such shall soon be rendered useless. Though the accurate prophet and the eloquent, persuasive preacher be useful in their day, they shall not be always so; nor shall their gifts fit them for glory; nothing short of the love above described can fit a soul for the kingdom of God.

Tongues - shall cease] The miraculous gift of different languages, that soon shall cease, as being unnecessary.

Knowledge - shall vanish away.] All human arts and sciences, as being utterly useless in the eternal world, though so highly extolled and useful here.

Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

8. Love never faileth Here we have another excellence of love — that it endures for ever. There is good reason why we should eagerly desire an excellence that will never come to an end. Hence love must be preferred before temporary and perishable gifts. Prophesyings have an end, tongues fail, knowledge ceases Hence love is more excellent than they on this ground — that, while they fail, it survives.

Papists pervert this passage, for the purpose of establishing the doctrine which they have contrived, without any authority from Scripture — that the souls of the deceased pray to God on our behalf. For they reason in this manner: “Prayer is a perpetual office of love — love endures in the souls of departed saints — therefore they pray for us.” For my part, although I should not wish to contend too keenly on this point, yet, in order that they may not think that they have gained much by having this conceded to them, I reply to their objection in a few words.

In the first place, though love endures for ever, it does not necessarily follow that it is (as the expression is) in constant exercise. For what is there to hinder our maintaining that the saints, being now in the enjoyment of calm repose, do not exercise love in present offices? What absurdity, I pray you, would there be in this? In the second place, were I to maintain, that it is not a perpetual office of love to intercede for the brethren, how would they prove the contrary? That a person may intercede for another, it is necessary that he be acquainted with his necessity. If we may conjecture as to the state of the dead, it is a more probable supposition, that departed saints are ignorant of what is doing here, than that they are aware of our necessities. Papists, it is true, imagine, that they see the whole world in the reflection of light which they enjoy in the vision of God; but it is a profane and altogether heathenish contrivance, which has more of the savor of Egyptian theology, than it has of accordance with Christian philosophy. What, then, if I should maintain that the saints, being ignorant of our condition, are not concerned in reference to us? With what argument will Papists press me, so as to constrain me to hold their opinion? What if I should affirm, that they are so occupied and swallowed up, as it were, in the vision of God, that they think of nothing besides? How will they prove that this is not agreeable to reason? What if I should reply, that the perpetuity of love, here mentioned by the Apostle, will be after the last day, and has nothing to do with the time that is intermediate? What if I should say that the office of mutual intercession has been enjoined only upon the living, and those that are sojourning in this world, and consequently does not at all extend to the departed?

But I have already said more than enough; for the very point for which they contend I leave undetermined, that I may not raise any contention upon a matter that does not call for it. It was, however, of importance to notice, in passing, how little support is given them from this passage, in which they think they have so strong a bulwark. Let us reckon it enough, that it has no support from any declaration of scripture, and that, consequently, it is maintained by them rashly and inconsiderately.

Whether knowledge, it will be destroyed. We have already seen the meaning of these words; but from this arises a question of no small importances whether those who in this world excel either in learning, or in other gifts, will be on a level with idiots in the kingdom of God? In the first place, I should wish to admonish pious readers, not to harass themselves more than is meet in the investigation of these things. Let them rather seek the way by which the kingdom of God is arrived at, than curiously inquire, what is to be our condition there; for the Lord himself has, by his silence, called us back from such curiosity. I now return to the question. So far as I can conjecture, and am able even to gather in part from this passage — inasmuch as learning, knowledge of languages, and similar gifts are subservient to the necessity of this life, I do not think that there will be any of them then remaining. The learned, however, will sustain no loss from the want of them, inasmuch as they will receive the fruit of them, which is greatly to be preferred.

John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.

(8) Charity never faileth.—From the positive and negative qualities of love described and enumerated in the preceding passage, the Apostle now turns to contrast the imperishable character of love and other graces with the ephemeral nature of gifts. The Corinthians held an exaggerated estimate of the value of gifts such as tongues and prophecy, and under-valued the graces of faith and love. Now the Apostle shows that they were thereby preferring the things which are for a time to the graces which are for ever. One faction, indeed, exalted to the highest place a gift—that of tongues—which was the most ephemeral of all Christian gifts. On the “tongues,” see Note on 1Co_14:2. “Prophecies,” in the plural, intimates the varied gradations of power possessed by the preachers, in some cases including that deep spiritual insight into the realities of the present which enabled the preacher to foretell distant events.

A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

8. Charity never faileth] The Vulgate and some MSS. read falleth. Tyndale renders, falleth never awaye. In the Septuagint (as in Job_15:33, and Isa_28:1; Isa_28:4) the word is used of a fading flower. In Rom_9:6, it is applied to the Word of God.

whether there be prophecies, they shall fail] Another word is here used in the original for the word translated fail. It should rather be rendered be brought to an end, literally be worked out. It is translated brought to nought in ch. 1Co_1:28, while in 1Co_13:10 it is rendered done away, in 1Co_13:11 put away, and in the latter part of this very verse vanish away. The utterances of the inspired man (see ch. 1Co_14:1) are, we are here told, no longer of any value to us when we are face to face with the facts of which he was wont to speak.

tongues] Either (1) speaking with tongues, which as a sign (see ch. 1Co_14:22) will be unnecessary when we are confronted with the reality and need no more signs and wonders to compel our attention to it Or (2) divers languages, which shall cease when the curse of Babel is removed in the ‘holy city, New Jerusalem’ which shall come down from heaven, and in which all things shall be made new.

whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away]. Rather, be brought to an end. See last note but one. Knowledge (see note on ch. 1Co_12:8) as the result of a process, the outcome of observation, argument, balancing of probabilities—for all these form part of our earthly knowledge—is but partial and incomplete (see next verse), and vanishes in a moment before the actual presence of what is. Wisdom, says Estius, will not in like manner vanish, because its perfection consists in the vision of God.

The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

For we know in part,.... Not that the Scriptures, the rule and measure of knowledge, and from whence spiritual knowledge is derived, are imperfect; so that there is need of unwritten traditions, and of enthusiastic revelations and inspirations, to inform of things otherwise unknown; for though they were at sundry times, and in divers manners delivered, yet now they contain a complete system of divine truths, to which nothing is to be added, and from which nothing is to be taken away; or that only a part of the saints know the things of God; for though there is a difference between them, some have more knowledge than others, yet all have some, all are taught of God, and know him, and have that anointing which teacheth all things; wherefore the sense also is not, that only a part of truth, and not the whole, is known; for the Spirit of God leads into all truth; the whole counsel of God is made known in the Scriptures, and by the ministers of the word; though, to this sense the Arabic version inclines, rendering it, "some part of doctrine we know"; and so in Co1 13:12 "some part of knowledge I know"; as also the Syriac version, which renders it , "a little from much we know"; but the true meaning is, that though the rule of knowledge is perfect, and all the saints have knowledge, and every truth of the Gospel is known; yet by those that know most, it is known but imperfectly: the truth itself may be most clearly discerned, as it is revealed in the word; yet the manner of it, how it is, may not be known; and many difficulties may attend it, and objections be raised to it, which are not easily solved; as in the doctrines of the Trinity, predestination, the union of the two natures in Christ, the resurrection of the dead, &c.

and we prophesy in part; the word of prophecy, as it sure, it is also perfect, to which we do well to take heed; and though all do not prophesy, yet all that do, and that prophesy aright, that is, explain the word of God aright, these preach the Gospel fully, declare the whole counsel of God, and keep back nothing profit able to the saints; yet still their prophesying or explaining the prophecies of the Old Testament, or the mysteries of the Gospel, is but imperfect at best in the present state of things.

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

Ver. 8. Prophecies, they shall fail] The archprophet shall teach us immediately, as he had done Moses and Elias, who appearing to Christ in the transfiguration, knew and could say far more to our Saviour for his comfort and confirmation against the bitterness of his death than ever they could while here living upon earth, Luk 9:31.

Whether there be knowledge] Gotten by study, and communicated to others. For Lilmod lelamreed, say the rabbins, we therefore learn that we may teach.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Charity never faileth - Paul here proceeds to illustrate the value of love, from its “permanency” as compared with other valued endowments. It is valuable, and is to be sought because it will always abide; may be always exercised; is adapted to all circumstances, and to all worlds in which we may be placed, or in which we may dwell. The word rendered “faileth” (ἐκπίπτει ekpiptei) denotes properly to fall out of, to fall from or off; and may be applied to the stars of heaven falling Mar 13:25, or to flowers that fall or fade Jam 1:11; 1Pe 1:24, or to chains falling from the hands, etc.; Act 12:7. Here it means to fall away, to fail; to be without effect, to cease to be in existence. The expression may mean that it will be adapted to all the situations of life, and is of a nature to be always exercised; or it may mean that it will continue to all eternity, and he exercised in heaven forever. The connection demands that the latter should be regarded as the true interpretation; see 1Co 13:13. The sense is, that while other endowments of the Holy Spirit must soon cease and he valueless, love would abide, and would always exist. The “argument” is, that we ought to seek that which is of enduring value; and that, therefore, love should be preferred to those endowments of the Spirit on which so high a value had been set by the Corinthians.

But whether there be prophecies - That is, the “gift” of prophecy, or the power of speaking as a prophet; that is, of delivering the truth of God in an intelligible manner under the influence of inspiration; the gift of being a public speaker, of instructing and edifying the church, and foretelling future events; see the note at 1Co 14:1.

They shall fail - The gift shall cease to be exercised; shall be abolished, come to nothing. There shall be no further use for this gift in the light and glory of the world above, and it shall cease. God shall be the teacher there. And as there will be no need of confirming the truth of religion by the prediction of future events, and no need of warning against impending dangers there, the gift of foretelling future events will be of course unknown. In heaven, also, there will be no need that the faith of God’s people shall be encouraged, or their devotions excited, by such exhortations and instructions as are needful now; and the endowment of prophecy will be, therefore, unknown.

There be tongues - The power of speaking foreign languages.

They shall cease - Macknight supposes this means that they shall cease in the church after the gospel shall have been preached to all nations. But the more natural interpretation is, to refer it to the future life; since the main idea which Paul is urging here is the value of love above all other endowments, from the fact that it would be “abiding,” or permanent - an idea which is more certainly and fully met by a reference to the future world than by a reference to the state of things in the church on earth. If it refers to heaven, it means that the power of communicating thoughts there will not be by the medium of learned and foreign tongues. What will be the mode is unknown. But as the diversity of tongues is one of the fruits of sin Gen. 11, it is evident that in those who are saved there will be deliverance from all the disadvantages which have resulted from the confusion of tongues. Yet love will not cease to be necessary; and love will live forever.

Whether there be knowledge - See the note at 1Co 14:8. This refers, I think, to knowledge as “we now possess it.” It cannot mean that there will be no knowledge in heaven; for there must be a vast increase of knowledge in that world among all its inhabitants. The idea in the passage here, I think, is, “All the knowledge which we now possess, valuable as it is, will be obscured and lost, and rendered comparatively valueless, in the fuller splendors of the eternal world; as the feeble light of the stars, beautiful and valuable as it is, “vanishes,” or is lost in the splendors of the rising sun. The knowledge which we now have is valuable, as the gift of prophecy and the power of speaking foreign languages is valuable, but it will be lost in the brighter visions of the world above.” That this is the sense is evident from what Paul says in illustration of the sentiment in 1Co 13:9-10. “Now” we know in part. What we deem ourselves acquainted with, we imperfectly understand. There are many obscurities and many difficulties. But in that future world we shall know distinctly and clearly 1Co 13:12; and then the knowledge which we now possess will appear so dim and obscure, that it will seem to have vanished away and disappeared,

“As a dim candle dies at noon.”

Macknight and others understand this of the knowledge of the mysteries of the Old Testament, or “the inspired knowledge of the ancient revelations, which should be abolished when the church should have attained its mature state;” a most meagre, jejune, and frigid interpretation. It is true, also, that not only shall our imperfect knowledge seem to have vanished in the superior light and glory of the eternal world but that much of that which here passes for knowledge shall be then unknown. Much of that which is called “science” is “falsely so called;” and much that is connected with literature that has attracted so much attention, will be unknown in the eternal world. It is evident that much that is connected with criticism, and the knowledge of language, with the different systems of mental philosophy which are erroneous; perhaps much that is connected with anatomy, physiology, and geology; and much of the science which now is connected with the arts, and which is of use only as tributary to the arts, will be then unknown. Other subjects may rise into importance which are now unknown; and possibly things connected with science which are now regarded as of the least importance will then become objects of great moment, and ripen and expand into sciences that shall contribute much to the eternal happiness of heaven. The essential idea in this passage is, that all the knowledge which we now possess shall lose its effulgence, be dimmed and lost in the superior light of heaven. But love shall live there; and we should, therefore, seek that which is permanent and eternal.

Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

Prophecies and tongues last not longer than this life. --- Knowledge shall be destroyed, that is, that imperfect knowledge we have in this world. For now we know only in part, we only see, as it were, through a glass, and imperfectly. --- Faith, which is of things that appear not, and hope, which is of things that we enjoy not, will cease in heaven, but charity, the greater, or greatest even of these three, will remain, and be increased in heaven. (Witham)

George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).

The apostle, from another argument, commendeth the grace of love, viz. its never failing; it shall go with us into another world, and have its use and exercise there, where there will be no prophesying, no speaking with divers tongues, but there the saints shall love God. And this maketh it evident, that by charity, or love, (before mentioned), the apostle doth not singly mean bounty or beneficence to those that stand in need of those good things of this life, in which we can help them.

Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away: by knowledge, here, some understand the communicating of knowledge to the church by preaching: others, the means we now have by meditating in and study of the Scriptures: others, better, of the imperfect degrees of our knowledge, or the way of our procuring it: the following verses would incline us to interpret it of the former, though it be true also of the latter.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

Vers. 8-13. The eternal permanence of love.

Never faileth. The word "faileth" (ejkpiptei) has two technical meanings between which it is not easy to decide.

1. It means, technically, is never hissed off the stage like a bad actor," i.e. it has its part to play even on the stage of eternity. This is its meaning in classic Greek.

2. it means "falls away like the petals of a withered flower. (as in Jam_1:11; comp. Isa_28:4) Here, perhaps, the meaning is nottechnical, but general, as in Rom_9:6 and in the LXX (Job 21) But the reading may be simply piptei (falleth), as in a, A,B,C. They shall fail. This is not the same word as the one on which we have been commenting; it means "shall be annulled" or "done away;" and is the same verb as that rendered in the next clauses by "vanish away," "be done away" (ver. 10), and "put away" (ver. 11). Thus in two verses we have the same word rendered by four different phrases. No doubt the effect of the change sounds beautifully to ears accustomed to the "old familiar strain;" but it is the obvious duty of translators to represent, not to improve upon, the language of their author. In the Revised Version the stone word is rightly kept for the four recurrences of the verb. Tongues. Special charisms are enumerated to show the transcendence of love. Knowledge. This shall be only annulled in the sense of earthly knowledge, which shall be a star disappearing in the light of that heavenly knowledge which shall gradually broaden into the perfect day.

Vers. 8-13.

Permanence of love.

Why is it that the numerous objects around us are transient? On every side they appeal to us, connect themselves with hope and fear, enter into our business, awaken enterprise and ambition, and even inspire ardent love; yet they are ever passing away. Now, there must be a discipline in all this, and Christianity assures us what it means. It is that we may be trained in the midst of evanescence for that which is permanent. And this presupposes that there is not only an immortal soul in man, but that, by reason of his present organization and its relations, certain of his functions and acquirements are purely temporary, while others are to live forever. In fact, there are functions and acquirements which do not wait for the death of the body. They fulfil their purpose and expire long before age overtakes us. Yet, says Wordsworth

Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts Have followed, for such loss, I would believe Abundant recompense.

It is in the spirit of a true and noble Christian philosophy that this great moral poet of the century sees no cause to "mourn nor murmur" because our nature has a rejecting instinct, which, as God ordains, throws off and leaves behind it tastes and habits that were once very useful as well as precious. Keeping in mind, then, that this rejecting instinct is an organic part of our constitution and has its allotted functions to discharge, we can appreciate all the more St. Paul"s line of thought in the closing verses of this chapter. Love never faileth. Its existence, activity, manifestation, will be perpetuated. The wonderful spiritual gifts of which he had said so much prophecy, the ability to speak with tongues, knowledge these should cease to exist. Although they proceeded from the Holy Ghost and were mightily instrumental for good in the incipient work of the Church, yet, nevertheless, they were to terminate. Scaffoldings were they all, useful as such, subserving most important ends, but mere scaffoldings, that could no longer remain when the edifice had been finished. What, then, is the ideal of the Church? it is not splendid endowments, for they are doomed to extinction, but the love "that never faileth." Whether the passing away of these gifts refers to the apostolic age or to "the age to come," matters nothing, since the idea of their discontinuation, rather than of the time it should occur, is foremost in St. Paul"s mind. Imagine, then, his conception of love, when he could contemplate the Church as a vast body laying off these mighty accompaniments of its career, and yet, so far from being weakened, would be girded afresh with a power more resplendent and display it in a form infinitely more majestic. Disrobed of these habiliments, its contour would appear in the perfection of sublimity; its anatomy as an organism would be, as it were, transparent; the whole framework, the various parts, the ligaments binding them together, the circulating lifeblood, would disclose the single animating principle of love. Would it startle the Corinthians to learn that even knowledge should vanish away? "We know in part, and we prophesy in part." All knowledge cannot be meant, for love itself includes much knowledge, and, in its absence, would be simply emotional intensity. To possess the mere faculty of knowing would be worthless, if the mind could not retain the contents of knowledge and make them a portion integrally of itself. What the apostle teaches is that such knowledge as stands related to the present state and time, and grows directly out of imperfect human development, and shares the condition of all things earthly, is short lived and must terminate. Tongues shall cease, but the gift of speech shall not be lost. And he explains himself by saying that the gifts relating to prophecy and tongues were only partial, were exclusively adapted to a preliminary state of experience and activity, and completed their purpose in a temporary spiritual economy. We are here under specific, no less than general limitations, and, in certain directions, we are restrained more than in others. What the Spirit looks to is not knowledge alone, but to its moral aspects as well; to humility, meekness, self abasement, when the intellect is strongest, freest, and boldest; nor will he expand the understanding and its expressional force for their own sakes, but develop them only so far as subservient to an object higher than their immediate ends. Partial information, partial command of our mental faculties, partial uses of even the wisdom we possess this is the law of limitation and restraint, under which the complex probation of intellect, sensibility, volition, aspiration, and outward activity, works out immeasurable results. Therefore, he argues, we now know and prophesy "in part;" at the best, we are fragmentary and incomplete; and yet this imperfection is connected with a perfect system and leads up to it. The perfection will come; the existing economy is its foreshadowing; nor could knowledge give any rational account of itself, nor could prophecy and tongues vindicate their worth, if the fuller splendours, of which these are faint escapes of light, were not absolute certainties of the future. Only when the "perfect is come" shall that which is "in part" be "done away." Institutions founded in providence and upheld by the Spirit are left to no chance or accident as to continuance, decay, extinction. God comes into them, abides, departs, according to the counsel of his will. If he numbers our days as living men, and keeps our times in his hand; if only his voice says, "Return, ye children of men; this is equally true of institutions. For the dead dust, man makes a grave; but the life of individuals, institutions, government, society, even the Church, is in God"s keeping, and he alone says, "Return." How shall St. Paul set forth the relation of the partial to the perfect? A truth lacks something if it cannot be illustrated, and a teacher is very defective in ability when he cannot find a resemblance or an analogy to make his meaning more perspicuous and vivid. Truth and teacher have met in this magnificent chapter on ground reserved, we may venture to say, for their special occupancy and companionship. The great teacher sees the sublimest of truths in a glowing light, and most unlike Paul would he be if no illustration came to hand spontaneously. Is there something in the more hallowed moments of the soul that suddenly reinstates the sense of childhood? "When I was a child" in the heathen city of Tarsus, the capital of a Roman province; the mountains of Taurus and the luxuriant plain and the flowing Cydnus near by; the crowded streets and gay population and excited groups of talkers pressing on eye and ear; the festivals of paganism; the strange contrasts of these with the life in his Jewish home; his training under the parental roof; the daily reminders of the Law and the traditions of the Pharisees; what thoughts were they? Only those of a child, understood and spoken as a child. No ordinary child could he have been. Providence was shaping him then for an apostle, so that while the holy child Jesus was growing "in wisdom and stature" amid the hills of Nazareth and in the nursery of the virgin mother"s heart, there was far away in Cilicia a boy not much younger, who was in rearing there, under very unlike circumstances, to be his chosen apostle to the Gentile world. Yet the boy Saul was but a child, and thought and spake "as a child." But is childhood disallowed and set off in sharp contrast with manhood? Nay; childhood is of God no less than manhood as to quality of being. What is contrasted is the childishness in the one case and the perfected manhood in the other. So that we suppose the apostle to mean that whatsoever is initial, immature, provisional, in the child, has been put away to make room for something better. The better implies the good, a childish good, indeed, and yet a good from the hand of God however mixed with earthly imperfections. Another movement occurs in the leading thought. Can one think of knowledge without an involuntary recurrence of the symbol of light? The symbol has quite supplanted the thing signified, and the enlightened man is more honoured than the knowing man. St. Paul proceeds to say, "Now we see through a glass, darkly;" the revealed Word of God is conveyed to us "in symbols and words which but imperfectly express them" (Hodge, Delitzsch); and yet, while there is a "glass" or mirror, and the knowledge or vision of Divine things is "darkly" given, there is a real knowledge, a true and blessed knowledge, for "we see." Enough is made intelligible for all the purposes of the spiritual mind, for all spiritual uses, in all spiritual relationships of comprehension, conscience, volition, affection, brotherhood; enough for probation, responsibility, culture, and lifetime growth. What in us is denied? Only curiosity, excessive appetencies of the faculties, habits of perception and judging superinduced in the intellect by the sensational portion of our nature, these are denied their morbid gratification. A plethora of evidence is denied that faith may have its sphere. Over strength and over constraint of motive are denied that the will may be left free. Violent impulses of feeling are denied that the heart may be intense without wild and erratic enthusiasm, treasuring its life of peaceful blessedness in unfathomable depths like the ocean, that keeps its mass of waters in the vast hollows of the globe and uses the hills and mountains only to shape its shores. On the other hand, what is granted to the mind in the revelation of Divine truth? Such views of God in Christ as the soul can realize in its present condition and thereby form the one master habit of a probationary being, viz. How to see God in Christ. At present, we can only begin to see as by reflection in a mirror; and, as in the education of the senses to the finer work of earthly life the cultivation of the eye is the slowest and most exacting, the longest, the most difficult, and that too because the eye is the noblest of the special senses, so learn we, and not without much patient exertion, and oft repeated efforts to see God in Christ as made known in his gospel and providence and Holy Spirit. Yet the mirror trains the eye and prepares it to see God through no such intervening medium. The promised vision is open, full, immediate. We shall see him "face to face, says St. Paul. "We shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is," declares St. John. And then partial knowledge shall expand into perfect knowledge, and we shall know after a new and Divine manner, for nothing less than this is the assurance: Know as we are known. "Glorious hymn to Christian love, as Dr. Farrar calls this chapter, what shall be its closing strain? "And now abideth" (remains or continues) the same duration as compared with the evanescence of extraordinary gifts being ascribed to the three now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love." Who can doubt it after reading this chapter? Here it stands beside the great gifts of the "tongues of men and of angels," and of the prophetic insight, and of miracle working, and of philanthropy and martyrdom, and, amid this splendid array, love is greatest. In what it does, it is greatest. In what it is, it is greatest. Here, finally, it is grouped with faith and hope, and yet the light that irradiates its form and features from the glory of God in the face or" Jesus Christ is a lustre beyond that of the other two, because the "greatest of these is love. L.

Love never faileth.

Prophecies, tongues, knowledge, these were all matters of immense importance in the Christian community at Corinth, whose members prided themselves upon their discernment, their intellectuality, their gifts. And they were not unimportant in the view of that one of the apostles whose mind was both more highly endowed by nature, and more sedulously and effectively disciplined by study, than was the case with his brethren. But let these excellent and beautiful things be brought into comparison with Christian love, and they vanish as the stars of night when the sun arises in his splendour and power.

I THE CESSATION AND VANISHING OF INTELLECTUAL GIFTS.

1. What they were. They seem to have been supernatural gifts, highly prized by their possessors, and eagerly coveted by the members of the Christian societies generally. "Prophecy" was the faculty of uttering forth Divine truth. "Tongues" were supernatural utterances, probably of various kinds. "Knowledge" is here used in a special sense, equivalent to a peculiar spiritual illumination. Such were the gifts of which these Corinthians were wont to boast.

2. Why it is appointed that these gifts shall cease. Because they were bestowed to serve a temporary purpose, when the barque of Christianity had to be launched upon the sea of human society, when Christian doctrine needed a special introduction and a special authentication. There are certain parts of a plant which serve to protect it for a season, which disappear when the plant is mature. A scaffolding may be useful for a time; but when the building is completed, it has done its work, and is taken down and carried away. So with these gifts; good for a temporary purpose, they may be dispensed with when that purpose is attained.

II THE UNFALLING LIFE OF LOVE.

1. Love is the special and permanent characteristic of the Christian economy. Observe its exemplification in such characters as the apostles Paul and John. And notice that whilst the special gifts referred to have passed away, charity remains the distinctive feature of the Church of Christ in all its varying circumstances and ministrations.

2. Love is permanent in the heavenly and eternal state. If faith shall then become trust without misgiving, and hope expectation without uncertainty, love shall then be adoration without coldness, affection without interruption. Love shall be supreme, and the great Centre of worship and adoration shall call forth all the affection of the countless host, whilst the members of that vast and glorious society shall find room for the infinite exercise of this peerless grace.

III THE EXPLANATION OF THE SUPERIORITY AND SUPREMACY OF LOVE.

1. What calls it forth is permanent; there is no limit to the appeal for love made by the conscious universe and by its Lord.

2. What fosters and feeds it is permanent; there is no limit to the supply of the Spirit, the power, the grace, of God. T.

The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Love never faileth - It accompanies to, and adorns us in, eternity; it prepares us for, and constitutes, heaven. But whether there be prophecies, they shall fail - When all things are fulfilled, and God is all in all. Whether there be tongues, they shall cease - One language shall prevail among all the inhabitants of heaven, and the low and imperfect languages of earth be forgotten. The knowledge likewise which we now so eagerly pursue, shall then vanish away - As starlight is lost in that of the midday sun, so our present knowledge in the light of eternity.

John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.

The eternal duration of love:

v. 8. Charity never faileth; but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

v. 9. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

v. 10. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away

v. 11. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

v. 12. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.

v. 13. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

The first sentence is the topic of the last section of this chapter: Love never fails, it outwears all gifts, it never drops out of existence; like the eternal God, to whom it owes its being, it lasts forever. The gift of prophesying, of inspiration from the Lord, of foretelling future events and explaining the Word of God in connection therewith, will come to naught, be made useless and void, be abolished. As the content of all prophecy will be revealed in fulfillment, as all that was hidden will be clearly revealed, there will then no longer be need of prophecy. The gift of tongues, of ecstatic utterances in strange and unknown tongues, will cease, will stop, since they had only a temporary significance; they lapsed and terminated when their object was attained. The gift of knowledge, of comprehension of the things revealed, shall be done away with. A time will come when this, like the rest, will have served its purpose and therefore will be abolished for good and all.

Since the assertion that the gifts of knowledge and prophecy will cease might seem strange, Paul explains his statement: For in part we know, and in part we prophesy; but when there comes the perfect, the imperfect will be abolished. Our knowing in this world is imperfect, inadequate for a complete understanding of God, of His essence, of His will. There are only small parts of the eternal, heavenly truth which we understand, even with our enlightened Christian reason. We have no comprehensive view of the total, of the connection of the divine thoughts and counsels; the fullness of God’s greatness and majesty is still hidden from us. We know only so much of God’s essence and will as is necessary for our salvation. And the most enlightened and inspired commentators of the Bible are able to get only glimpses of the mysteries of the spiritual world, of the heavenly glories, through the revelation given to us in the Gospel. But this imperfect condition will cease, the knowing and prophesying in part will come to an end, as soon as the perfect appears, just as the blush of dawn disappears when the sun rises above the horizon in full splendor. When Christ will return in glory, when we shall be glorified with Him in heaven, then all the imperfections of this present knowledge will be left behind.

The great difference between the present and the future state is illustrated in the text by the difference between the child’s estate and the man’s estate: When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child; my speech, my aims, and my mental activity were those of a young child, immature, imperfect. At the present time our ideas of heavenly, divine things do not measure up to the glory and dignity of the subject. Now that I have become a man, I have abolished the things of the child; the adult no longer holds the imperfect, immature opinions and ideas of the child. Even so the full, mature, complete knowledge of God is reserved for yonder world. But mark that we shall have the very same divine, beautiful, spiritual matters to delight us in heaven which we now have in the world: that which we now understand and know only in part will then be revealed to us in its entirety, in the full glory of its substance. As the blossom loses its petals, but retains its center, which will eventually ripen into the perfect fruit, so we shall strip off the imperfect opinions of our understanding, while we retain the core in its fully developed state and see its fruition in heaven.

The contrast between the present imperfect and the future perfect knowledge is illustrated by another picture: For now we behold through a mirror, in an enigma; then, however, face to face. The ancient mirrors were made of polished metal, which reflected an image but faintly, without sharp and distinct outlines; thus is our beholding of the glories of God, as offered to us in His Word, not because the Word is dark, but because our understanding is not sufficient to grasp the wonders of His substance and qualities. And we behold in an enigma, what we often consider a riddle; on account of our darkened understanding, even in our regenerated state, the phraseology of the Lord in His Word often presents difficulties, we are often able to get but an obscure and uncertain idea of His meaning. That is what St. Paul frankly states, making his own person an example of the Christians in general: Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I, too, am known. Because the Lord had to fit the heavenly mysteries to the imperfect speech of human beings, because He had to clothe His eternal, divine thoughts in words, expressions, pictures, parables taken from this perishing world, therefore the perfection of the divine glory must needs be hidden from our eyes. But in heaven every believer will see, know, understand the fullness of the divine essence, attributes, plans, counsels in a perfect and blessed understanding, so thoroughly as he himself was known of God when the Lord changed his heart in conversion. It is a perfect and blessed knowledge of God. No longer will God then see anything strange, foreign, hostile between Him and us. All our sins will be removed fully from His sight. As Luther writes: "I shall know Him then in the clearest possible manner, without covering; for the covering was not taken from Him, but from me, for He has none before Him. " In heaven we shall at last in love know God by direct contact, and all the mediated, imperfect knowing that is possible to us now will be left far behind and forgotten altogether in the bliss of the perfect salvation. See Psa 17:15.

The prospect of this wonderful blessedness causes the apostle to close his psalm of love in a wonderful outburst of triumphant joy: But as it is, there remain faith, hope, love, these three. All other gifts, all other virtues pass away, these three remain permanently. Faith, hope, love remain in eternity, because that which a Christian believes, hopes, loves remains forever, since God is eternal, with whom we are united in faith, hope, and love. This conclusion is practically demanded by the statement that all imperfect things will be abolished. For of these three the apostle does not say that they are imperfect, that we believe in part, that we hope in part, that we love in part. Faith, even the weak faith, although it knows God only in part, yet, as saving faith, accepts the whole God, the whole Christ, the entire redemption in Christ, the full forgiveness of sins. Hope also, seeing and knowing only a few rays of the glory to come, yet has the entire future world as its object. And love concentrates upon the entire Triune God of our salvation, not upon some pitiful remnant. But love is not more lasting, but greater among these, the greatest of the three. Faith and hope also remain forever, since that in which we believe, that for which we hope, lasts forever. But the nature of faith and hope will cease; for what we have here believed and hoped for we shall there possess and enjoy. Our faith will reach the perfection of its state in beholding; our hope will be perfected in enjoyment. But our love of God and Christ, and therefore also of all our brethren, will be absolutely unchanged, only purified, since all the obstacles which here hinder the activity of love will there be removed. In heaven love will be altogether free and untrammeled in its ability to prove itself, and everywhere it will find love in return and thus be blessed in the fellowship of God, of the holy angels, and of all the saints.

Note: The fact that love is here called the greatest virtue does not in any way disagree with the fact that faith is the only means of obtaining salvation. "But they [our opponents] object that love is preferred to faith and hope. For Paul says, 1Co 13:13: ’The greatest of these is charity. ’ Now, it is reasonable that the greatest and chief virtue should justify. Nevertheless, let us, indeed, grant to the adversaries that love towards God and our neighbor is the greatest virtue, because the chief commandment is this: ’Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God,’ Mat 22:37. But how will they infer thence that love justifies? The greatest virtue, they say, justifies. By no means. [It would be true if we had a gracious God because of our virtue. Now it was proven above that we are accepted and justified for Christ’s sake, not because of our virtue; for our virtue is impure. ] For just as even the greatest or first Law does not justify, so also the greatest virtue of the Law does not justify. [For, as the Law and virtue is higher, and our ability to do the same proportionately lower, we are not righteous because of love. ] But that virtue justifies which apprehends Christ, which communicates to us Christ’s merits, by which we receive grace and peace from God. But this virtue is faith. For as it has been often said, faith is not only knowledge, but much rather willing to receive or apprehend those things which are offered in the promise concerning Christ.

Summary.The apostle praises the high worth of love, gives a description of its essential features, and describes its eternal duration.

Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Charity never faileth. Holy love is an everlasting quality and employment; it shall not fail at death, as other graces do, but be perfected at death.

Repentance should accompany us to the gates of heaven, but repentance ceases for ever in heaven; for no need of repentance where there is entire innocence.

Faith is swallowed up in vision, and hope in fruition; but love is then and there in its exaltation.

Thus charity never faileth, but all other gifts will fail; prophesying, languages, sciences, and all artificial knowledge, will cease for ever; knowledge itself in heaven shall vanish away.

But how vanish?

The meaning is, that such knowledge as we have now shall vanish then; that imperfect knowledge we have now will cease and be useless then. Our present knowledge is attained with much labour and study; but it shall be no more difficult to know in heaven, than it is for the eye to open and see; the beautiful face of truth shall in a moment be unveiled to us in heaven, and the curtain drawn away by the hand of God, which interposed between us and the light.

Again: knowledge of so imperfect a degree, as now it is of, shall vanish away: here we know what we know by divine revelation, but in part; and we prophesy by inspiration, but in part.

William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

8. “Love never faileth.” Here we have the hard shell religion that never falls from grace. This Divine “love never faileth.” Hence you have nothing to do but get it and keep it, and you will never fall. Perfect humility, always involved in perfect love, puts you down on the Lord’s bottom and keeps you there, whence there is no falling, since you are on the bottom and there is no place to fall to. “Where there be prophecy, they shall be done away” Why? Prophecy is the spiritual gift qualifying to preach and teach salvation generally. When we pass out of this world we will find no lost souls to be saved, hence no one to preach to. So of course all preaching will cease. “Whether there be tongues, they shall cease.” We will not need mortal language in Heaven, where everything is purely spiritual. When Paul was there (2 Corinthians 12) he heard things impossible to utter. Mortal language is utterly inadequate to cover the ineffable realities of Heavenly glory. Our language here signifying spiritual things is mainly symbolic, because while in these bodies it is so difficult for us to conceive pure spiritualities. When we pass into the purely spiritual world we will all use the language of the angels, archangels, cherubim and seraphim. “Where there be knowledge. it shall be done away.” Do not misunderstand this.

You will not forfeit any of your attainments in the acquisition of knowledge, but retain them all, and add to your investment with paradoxical rapidity. You must remember he is not speaking of your acquired knowledge, but the spiritual gift denominated knowledge, and here under discussion with the other eight. This gift means insight into God’s revealed Word to enable you to understand the Bible. This will be done away, and for the good reason that we will not take our Bibles to Heaven. We will not need material eyes there and we will have no Bible to read, hence we will not need that gift whose immediate province is to reveal to us the truth as given in our Bibles. Instead of studying Paul’s epistles, we will have Paul himself, and not need his letters, which he wrote to lead us to Heaven.

Now that we are there we no longer need the way-bill. Doubtless we will learn more in a single hour after we get to Heaven than we have ever known before in all our lives. When we pass out of the body memory will be so quickened that all the blessed truth we have forgotten will come back vivid and bright, to abide forever. What a glory to hear Paul preach after he has spent nineteen hundred years in the universities of Heaven! How glorified Paul will eclipse sanctified Paul! What a wonderful teacher Father Adam will be! How I will be delighted to hear him describe Eden before the Fall and tell how long he lived in it! How wonderfully can Enoch tell us about the antediluvian world, and Noah about the Flood! Daniel about the lions’ den, and the Hebrew children about the fiery furnace! How I will delight to hear Gabriel tell about my Lord’s first advent, and Michael about the second! How unutterably delectable to wing my flight escorted by radiant angels through trackless ether to some grand celestial world contemplated through the telescope when a boy!

William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall be done away; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away .

J. W. McGarvey (with Philip Y. Pendleton), Commentaries on the New Testament (The Fourfold Gospel, 1914; Acts; and the epistles) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

8–10. Love never faileth. The superiority of love over all besides is shown by its survival of all with which it is compared. It is eternal and imperishable. Whether there be prophecies. The gift of prophesying shall cease. As a matter of fact we know that it has long since done so. Whether there be tongues. The gift of speaking in unknown tongues was transitory. Knowledge. Even the supernatural knowledge, granted as a spiritual gift, is temporary. All these were only granted while the church was in an immature state.

B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.

translationWords

love

prophet

tongue

know

perfect

unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.

8. πίπτει אABC. ἐκπίπτει DEFG.

8. πίπτει. See Critical Note. πίπτω is found in the sense of come to destruction in Plat. Phaed. 100 E καὶ τοῦτο ἐχόμενος ἡγοῦμαι οὐκ ἄν ποτε πεσεῖν, ἀλλ’ ἀσφαλὲς εἶναι.

προφητεῖαι. The allusion is to the spiritual gifts mentioned in the last chapter. The gift of prophecy (see note on ch. 1Co 14:1) will be no longer needed when all men are in the presence of the eternal verities for which this life is a preparation.

καταργηθήσονται. As far as verbal accuracy is concerned the A.V. is remarkably misleading in this passage. It translates ἐκπίπτει and καταργηθήσονται by fail, and καταργηθήσεται by vanish away. See ch. 1Co 1:28 note, and 1Co 13:10-11 of this chapter.

γλῶσσαι. Both (1) speaking with tongues, which as a sign (see ch. 1Co 14:22) will be unnecessary when we are in that heavenly abode where no signs are needed, but we are in the presence of the things signified, and (2) divers languages, which shall cease when the curse of Babel is removed in the ‘holy city, New Jerusalem’ which shall come down from heaven, and in which all things shall be made new.

καταργηθήσεται. See last note but one. Earthly knowledge (see note on ch. 1Co 12:8), as the result of a process, as acquired by labour, observation, argument, the comparison of facts, the balancing of probabilities, is of little use to us when we enjoy the actual vision of things as they are. Even the analogy of our earthly experience may lead us to this conclusion.

‘Our little systems have their day,

They have their day and cease to be.’

TENNYSON, In Memoriam.

Philosophic doctrines are in fashion for a while, and are then supplanted by others. The learning of one generation is the ignorance of the next. Theories which are popular to-day provoke a smile of derision to-morrow. The discovery which is the pride of one age is superseded in a subsequent one. Thus is earthly knowledge prone to lose its value. Wisdom, says Estius, is not thus to be set aside, because its perfection consists in the vision of God.

Cambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges (Cambridge University Press, 1896; 21 vols, various authors incl. Carr, Maclear, Plummer, Farrar, Lumby, Moule, M. R. James, Simcox) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

8-12.] The eternal abiding of Love, when other graces have passed away.

8. πίπτει] The exact word is that of the E. V., faileth: so Theod.: οὐ διασφάλλεται, ἀλλʼ ἀεὶ μένει βεβαία κ. ἀσάλευτος κ. ἀκίνητος, ἐς ἀεὶ διαμένουσα. τοῦτο γὰρ διὰ τῶν ἐπαγομένων ἐδίδαξεν. Of the two readings, we may illustrate πίπτει by Plato, Phileb., p. 22 e, ἀλλὰ μήν, ὦ Σώκρατες, ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ νῦν μὲν ἡδονή σοι πεπτωκέναι καθαπερεὶ πληγεῖσα ὑπὸ τῶν νῦν δὴ λόγων: and Polyb. x. 33. 4, κἄν ποτε πέσῃ τὰ ὅλα, “in case the whole plan should fail:” id. i. 35. 5: and ἐκπίπτει by Plato, Gorg. p. 517, εἰ οὗτοι ῥήτορες ἦσαν, οὔτε τῇ ἀληθινῇ ῥητορικῇ ἐχρῶντο (οὐ γὰρ ἂν ἐξέπεσον) οὔτε τῇ κολακικῇ: where Heindorf,—‘proprie usurpatur de actoribus, citharœdis, aliisque, qui a spectatoribus exploduntur et exsibilantur:’ and by the celebrated passage in Demosthenes περὶ στεφ. p. 315,—ἐτριταγωνίστεις, ἐγὼ δʼ ἐθεώρουν. ἐξέπιπτες, ἐγὼ δʼ ἐσύριττον: where also, by the way, ἔπιπτες is a various reading.

By εἴπε, εἴτε, εἴτε the general idea, χαρίσματα, is split into its species—be there prophesyings,—be there (speakings in) tongues,—be there knowledge.

Chrys., al., understand the two first futures, καταργ., παύς., of the time when, the faith being every where dispersed, these gifts should be no longer needed. But unquestionably the time alluded to is that of the coming of the Lord; see ver. 12, and this applies to all these, not to the last (γνῶσις) only. The two first, προφ. and γλῶσσ., shall be absolutely superseded:γνῶσις, relatively: the imperfect, by the perfect.

9,

Henry Alford, The Greek Testament (1849–1861) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

8-13. Having shown the worthlessness of supernatural gifts, if love is absent, and the supreme excellence of a character in which love is dominant, St Paul now shows that love is superior to all the gifts, because they are for this world only, whereas love is for both time and eternity. “This is the crowning glory of love, that it is imperishable” (Stanley); it abides until and beyond the supreme crisis of the Last Day.

8. Ἡ ἀγάπη οὐδέποτε πίπτει. In making this new point the nominative is again repeated, and with good effect. And the new point is reached without difficulty. From ὑπομένει to οὐδ. πίπτει is an easy transition. That which withstands all assaults and is not crushed by either the shortcomings of comrades or the violence of opponents, will stand firm and unshaken. In the N.T., πίπτειν is nearly always literal; but comp. τοῦ νόμου μίαν κεραίαν πεσεῖν (Luk 16:17). In class. Grk., οὐδέποτε is stronger than οὔποτε; but in late Grk. strong forms lose their strength and become the common forms: οὐδέποτε occurs fifteen or sixteen times in the N.T., οὐ … πότε only 2Pe 1:21; comp. Eph 5:29; 1Th 2:5; 2Pe 1:10.

From the statement that ‘Love never faileth’ but ‘abideth’ after death, has been inferred the doctrine that the saints at rest pray for those on earth. Calvin vigorously attacks this inference, as if it were harmful to believe in such a result of love. The inference is, no doubt, somewhat remote from the context.

The reading πίπτει (א* A B C* 17, 47, Nyss. Ambrst. Aug.) is to be preferred to ἐκπίπτει (D E F G K L P, Vulg, Tert. Cypr.), which perhaps comes from Rom 9:6. Chrys. reads ἐκπίπτει, and explains that Christians must never hate their persecutors. They hate the evil deeds, which are the devil’s work, but not the doers, for they are the work of God. But οὐδέποτε πίπτει means more than this, as what follows shows.

εἴτε δὲ προφητεῖαι, καταργηθήσονται. St Paul now takes up again the comparison between Love and the special gifts. Tested by the attribute of durability, Love exceeds all these χαρίσματα. And here the AV. improves on the Greek. The varied rendering of καταργεῖσθαι, ‘fail,’ ‘vanish away,’ ‘be done away,’ is more pleasing than the repetition of the same word; and the making the first καταργ. a verbal contradiction of οὐδέποτε πίπτει is effective.

The repeated εἴτε is depreciatory; it suggests indifference as to the existence of gifts of which the use was at best temporary. ‘But as to prophesyings, if there be any, they shall be done away.’ Excepting Luk 13:7 and Heb 2:14, καταγεῖν, ‘to put out of action,’ is wholly Pauline in the N.T. It is found in all four groups, but is specially common in this group of the Pauline Epp. In the LXX, only in Ezra. Three prominent χαρίσματα are taken in illustration of the transitory character of the gifts: to have gone through all would have been tedious. And the γλῶσσαι are dropped in v. 9. Obviously, they will be ‘rendered idle.’ Tongues were a rapturous mode of addressing God; and no such rapture would be needed when the spirit was in His immediate presence. But Tongues seem to have ceased first of all the gifts. The plur. προφητεῖαι indicates different kinds of inspired preaching; but γνώσεις (א A, etc.) is a corruption to harmonize with the preceding plurals.

International Critical Commentary — older volumes (1896–1929), various authors — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Faileth [εκπιπει] . Falls off [εκ] like a leaf or flower, as Jas 1:11; 1Pe 1:24. In classical Greek it was used of an actor who was hissed off the stage. But the correct reading is piptei falls, in a little more general sense, as Luk 16:17. Love holds its place.

Marvin R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament (1887–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.