WWUTT 1403 And Our Brother Sosthenes (1 Corinthians 1:1)

Salvation Through Hearing the Gospel and the Will of God

We have come to salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ because someone preached the gospel to us. We were convicted of our sin and we turned to Jesus and were saved. And this is by the will of God when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, studying God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ. Find all our videos online at www .wutt .com as well as links to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe Hughes.

Paul, Sosthenes, and the Greeting of 1 Corinthians 1

Thank you, Becky. We come back to our study of 1 Corinthians 1, still in our greeting to this letter. So I'm gonna start off by reading the first three verses. The apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth.

Paul called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus and our brother Sosthenes. To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the word of the Lord. We begin with Paul, an apostle of Christ. So he being a messenger of Christ, carrying the very word of Christ.

It comes from the Greek word apostolos, which is one who is sent. And an apostle was not a word or a title that was limited to followers of Jesus Christ or those whom Christ had appointed to carry his message.

Someone who was a messenger of the emperor was called an apostle, one who was sent. So here we have a messenger sent by the King of Kings, Jesus Christ, who has said, take my message to the world, going out in every place and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So the word that an apostle carried was the word of God. Their word was to be considered scripture. As Peter talks about in 2 Peter 3 .16, he equates the letters of Paul with even the Old Testament scriptures.

Now, when the last apostle died at the end of the first century, that would have been John. He died in what is modern day Turkey. When he died, the apostolic age came to an end. So that revelation of Jesus Christ to his apostles concluded there at the end of the first century.

We don't have any new revelation, but we don't need it. Canon is complete, it is closed. In fact, Paul will make an argument about this, not directly related to it, but it is a statement that he makes that nevertheless gives credibility to the argument that Paul was the last apostle appointed.

And that's in 1 Corinthians 15 .8, where he says, last of all is to one untimely born, Jesus appeared also to me. Jesus appeared to every one of the apostles post-resurrection and appointed them specifically to be an apostle, including the apostle Paul.

We talked about that yesterday with Jesus appearing to Paul on the road to Damascus. So you'll have people today that will proclaim themselves to be apostles. Joseph Smith said that Jesus appeared to him.

And then you have the quorum of apostles that are kind of over the Mormon church today. And they're all liars. There are no more apostles. Christ is not sending anyone else specifically with some new revelation that is gonna be just as valid as what we have in the scriptures.

Canon is closed, it is complete. The Bible talks about how the church is built on a foundation of the testimony of the apostles. It's talked about in Ephesians chapter three, and it's what Jesus was saying to Peter when he said, you are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my church.

It's a statement regarding the foundation of the church being built on the testimony of the apostles. So Paul is an apostle called by the will of God to be an apostle in Christ Jesus. And then he mentions our brother Sosthenes, and I talked about this yesterday, that we haven't yet come to Acts chapter 18 to look back at when Paul had first set foot in Corinth and preached the gospel there.

So let's do that now. We didn't do that in the introduction, so I'm gonna do it here. So in Acts chapter 18, starting in verse one, it says, after this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. Now, this is after Paul had spoken at the Areopagus, or what we also refer to as Mars Hill, that place that was like in the presence of the gods there in Athens.

It was up on a big hill where there were statues to every one of the false gods that the Greeks worshiped, and then there was also an altar there to an unknown god. So it's like, in case we forgot anybody, here's this altar to the unknown god that hopefully won't get mad at us because we didn't make a statue out of him or her, right?

So Paul says the god that you say that you don't know is actually known, and he has sent his son, Jesus Christ. That's the testimony that Paul gave, and declared that Jesus would be the one to judge the living and the dead, and God has shown this by raising Jesus from the dead.

And it's at that point where a lot of the Greeks were like, what, this is crazy talk. The dead, rising from the dead, that just cannot be. But there were others that were intrigued by what Paul said, and they said to him, we wanna hear you more about this.

And so Paul continued to testify about the Lord there in Athens. But then after Athens, Acts 18, one, he comes to Corinth. In verse two, and he found a Jew named Achilla, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome.

And he went to see them, and because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them and worked, for they were tent makers by trade. And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks.

Now we know later on, Priscilla and Achilla are the two that are going to, they're gonna evangelize Apollos, who only knows the testimony of Jesus up through the baptism of John. So then Priscilla and Achilla share with him the gospel, and Apollos becomes, he becomes a believer, and already a man who reasoned soundly from the scriptures that he knew, and now he had the gospel and reasoned all the more soundly.

So Priscilla and Achilla are going to bring Apollos into the church. So we go on, that doesn't yet happen, this is in Corinth, but this is where Achilla and Priscilla come into the story. Now, if you remember back a few weeks ago, when we were in Romans chapter 16, Paul instructed the church to greet their fellow saints, and among them were Priscia and Achilla.

Priscia is kind of a variation of the name Priscilla, but it's the same husband and wife duo, and the church would have known who they were. How would they have known that? Because Achilla and Priscilla would have been there.

As it says here in Acts 18 .2, Paul found a Jew named Achilla, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla. So they had been in Rome. They might have been a part of that church there.

Now it says he was a native of Pontus, so he wasn't a native of Italy. Pontus was in the northern region of what is modern day Turkey. And nevertheless, a Jew, though he lived in Asia, he was a Jew, so that would have been part of the dispersion.

His family would have ended up up there at some point, but having heard the gospel, he and his wife became evangelists. So they're traveling around, sharing the gospel, and they come into Paul's company in Corinth.

Now they're tent makers, that's their skill, so they have a business together. And Paul provides for himself while he's ministering there in Corinth. He doesn't obligate the Corinthians to have to care for him.

He does that on his own. That comes up a little bit later on. We'll talk about that probably when we get to around chapter nine. But anyway, we continue on with the story here. So he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath.

It says that in verse four, Paul reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks, persuade them that Jesus is the Christ. So going on in verse five, when Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus.

And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, your blood be on your own heads. I am innocent. From now on, I will go to the Gentiles. And he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Justice, a worshiper of God.

His house was next door to the synagogue. Let's stop there for a moment. So when Paul is there in the synagogue and he is reasoning from the scriptures, so if you'll remember, Paul, when he goes into a new city to share the gospel, he often goes to the synagogue first.

There's two reasons for that. Number one, it's because Jesus had commissioned his disciples to go out and be his witnesses in Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. The testimony was gonna be first to the Jews before it was to the Gentiles.

So Paul would go to the synagogue of the Jews in any city that he would go into and that's where he would minister first. So that's reason number one, because that was the commission. Reason number two is because that's where the scriptures were.

So if Paul is gonna reason from the scriptures that Jesus is the Christ, it's good to be there where the scriptures are. Now, he was an extremely learned Pharisee. He probably had all the scriptures memorized.

He had a rockstar status as a Pharisee. It wasn't necessary for him so much to have to unroll a scroll and quote it. He knew it probably all by heart. I mean, I'm being somewhat speculative there, but given all the education that a Pharisee had to go through it's very likely that Paul knew pretty much all of this by heart.

It wasn't needed for him to have to unroll a scroll and read it there, but for him to testify the way that he did, he was gonna do it in the place where those things were proclaimed regularly so that they would recognize what Paul had said, they would know that it came from the scriptures and they would even be able to test and cross-examine him.

In the previous chapter in Acts chapter 17, where did Paul go before he got to Athens? He was in Berea. And that's where we read about the Bereans who tested everything Paul said to see that it came from the scriptures.

That's what they would have done. They were in their synagogues. They would have pulled out the prophets, the law, the Old Testament scrolls. They would have read them to examine what Paul was saying and to connect his testimony to Christ, Jesus being the Christ, the promised Messiah who was to come.

So here in Corinth, Paul is doing the same. He's going into the synagogue. He's reasoning there where the scriptures are, where the law has been proclaimed so that they may hear and understand that Jesus is the fulfillment of all this that they have been teaching there in that synagogue.

But they opposed him. Verse six, they opposed and reviled him. And when they continued to do that, would no longer listen to what he said or they would blaspheme Jesus, denying that he is God. And they would repeatedly do this.

It says that Paul shook out his garments and he said, and that would have been a symbolic gesture. I am freeing myself of you. Do not cling to me, I'm out of here. And he says, your blood be on your own heads.

That's a reference back to Ezekiel 33. So when God had spoken to Ezekiel about being a watchman on the wall, he said, if the watchman sees the sword coming against the people. Now the sword in this case in Ezekiel 33 was gonna be the judgment of God upon the people.

And when the watchman sees the sword coming, he is to sound the alarm and warn the people of judgment that is coming upon them. If the people hear the alarm and they do not take the warning and they don't do anything about it, then when the sword comes upon them, they are responsible for their own deaths.

Their blood will not be on the hands of the watchman. But if the watchman does not alarm the people, does not tell them about the sword that is coming upon them and then the sword comes and takes them away, their blood will be on the hands of the watchman.

Their blood will be on their own heads, but the watchman will also have to give an account. And so here Paul has testified to the people about the judgment of God that is coming. And Jesus Christ is the savior, the only way to be saved from the judgment of God coming against all those who have sinned against God.

And even the Jews here in this synagogue, they have sinned against God. As it says in Isaiah, Jesus said of them, so it is said in Isaiah, they acknowledge me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

If they had truly known God, then they would know Jesus, his son. But because they are rejecting Christ, they're demonstrating that they're not truly of God. Paul has reasoned from them the whole counsel of God.

As he will later say to the elders in Ephesus in Acts chapter 20, I have given you the full counsel of God. I am innocent of the blood of all of you. Here in this particular case, he's making sort of the same statement there to the synagogue in Corinth.

I've given you everything. I have shown you, I have reasoned from the scriptures that Jesus is the Christ, you've rejected it. So he's shaking his garments of them and saying, your blood is on your own heads.

A statement that would be connected with Ezekiel 33. I am innocent, Paul says, from now on, I will go to the Gentiles. So if the judgment of God comes upon those people there in the synagogue, if they've never repented, then Paul is not gonna be held accountable for the judgment that comes upon them.

He told them, he gave them the warning. He pointed them to the savior and the king of kings that was coming to judge the world. But they didn't heed the warning. So at the judgment, they will have no one to blame but themselves.

So we go on here in this account of Paul sharing the gospel in Corinth, verse seven. And he left there and went to the house of a man. Well, I've read this. Yeah, Titius Justice, a worshiper of God who lived next door to the synagogue.

Verse eight, Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord together with his entire household. And many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptized. So it wasn't a lost cause.

It's not like there wasn't anybody there in the synagogue that didn't listen to Paul and didn't believe in him. Apparently, there was the man who lived, well, it says he lived next door to the synagogue, but he may not have been a Jew since he had a very Greek name.

Titius Justice says he was a worshiper of God. Crispus, however, that's a Greek name as well, but he was the ruler of the synagogue, likely, therefore, a Jew. You couldn't have been a Greek and been a ruler of the synagogue.

He was a Jew that was a ruler of the synagogue. He believed in the Lord together with his entire household. And many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptized. So, so far, this church is made up of primarily Gentiles, but you do have a few Jews in there who had been part of the synagogue that did believe what Paul had testified.

So we go on in verse nine. And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent. For I am with you and no one will attack you to harm you. For I have many in this city who are my people.

And he stayed a year and six months teaching the word of God among them. Probably would have been pretty close to two years that Paul would have been there because that's just a year and six months after this particular occasion.

How long had he been teaching in the synagogue? We don't know. So it was likely pretty close to two years that he had been there in Corinth. So going on in verse 12, but when Galio was pro-consul of Achaia, the Jews made a united attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal saying, this man is persuading people to worship God contrary to the law.

Was that true? Is that what Paul was doing? No, of course not. He was preaching that we are saved by faith alone in Jesus Christ. The Jews, the teachers of the law, the lawyers and so on and so forth, they considered that to be heresy because they believed we were saved by keeping the law, adhering to the law.

That is how we have salvation. So their claim is that Paul is persuading people to worship God contrary to the law, without the law. You just have faith in Jesus and you don't need to follow the law. Paul wasn't saying that at all because at the end of Romans three, he says, do we overthrow the law by this faith?

By no means. On the contrary, we uphold the law. So Paul understood the law better than they did. He understood that the law pointed to Christ who fulfilled the law. And now in Christ, we keep the commands of God in a righteous way, but we're saved not by our keeping the law.

We're saved because Jesus kept the law. We're saved because he died for us as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, his death on the cross, his resurrection from the grave, so that all who believe in him, we are forgiven our sins and have everlasting life.

It's only by faith. By faith alone, we are saved, but we will demonstrate that we have saving faith by the works that we do in our love and commitment and submission to Christ the Lord. Verse 14, but when Paul was about to open his mouth, Galileo said to the Jews, if it were a matter of wrongdoing or vicious crime, oh Jews, I would have reason to accept your complaint.

But since it is a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, see to it yourselves. I refuse to be a judge of these things. And he drove them from the tribunal and they all seized Sosthenes.

Hey, there's that name. They seized Sosthenes, a ruler of the synagogue or the ruler of the synagogue. So this would have been sometime after Christmas. And it could have been that because Christmas believed Paul and his entire household were baptized, then they kicked Christmas out of the synagogue.

They put Sosthenes there in his place, but Sosthenes likewise becomes a Christian. So in verse 17, they all seized Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue and beat him in front of the tribunal. But Galileo paid no attention to any of this.

So then we go on in verse 18 and it says, after this Paul stayed many days longer and then took leave of the brothers and set sail for Syria and with him Priscilla and Achila. At Sin-Crie he had cut his hair for he was under a vow and they came to Ephesus and he left them there, but he himself went into the synagogue and reasoned with the Jews, even there at Ephesus.

So we go from there into what happens at Ephesus. And at the end of the chapter is when Priscilla and Achila will witness to Apollos there at Ephesus. So there's the story. It's pretty much verses one through 17.

Acts 18 verses one through 17, where we read the account of Paul being in Corinth and that's everything that happened there in Corinth. And as I said yesterday, Sosthenes, who was the ruler of the synagogue, he was beaten.

He was beaten and not Paul because remember what God had said to Paul. He said, do not be afraid, go on speaking and do not be silent. I am with you and no one will attack you or harm you. Even though Paul was the one that was dragged before Galileo the people did not attack Paul because God said he would not be attacked.

They attacked Sosthenes instead, but this did not discourage Sosthenes. It rather strengthened him and sanctified him that he would continue to testify to the gospel of Jesus Christ. For here we have at the beginning of first Corinthians chapter one that Sosthenes is writing this letter along with Paul.

Paul is the one who is dictating it. Sosthenes is writing it down. So we see that he has become a faithful servant of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. And we go on here into verse two, to the church of God that is in Corinth.

Now I'm back in first Corinthians. First Corinthians one, two, to the church of God that is in Corinth to those sanctified in Christ Jesus called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of the Lord.

And we're gonna come back to this next week. I'm not quite done with first Corinthians. So we've had three lessons now in first Corinthians one, one. In three lessons, that's as far as we've gotten. Just one verse.

Boy, we are off to a flying start here to our letter to the Corinthians. But it would be easy for me to just say, okay, that's our greeting. We've done that for three lessons now. And we're gonna jump into what Paul has to say next.

But I wanna focus on these things. We're gonna take our time. We're gonna learn from the word of God. And we're gonna rejoice in him for his goodness and grace that he continues to show us daily through our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.

Prayer of Thanksgiving for Calling, Sight, and Salvation

Let's finish with prayer. Heavenly father, we thank you that you have called us. And it was through the hearing of the gospel of Jesus Christ that we have been called out of darkness and into your marvelous light that we would no longer walk in blindness, but like Paul who was healed of his blindness and given eyes to see both physically and spiritually.

So we have been given spiritual eyes that we may know the Lord, our God. We have become knowledgeable of our sin and the judgment of God that was coming against us because of our sin, our need for a savior.

And we have looked upon the Lord Jesus Christ and we are saved. Teach us to have confidence in God today. And in all that we do, we do it to the glory of God. We live unto your glory. We give praise to Jesus Christ, our savior.

Help us to be as Christ, showing love and gentleness and kindness to one another as you have shown us those things, even this day. It's in Jesus' name that we pray, amen.

Program Sign-Off and Weekly Schedule

You've been listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Gabe will be going through a New Testament study. Then on Thursday, we look at an Old Testament book.

On Friday, we take questions from the listeners and viewers. Tomorrow, we'll pick up on an Old Testament study when we understand the text.