In his letter to the Corinthian church, Paul touches on several very important...
In his letter to the Corinthian church, Paul touches on several very important questions of spiritual life. He does not stress by chance that his preaching has nothing in common with the conversations and instruction of rabbis and teachers of the Torah, who appealed first of all to human reason, seeking to teach their disciples the art of righteous living, which in those days was called wisdom. The apostle says directly that he was never a teacher in the traditional sense; he always remained only a witness of Christ and the Kingdom, seeing in this the chief task of his ministry (vv. 1-5). And still Paul mentions a certain wisdom, of which he says that it makes sense to preach it only to the "mature," to those who have already come to share in the Kingdom (vv. 6-8). This is, as we can see, the experience of life in the Kingdom, without which there is no Christianity. And the foundation of this experience is the perception of the reality of God's breath ("spirit"), which opens to a person the mystery of God's life, the depths that otherwise would never have been revealed to him (vv. 9-10). Speaking of the "human spirit" (v. 11), the apostle clearly has in mind that "breath of life" which God breathed into the nostrils ("into the face") of the human being at creation and which, in the spiritual sense, makes a person what he is: a spiritual being created in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 2:7).
Paul calls such a person "natural" (v. 14), using the Greek word ψυχή to render the Hebrew nephesh, which in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament denotes the life a person receives together with the "breath" given to him by God. But for life in the Kingdom this, as we can see, is not enough. Here, in addition to the "breath of life," one must also share in the breath ("spirit") of God, which all the biblical prophets know so well. Before, it was indeed known only to God's chosen ones, to whom God directly revealed what He wished to reveal. To some of these people, like the great prophets of Israel, the Kingdom was also sometimes partly opened. But before the coming of the Messiah it was opened to them only briefly and in a vision; now it has entered the world, and one can share in it only by receiving that breath of God which the prophets knew so well. This is what Paul is speaking about when he mentions the breath ("spirit") of God, known only to those who have already come to share in the life of the Kingdom (vv. 11-13). This breath permeates the whole Kingdom. Every inhabitant of the Kingdom knows it, while for everyone else it remains something strange and incomprehensible (vv. 14-15). But this is precisely how a person becomes a Christian in the proper sense of the word, receiving, in the apostle's words, "the mind of Christ" (v. 16).
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2:11 For what man knoweth the things of a man - All the inmost recesses of his mind; although men are all of one nature, and so may the more easily know one another. So the things of God knoweth no one but the Spirit - Who, consequently, is God.
2:12 Now we have received, not the spirit of the world - This spirit is not properly received; for the men of theworld always had it. But Christians receive the Spirit of God, which before they had not.