NOTES for Co1 4:20
What power, one wonders, does the apostle mean when he speaks of the power of the Kingdom? One might say that he means the power of God, and this answer would not be wrong. But what lies behind it? Indeed, much was said about God's power even before Christ came into the world, and it was understood in different ways. Of course, even then all believers realized that God's power and what the pagan world understood by power were different things. But this difference was not always clearly understood. Above all, it meant that God could intervene at any moment in any situation, changing it in a way completely unexpected by an outside observer, so that what seemed unshakable instantly collapsed while what had been entirely powerless and insignificant suddenly gained strength and became the decisive factor.
Yet this usually still concerned the laws of the untransformed world, which God uses to carry out His plans, often in spite of those who oppose Him and by turning events to His advantage in a wholly unpredictable way. Perhaps the most remarkable illustration of such a reversal is the story of Joseph. His brothers did everything to prevent God's plan, as they understood it, from coming to pass, but all their efforts, as later became clear, only brought that plan closer to fulfillment.
Paul is speaking about a different situation: one in which the Kingdom has already entered the world and is already borne witness to by people who have experienced life in it and communion with the One who brought it into the world. Here, of course, the subject is no longer external power. It should be noted that during the Second Temple period the proclamation of God became, in a certain sense, a proclamation of the word—both the Word of God in every sense of that expression and the human word without which people could not tell the world about their own experience of communion with God and hearing the Word.
Such was, in particular, the preaching of the Pharisaic mentors and teachers with whom the Savior so often disputed during His earthly ministry. This too was testimony, but testimony to their own, often subjective, experience of communion with God. Christian testimony, however, is always objective in the true sense of the word. It is testimony not about oneself before God, but about Christ and the Kingdom. Such testimony is possible only when the witness has already entered into the life of the Kingdom, lives by that life, and has its power at work within him. It is evidently this power to which the apostle bears witness, seeing in it the manifestation of the Kingdom.