‘Love,’ Paul insists, ‘never ends.’ Then he gives us another of his marvellous lists. He speaks of matters that were important in his day, things that everyone thought would last, and he shows all of them to be fleeting, temporary, passing away.
‘As for prophecies, they will pass away.’
At the time, every mother’s dream was for her son to become a prophet. For hundreds of years, God had chosen to speak to the world through prophets and they were more powerful than kings. Men waited anxiously for a new messenger from on High to arrive and then hung on his every word.
Paul is implacable: ‘As for prophecies, they will pass away.’
The Bible is full of prophecies, but once they were fulfilled, they lost their meaning. They disappeared as prophecies and remained only to feed the faith of devout men.
Then Paul speaks about languages:
‘As for tongues, they will cease.’
As far as we know, thousands of years have passed since languages first appeared on the face of the Earth. They helped man to survive in a dangerous, hostile world. Where are those languages?
They disappeared.
The Egyptians built pyramids and carved their writing on monuments that are still there today. The Egyptians continue to exist as a nation, but their original language has disappeared.
Take these examples in any sense you like, even in the literal sense.
Although it was not Paul’s main concern, it can at least help us to understand what he meant. The Letter to the Corinthians, which we have been reading and discussing, was written originally in ancient Greek.
If we went to Greece with the original text, very few people would be able to decipher it.
1,500 years ago, Latin dominated the world, that domination has long since ceased. Look at indigenous languages: they are fast disappearing. The original languages of Wales and Scotland are dying before our eyes.
The most popular book in England at the present time – with the exception of the Bible – is The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. It is largely written in the English of the London streets. Scholars say that, in fifty years’ time, the book will be unintelligible to the average reader.
Then Paul goes still further and adds: ‘As for knowledge, it will pass away.’
Where is the wisdom of the ancients? It has vanished completely. Nowadays, a boy at secondary school knows far more than the discoverer of the Law of Gravity, Sir Isaac Newton, knew in his day. The newspaper that brings us the news in the morning is thrown away each night. We can buy encyclopaedias from ten years ago for a few pence, because the scientific discoveries described in their pages are now completely outdated.
The horse-drawn carriage was replaced by steam. And electricity, in turn, is threatening to replace steam, relegating to obscurity hundreds of inventions that have only just been born. One of our greatest living authorities, Sir William Thomson, said at a meeting: ‘The steam-engine is passing away.’
‘As for knowledge, it will pass away.’
In the back yard of every workshop we see wheels, levers and cranks eaten away by rust. Twenty years ago, those same parts were objects that filled their owner with pride.
Now they represent nothing, apart from a heap of useless old iron.
All the science and philosophy of our day, of which we are so proud, will soon be old.
Some years ago, the greatest figure in Edinburgh was Sir James Simpson, who discovered chloroform, the precursor of anaesthesia. Recently, the university librarian asked the scientist’s nephew to pick out the books by his uncle that were no longer of use to the students.
The nephew said to the librarian: ‘Take every text-book that is more than ten years old and put it down in the cellar.’
Sir James Simpson was a person of great importance; scientists from all over the world came to consult him.
Meanwhile, his discoveries – and almost all the discoveries of his day – have been consigned to oblivion.
‘For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully.’
Can you tell me anything that is going to last for ever? Paul did not bother to name many things. He did not mention money, fortune, fame; he picked out only the things important in his time, the things to which the best men of the day devoted themselves. And he brushed them peremptorily aside.
Paul had nothing against those things in themselves. He does not speak ill of them. He said only that they would not last. They were important things, but they were not supreme gifts.
There were things beyond them.