30. For the reformation of those abuses, the apostle reduceth them to
stirred it up to write to Paul for the decision of several cases, which were controverted among them. In this chapter the fifth case comes to be handled, about the ordering their public assemblies.
(1.) Concerning the carriage of men and women in the church. (2.) The celebration of the Lord's Supper. (3.) The use and exercise of spiritual gifts, chap. 12. In ver. 17, the apostle makes a transition from the first to the second, and taxeth them with their divisions, which were the ground of their other miscarriages.
Observe, Divisions in a church are usually attended with sad consequences. They despoil the church of its beauty and ornaments, and many times are an occasion of sullying the beauty of divine institutions; they here hindered a communion one with another. All communion is founded upon union. Divisions shook that, and brought in gross miscarriages about the Lord's Supper; a disorderly meeting, one taking before another, and making the Lord's Supper a scrambling feast; discovering more passion one against another than a mindfulness of the sufferings of Christ; and their unworthy receivings provoked God to send among them deadly diseases, ver.
30. For the reformation of those abuses, the apostle reduceth them to the consideration of the first institution.
Observe, In all reformations, we are not so much to mind what this or that custom of the church is, when there is a clear word to walk by.
Christ overthrows polygamy by reducing the number of persons married to the first institution: Mat. 19:4, 9, 'God created male and female.' This miscarriage was chiefly in their ἀγάπαι, or banquets which they had before the supper, which were set up in imitation of Christ, who kept his last supper with his disciples, at the end whereof he instituted this sacrament. Now, in the eating of this, the rich brought their dainties, and ate to gluttony and excess, before the poor were met together, and left the scraps for the meaner sort, and thereby did shame them, ver. 22; i.e. did upbraid them with their poverty. Whence observe,