Does the Apostle Paul Always Speak for God?

Now, Contending for the Faith. In this regular feature, Dave and Tom respond to questions from listeners and readers of The Berean Call. Here is this week’s question: “Dear Dave and T.A., There are some verses in Scripture that seem to indicate that the Apostle Paul is speaking from his own mind rather than the command of the Lord. Is that possible? Please help me with 1 Corinthians:7:25Now concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord: yet I give my judgment, as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful.
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Tom: Dave, let me pick out some of the verses. There’s about four verses I think underscore what the person is concerned about. Verse 25 says, “Now concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord: yet I give my judgment….”

Verse 26: “I suppose therefore that this is good for the present distress, I say….”

Now Verse 36: “But if any man think that he behaveth himself uncomely toward his virgin, if she pass the flower of her age and need so require, let him do what he will. He sinneth not: let them marry.”

Verse 37: “Nevertheless he that standeth steadfast in his heart, having no necessity, but hath power over his own will, and hath so decreed in his heart that he will keep his virgin doeth well.”

And Dave, jumping to Verse 40: “But she is happier if she so abide, after my judgment; and I think also that I have the Spirit of God.” So is Paul speaking autonomously here? Is he throwing in some other ideas outside of what God says?

Dave: Well, he begins in Verse 25 saying, “I have no commandment of the Lord.” So he doesn’t have some commandment from God to deal with this situation. But it’s like us, Tom, we’ve got to ask the question. It was God’s will that it should be asked. And he ends it, as you noted—he says, “And I think also that I have the Spirit of God.” So although Paul starts out saying that he doesn’t have a commandment from God regarding this particular situation, and he says, “I am going to give you my opinion,” he ends saying, “Yes, but in giving my opinion, I believe I was led of the Holy Spirit.” So it would still qualify as Scripture, otherwise it wouldn’t be in here.

Now, Tom, there are difficult verses. I don’t understand by any means everything that is in the Bible, but you can look at this and you can see that some of this is common sense. He says, “Art thou bound unto a wife? Seek not to be loosed.” Well, you better not, because that’s not according to God’s will: “what God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”

Jesus himself said, “Are you loosed from a wife? Well, maybe you don’t need one.” It depends upon the calling of God on your life. I know some men who have deliberately chosen not to be married so that they could spend more time with God and for God in serving Him. It’s not easy. Paul, the life he lived—it’d be rather tough if he had a wife who went along with him. Now he says Peter brought along a wife, and so forth.

Tom: So he was entitled—Paul was entitled to do that.

Dave: I don’t read that Peter was shipwrecked and stoned and imprisoned and so forth, although Peter was at one time in prison without his wife. So what has God called me to do? This is a very brief life, and of course I know that better than you do, Tom, because I’m almost 20 years older than you are.

Tom: I think I’m catching up, Dave.

Dave: You will never catch me, Tom, you will never catch me. That’s the way time is. But I can look back—my 79th birthday will be coming up in September—and I can look back and say, “Wow! Where did the time go?” I don’t know; this is the nature of time. The day is coming, and it’s almost a contradiction to say that—the day is coming when there won’t be any more days, and there won’t be any more time. Time is part of this physical universe, and we will be dwelling in eternity, and that is very hard to imagine.

But in the meantime, we have certain things that we have to deal with. “Weep with those that weep, rejoice with those that rejoice, and I want you to be without carefulness. He that is unmarried cares for the things that belong to the Lord. If you are married, you have all kinds of others things that will occupy your time.” Now, you should—husbands are supposed to love their wives, we are supposed to be devoted to them. We have children, we are supposed to train our children, and so forth.

Tom: And not vex them.

Dave: But Paul says, “If you didn’t have those things, then you could serve the Lord.” So, Tom, it depends on what is God’s will for the individual case. When he says, “I don’t have a commandment from the Lord,” I think he’s simply saying that there is no command from God to be married or not to be married; there just is no rule like that. I think that’s basically why he begins in that manner.

Tom: These verses demonstrate to me the freedom that we have in Christ. We have a calling—we want to be true to the calling—but when he says, “Let him do what he will,” that we have choices here. But at the same time, the full counsel of God says, “Whatever we do, we do as unto the Lord.” We are dedicated to Him, committed to Him, and so on. Yet there are no laws here, as you said, no commandments. “Do this and don’t do that.”

Dave: And yet the Catholic Church has made a law. The early popes, so-called, were married. Some of them…

Tom: Well, Peter, I mean, at least they claimed that Peter was.

Dave: Yeah, but go beyond them. As you know, some of them married their children in St. Peter’s. Now why did this law come along? Very quickly, because they became very wealthy—bishops and cardinals and so forth. Well, the church can’t have them passing that wealth along to their heirs. So, they made a rule: celibacy. It has really destroyed the priesthood, removed these people from normal human beings. It has opened them up to many temptations, and we are reaping the fruit of that, as you know: the pedophilia and all the problems that are in the priesthood. So they ought to go back and read this. Paul says, “There is no command to be married or not married; it’s a matter of what God wants you to do.” But the Catholic Church made it a command, and that is unbiblical, and it has led them into many problems.

Tom: Yeah, and, Dave, another aspect of that: we were talking about mysticism. You find monastics and aesthetics, those who believe that celibacy is a higher form of spirituality—that’s bogus.

Dave: They do have a lot of problems, Tom.