John Calvin Commentary 1 Corinthians 4:7

"For who maketh thee to differ? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? but if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?" — 1 Corinthians 4:7 (ASV)

For who distinguisheth thee? The meaning is — “Let that man come forward, whoever he is, who desires distinction and troubles the Church by his ambition. I will demand of him who makes him superior to others? That is, who has conferred on him the privilege of being taken from the rank of others and made superior to others?” Now this whole reasoning depends on the order which the Lord has appointed in His Church—that the members of Christ’s body may be united together, and that each of them may rest satisfied with his own place, his own rank, his own office, and his own honor.

If one member desires to quit his place, so that he may leap over into the place of another and invade his office, what will become of the entire body? Let us know, then, that the Lord has so placed us in the Church, and has assigned to each one his own station in such a manner, that, being under one head, we may be mutually helpful to each other.

Let us also know that we have been endowed with a diversity of gifts, so that we may serve the Lord with modesty and humility, and may endeavor to promote the glory of Him who has conferred on us everything that we have.

This, then, was the best remedy for correcting the ambition of those who desired distinction: to call them back to God, so that they might acknowledge that one was not placed in a high or low station according to anyone’s pleasure, but that this belonged to God alone. Furthermore, God does not confer so much on anyone as to elevate him to the place of the Head, but distributes His gifts in such a manner that He alone is glorified in all things.

To distinguish here means to render eminent. Augustine, however, not ineptly makes frequent use of this declaration for maintaining, in opposition to the Pelagians, that whatever excellence there is in mankind is not implanted in him by nature, so that it could be ascribed either to nature or to descent. Further, that it is not acquired by free will, so as to put God under obligation, but flows from His pure and undeserved mercy.

For there can be no doubt that Paul here contrasts the grace of God with the merit or worthiness of men.

And what hast thou? This is a confirmation of the preceding statement, for that man who has no superiority over others cannot rightly extol himself. For what greater vanity is there than boasting without any ground for it? Now, there is no one who has anything of excellence from himself; therefore, the man who extols himself is a fool and an idiot.

The true foundation of Christian modesty is this: not to be self-complacent, knowing that we are empty and void of everything good; that if God has implanted in us anything that is good, we are all the more debtors to His grace; and finally, that, as Cyprian says, we must glory in nothing, because nothing is our own.

Why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it? Observe that there remains no ground for our glorying, since it is by the grace of God that we are what we are,
(1 Corinthians 15:10).

And this is what we had in the first chapter: that Christ is the source of all blessings to us, so that we may learn to glory in the Lord (1 Corinthians 1:30–31). And this we do only when we renounce our own glory. For God does not receive His due otherwise than by our being emptied, so that it may be seen that everything in us worthy of praise is derived.