Paul reaches for three everyday pictures: the soldier, the vine planter, and the shepherd. No one expects any of them to work for nothing. Barnes sums up the point: "It is reasonable that those who labor should have a fair compensation." He adds that "The Christian ministry is compared to a warfare, and the Christian minister to a soldier." Gill draws the same line, calling ministers of the Gospel "good soldiers of Jesus Christ." The three questions press the Corinthians to give Paul the same fairness they would give any worker.

The answer is plain: no one. Soldiers are paid, planters eat the fruit, and shepherds drink the milk. Paul does not stop at common sense, though. He asks next, "Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also?" (1 Corinthians 9:8), and goes on to the law of Moses and the Lord's own command (1 Corinthians 9:9, 14).

The word translated "charges" is opsonion. Thayer's lexicon explains that it came to mean a soldier's pay or allowance, and then wages in general. Paul uses the same word when he tells the Corinthians, "I robbed other churches, taking wages of them, to do you service" (2 Corinthians 11:8). It also appears when John the Baptist tells soldiers to "be content with your wages" (Luke 3:14), and in "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). "Goeth a warfare" translates strateuetai, to serve as a soldier.

Paul uses these same three pictures for ministry elsewhere. He calls himself a planter at Corinth: "I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase" (1 Corinthians 3:6). He urges Timothy to "endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ" and says "The husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the fruits" (2 Timothy 2:3, 6). He charges the Ephesian elders to watch over "all the flock" and "feed the church of God" (Acts 20:28).

So the questions do more than argue for support. They show what ministry is: hard, steady labor, like a soldier's, a farmer's, or a shepherd's. Matthew Henry draws the conclusion: "Those who seek to do our souls good, should have food provided for them."