It's the SAME WORD in every instance. IT MUST BE DETERMINED FROM WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE PASSAGE.
It's no different in Greek then it is in an English when words HAVE MULTIPLE meanings.
That's true, but also taking into consideration the flow of argument throughout the entire book and the teaching of the rest of scripture.
That's the problem with the approach that some cessationists take to I Corinthians 13, trying to read cessationism into it.
Take a look at these verses:
10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
The verses are about Paul who went to sleep in Christ before the canon was completed, but if you want to take it losely where Paul was a child and those who have the completed canon are adults, then you are saying that your speech, knowledge, and understanding is so great, that Paul's was childish by comparison. Notice this speaks of the individual 'I', not some collective knowledge of 'we.'
You also have to hide from the fact that Paul gives us an idea of the time frame when he writes in I Corinthians 1
5 That in every thing ye are enriched by him, in all
utterance, and in all
knowledge;
6 Even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you:
7 So that
ye come behind in no gift; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ:
8 Who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless
in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Context is important.
Theologians have seen the problem of the cessationist interpretaton of the passage that makes the reader superior to Paul.
This is a quote from Martin Lloyd Jones
It means that you and I, who have the Scriptures open before us, know much more than the apostle Paul of God's truth.... It means that we are altogether superior... even to the apostles themselves, including the apostle Paul! It means that we are now in a position in which... 'we know, even as also we are known' by God... indeed, there is only one word to describe such a view, it is nonsense."
(Martin Lloyd Jones as quoted in Wayne Grundem's
Systematic Theology on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit.)
John Calvin writes that some people ignorantly (or stupidly depending on your translation) apply the perfection spoken of in I corinthians 13:10 to the current age.
Hence we infer, that the whole of this discussion is
ignorantly applied to the time that is intermediate.
and of verse 12
so long as we dwell in the body we are absent from the Lord;
for we walk by faith, not by sight.
Our faith, therefore, at present beholds God as absent. How so? Because
it sees not his face, but rests satisfied with the image in the mirror;
but when we shall have left the world, and gone to him, it will behold
him as near and before its eyes.
Concerning seeing through a glass darkly in verse 12, Calvin wrote,
In the first place, there can be no doubt that it is the ministry of
the word, and the means that are required for the exercise of it, that
he compares to a looking-glass For God, who is otherwise invisible, has
appointed these means for discovering himself to us.
He also wrote,
Now I know in part That is, the measure of our present knowledge is
imperfect, as John says in his Epistle, (1 John 3:1,2,) that
we know, indeed, that we are the sons of God,
but that it doth not yet appear, until we shall see God as he is.
Then we shall see God -- not in his image, but in himself, so that
there will be, in a manner, a mutual view.
It's funny. I'd never read Calvin about that, but I often think of the same verse from I John when I read that verse now I know in part, but then I shall know as I am known.
See <http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom39.txt>
My
Bad
Sophistry detector was going off when I was reading your commentator's comments about Greek gender. The way some Bible commentators try to spin an argument out of grammatical components like this make language so complicated that the Greeks speakers of the first century themselves would not have been able to decode it.