Sermon Tone Analysis

* Corinthians 10:20-22*

*Picking a Fight we cannot Win*

 

“What pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God.

I do not want you to be participants with demons.

You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.

You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.

Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy?

Are we stronger than he?”[1]

We live in a world that is increasingly anthropocentric.

Modern man has ensconced himself on the throne of his life and generally conducts his life with no thought given to what the will of God might be.

“If it feels good, do it” has become the dominant philosophy guiding the life of far too many professing Christians.

Too often we are able to navigate through life without consciously thinking of God or considering what His will might be, save for a brief pause on Sunday morning, providing we are not too tired to attend services at the local church.

It is certain that the Lord’s Table is meant to be a time of worship.

However, the Meal is always corporate worship, and thus the relationship of the participants is vital.

At the Communion Meal, we confess relationship with those sharing the Meal as together we declare our mutual relationship to the Risen Son of God.

At the Lord’s Table, we subsume our personal experience to that of the corporate Body.

It is a human tendency to reduce common acts of worship to ritual in which the performance assumes greater important than the event itself.

Thus, we become focused on carefully performing the prescribed steps, forgetting that the confessional aspect of the event; we become more intent on the action than on the act.

Though the inclination to create liturgies is evident in every aspect of worship—preaching, singing, praying, baptising—nowhere is this propensity to exalt the steps more evident that at the Lord’s Table.

The great tragedy is not that we ritualise what should be a time of confession, but rather the great tragedy is that having reduced the worship to a ritual we ignore the relationship.

With time, we ignore the implications arising from living out our daily lives with its attendant self-centred focus, bringing the attitudes that contaminate our lives into the congregation.

Not even the knowledge that we are engaged in worship before the Lord with fellow saints is sufficient to deter this tendency.

That was precisely what was happening in Corinth when Paul wrote the congregation.

Perhaps if we examine the letter he wrote when he confronted them, we will learn from their error and avoid dishonouring the Lord as we observe the Lord’s Table.

Join me in exploring the stern confrontation delivered to the Corinthian Christians as the Apostle warned them they were picking a fight they could not win.

*A Deliberate Provocation* — Some of the Corinthians, apparently a significant number of them, were invoking their rights as they participated in various pagan rites.

The text before us is continuing the theme initiated in the eighth chapter.

There, Paul begins by speaking of what appears to have become a somewhat common practise of participating in feasts dedicated to idols.

Let’s examine the particulars.

Many, perhaps even most, of the Corinthian Christians had come to faith out of a background of idolatry.

Beyond the fact that Greek culture was steeped in idolatry, there remains the fact that in that pagan culture those who worked in various trades were required to be members of a guild.

No one could work at a given trade without holding membership in the appropriate guild.

The various guilds shared some similarities to contemporary trade unions, but they each had a patron god or goddess to which the members of the guild paid homage.

From time-to-time the guild members would join together to observe a festival or even a communal meal, and the food eaten whenever the guild came together would be first offered to the god or goddess to whom the guild was dedicated.

Though all the food was offered to the patron deity, only the less desirable foodstuffs would remain on the altar while the rest was consumed for the meal.

Those participating in the meal were said to be guests at the table of the patron deity.

The meal was not the only feature of the festivities, for there were often included immoral and idolatrous activities associated with worship of the deity.

In itself, the act of eating a meal with the idolaters was a neutral act.

This is what Paul means when he writes, “As to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that ‘an idol has no real existence,’ and that ‘there is no God but one.’

For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” [*1 Corinthians 8:4-6*].

Some of the Corinthian believers were sufficiently strong in their faith that they were not offended by eating a meal at an idolatrous feast.

However, there were fellow believers who did not share this freedom—their consciences were weak.

Therefore, the Apostle continued by issuing a caution.

“[Some of your fellow Christians,] through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.

Food will not commend us to God.

We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.

But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.

For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, will he not be encouraged, if his conscience is weak, to eat food offered to idols?

And so by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died.

Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ.

Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble” [*1 Corinthians 8:7-13*].

Paul continued instructing the recalcitrant saints by pointing to the fact that he was prepared to forego his rights in order to avoid wounding weaker believers or to avoid turning outsiders from the Faith.

Based on this, he urged the Corinthians to weigh their actions in light of how they could be perceived by others watching them [see *1 Corinthians 9:1-27*].

The Apostle then reminded the Corinthians of several examples drawn from the history of Israel—examples that should have been well known to these Corinthian believers [see *1 Corinthians 10:1-13*].

Throughout this examination of the economy of God versus the concept of man, Paul hammered his point home repeatedly cautioning against drawing a wrong conclusion and imploring his readers to weigh carefully their own actions in light of their spiritual forebears.

At this point, Paul drew his readers’ attention to their confession at the Lord’s Table, reminding them that they confessed a shared life when at the Table [see *1 Corinthians 10:14-22*].

The emphasis is upon the shared experience, and especially the shared act of worship.

The Corinthians, as is true of all people who conscientiously obey the Word of the Lord, participated as a Body in the Meal.

This is to be a corporate Meal at which participants confess their mutual relationship to one another because they share in a mutual relationship to the Risen Son of God.

Consider one vital issue before moving to the next point.

The Corinthians that participated at idolatrous feasts were deliberate in their actions, and thus we are compelled to conclude that they were deliberate in the provocation their actions presented to the Lord.

They appear to have known what they were doing, choosing to continue despite knowing that they were participating in a ritual that can only be described as demonic.

It was not so much that they had dined at the table of a pagan deity as that they were either unconscious of the impact of their action on the lives of their fellow Christians or they were inconsiderate of fellow believers.

In either case, those participating in the idolatrous feasts were harming the people of God.

I suppose that were we able to speak with the Corinthians that were sharing in the idol feasts, they would have asserted their right to dine wherever and with whomever they wished.

It seems to me that they were not so very different from modern Canadian Christians who are more intent on enjoying their rights than they are on fulfilling their responsibilities.

Living by this philosophy of the exaltation of personal rights, the Corinthian saints deliberately provoked the Lord and harmed the cause of Christ.

Well, how do we differ when we deliberately choose to pander to our personal desires rather than fulfilling the will of God?  God calls us to be generous on every occasion, but when we cease generosity toward His cause in order to accumulate more of this world’s goods, are we not deliberately provoking the Lord?

God expects us to be compassionate toward the vulnerable, but when we ignore the plight of impoverished saints, or when we fail to inform ourselves of the persecution of fellow Christians in foreign lands so that we will not be discomforted, are we not provoking the Lord?

When we stay up late on Saturday night or intentionally schedule our recreational time on Sunday and avoid worshipping the Lord, are we not provoking the Lord?

Modern Christians have created a caricature of God.

The God we worship is doting—always understanding when we assert our rights against responsibilities and never disappointed in our self-centred decisions.

He smiles benignly at us as we pursue our own comfort at the expense of advancing His Kingdom, and though He may cluck his disapproval He will never make us uncomfortable.

However, the God we imagine we serve is a caricature.

We have forgotten that God is holy.

He is pure and He calls His people to that same holiness.

Peter writes Christians, “Preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’

And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.

He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.

Recall Peter’s words written in his first letter to Christians of the Diaspora.

“Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for

 

“‘All flesh is like grass

and all its glory like the flower of grass.

The grass withers,

and the flower falls,

but the word of the Lord remains forever.’

“And this word is the good news that was preached to you” [*1 Peter 1:13-25*].

The Divine expectation is that Christians will be holy in all their conduct.

This means that God expects His people to assume responsibility for their actions, considering the impact of their decision on their fellow believers and on the way in which God is viewed by outsiders.

The Divine expectation is that Christians will reflect the purity of their souls through lives that are holy and righteous.

The Divine expectation is that Christians will live, not for this transient world, but for the world to come.

The Corinthians could not say that they were pure when they were deliberate in their provocative actions, nor could they say that their decisions reflected purified souls when they were deliberately provocative.

Similarly, we who name the Name of Christ in this day cannot say that we reflect purified souls or that we are holy when our focus is on fulfilling our immediate desires rather than discovering and doing the will of God.

We cannot aver that we are living for eternity when we consistently seek our own comfort.

*A Thoughtless Provocation* — Those Corinthians who chose to participate at meals dedicated to idols and also at the Lord’s Table, acted thoughtlessly.

They were focused on fulfilling their own desires, and not on building others.

This drive to fulfil their own desire appears to have been a systemic flaw in the make-up of the Corinthian Christians.

Throughout this letter we see that the Apostle found it necessary to instruct them repeatedly in the need to build one another in the Faith.

The Corinthian Christians were determined to obtain spiritual gifts that would exalt them in their own eyes as well as in the eyes of others—they wanted to feel good about themselves.