1Cor 10.14-22
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Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. Consider the people of Israel: are not those who eat the sacrifices participants in the altar? What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that 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?
Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.
—”therefore" - this is the application Paul provides for the Corinthians based on all he has said about this so far, especially what we saw last week regarding the idolatry of many of the Israelites
—though God is faithful and will provide a way of escape from the temptation to idolatry - the point is that we are not to look to stand up to it and resist it - we are to escape - we are to flee.
—use 1 cor 6.18 - flee from sexual immorality and idolatry - because one is physical unfaithfulness to God, and one is spiritual unfaithfulness (the Israelites were compared with adulterers when they went after other gods)
—but we don’t escape if we just escape from - we need something, somewhere, someone! - to escape too. And that is Christ. We have to escape the temptation by running to Christ.
I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say.
“sensible” = “wise” - it is the word Paul used back in chapter 4 when he admonished the Corinthians for thinking too highly of themselves:
We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute.
And then he tells the Corinthians that he is admonishing them because he loves them, and he encourages them to imitate him. And that is what he is building to in this section - he will end it iwth”
Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.
So in saying:
I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say.
He is telling them that they can, in fact, discern the truth, because they know Christ.
And Paul is about to get to the clear instructions about eating food offered to idols, but first… he wants to instruct them on a few more things. There are a few more things they need ot think about.
So he says: “you’re sensible- you’re wise - so consider this:”
The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?
--the cup of blessing is the third cup of wine (the cup of redemption) that is drunk during passover - what a tie in Paul is making! This is the cup Christ shared with His disciples at the making of the New Covenant. Tie this in with the salvific nature of passover with Christ our passover lamb.
He is then referring to the Lord’s Supper, or Communion. He is asking the Corinthians what their theology of Communion is. And boy, how this has divided the church. This is not an unimportant doctrine.
—and remember, there are ways to ask questions in Greek that also give the answer. Paul asks these two questions, but it is clear that the answer is “yes” to both. When we take the wine or the juice, it is a participation in the blood of Christ - a fellowship, or sharing, or communion - with Christ in His suffering and death. We drink as a covenant community - identified with Christ - because His blood has been applied to us.
—this is why the Table of the Lord is for believers. We are identifying ourselves with the One Whose blood the element points us to. We are identifying ourselves with His sacrifice. And we are identifying ourselves with the One He is the sacrifice to.
So, too, when we break the bread, it is a participation in - or communion with - the body of Christ. We are identifying ourselves with the One Who died for us. We are signifying that we are eating of His body, because we are those He has saved. As He taught in John 6:
This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”
So when Paul says this:
The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?
He transitions from what he just said about how of all those that ate the manna, most God was not pleased with and were destroyed, moving to the bread that we eat unto Christ and in identification with Him, because he is making a point about eating the food associated with a sacrifice.
When we take communion, we are eating of the food offered to God by Christ, spiritually speaking. And it binds us together as a community. We are in communion with each other.
Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.
We not only identify with Christ in taking Communion - we identify with each other. When I eat the bread and drink the wine, I am sharing in the benefits of Christ’s death, but I am sharing in the community of all who do the same.
We partake of the food together, as one.
--this might be a reference back to the divisions, or forward to the divisions he will discuss specifially about Commjnion in the next chapter, but certainly is relevant to the point he’s been making about considering each other before exercising any assumed rights
Consider the people of Israel: are not those who eat the sacrifices participants in the altar?
Paul literally says: “Consider Israel according to the flesh” - he is talking about the nation - the physical people - not the spiritual people of God.
10:18
The reference to “Israel according to the flesh” points to a distinction between true Israelites and the rest that already had begun to be made in the (e.g., Deut. 10:16; Jer. 4:4; 9:24). Elsewhere Paul refers to Christians as the “true circumcision” (Rom. 2:28–29) and as the children of the “Jerusalem above” rather than the present Jerusalem (Gal. 4:25–26).
Paul points to the cultic practices of the Judaism of his day, based on teaching. While some sacrifices were consumed only by the priests and others by the whole community (see Reid 2000: ), to eat the food that had been offered in sacrifice was to participate in the cultic act of the sacrifice
Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, “1 Corinthians,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI; Nottingham, UK: Baker Academic; Apollos, 2007), 727.
He is again using them as an example.
18 As earlier (9:13–14), but now in reverse order, Paul adds the further analogy of the sacred meals in Israel. “Consider the people of Israel,” he says, intending to argue his case one step further. “Are not those who eat the sacrifices koinōnoi (partners, sharers, participants) in the altar?” The context indicates that Paul is referring to the meals prescribed in the (Deut. 14:22–27), not to the priests’ share of the sacrifice alluded to earlier (9:13). The language “eat the sacrifices” refers to the meal that followed the actual sacrifice, in which they together ate portions of the sacrificed food. Since there is not the remotest hint in Judaism that the sacrificial food represented God in some way, Paul can only mean by “sharers in the altar” that the participants shared together in the food on the altar. Paul’s emphasis seems to be that by this meal they were thus bound together in their common worship of Yahweh. By analogy such people were not allowed also to join the sacrificial meals of their neighbors, and when they did so, it was clearly considered idolatry ( 7–8).
The probable reason for this second example is that it is more closely analogous to the pagan meals, which also involved sacrifice, followed by a meal in which the sacrificial food was eaten. The Christian meal was only an analogy of a sacred meal; their sacrifice had been offered once-for-all, and though now celebrated at the meal, was not a part of the meal, as in the Jewish and pagan meals.
Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, ed. Ned B. Stonehouse et al., Revised Edition, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), 519.
As he has already pointed out, the priests that were to eat of the food offered to YHWH were participants in the altar. They were taking part in the sacrifice that others brought to them and they sacrificed on their behalf.
This is exactly what Christ did for us. Our Great High Priest sacrificed on our behalf. And in communion, we partake, spiritually speaking, of the sacrifice that satisfied God and gave us spiritual life.
Paul is making the point that those who eat of the sacrifice - whether the priest at the Temple in the Old Testament or the Christian during Communion - we are through the act of eating of the sacrifice participants in the sacrifice.
That means, for the Corinthians to willingly eat the food offered to idols, they are partakers in the actual sacrifice.
They are identifying themselves with the sacrifice and the god the sacrifice is made to.
But Paul is not saying that they are identifying themselves with the idol.
What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything?
Paul is agreeing with what the Corinthians said at this point. An idol is nothing. We looked at some of those Old Testament passages where idols are said to be nothing. Where God even points out the absurdity of someone making an idol and worshiping what they created instead of worship the One Who created them.
No, an idol is nothing.
But remember, the sacrifice is not made to the piece of wood, but the god it represents. The god the pagans expected would inhabit that piece of wood so there was a physical place on earth where their presence would be represented.
And, as we saw in our Samuel series with Dagon and Baal, these gods are real. They are real heavenly beings - real divine beings that were believed to inhabit the idols in the pagan temples.
So Paul is not saying through all his examples of Communion and the Old Testament sacrifices that the Corinthians identify themselves with the idol when they eat of the food offered to it - but to the god that is sacrificed to:
What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons.
“demons” and the problem of language - from Hebrew to Greek to English - these are the territorial gods of Deuteronomy 32 - Paul’s principalities
For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens.
gods = elohim - the name often used of YHWH but ascribed to other heavenly beings throughout the Old Testament
they are worthless idols, they are represented by things man creates, whereas YHWH is the creator of everything, including the heavens - which means He is the creator of these elohim.
And that Jewish thinking is that these elohim are real is clear in that the Jews that translated the Old Testament into Greek said:
Psalm 95:5 (LES)
5 For all the gods of the nations are demons,
but the Lord made the heavens.
Because these demons are those deities that were worshiped by the nations around Israel - and whom Israel worshiped when they fell into idolatry:
They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons;
or
They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently, whom your fathers had never dreaded.
This is why Greek - and then English - lumps all the fallen heavenly beings into this category of demons. It is a limitation of language.
Point being, when Paul says:
No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons.
He is referring to actual small ‘g’ gods. Real spiritual beings that were worshiped by the pagans.
If in eating of the sacrifice the priest in the Temple was identified with the sacrifice unto YHWH, and if in taking Communion the Christian is identified with the sacrifice of Christ, then eating of the food offered to idols makes someone a participant - in communion with - the demon - the false god that was sacrificed to.
And Paul says that’s a real problem if we are identified with Christ:
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.
10:21
The expression “Lord’s table” is used to refer to the altar in the (Mal. 1:7, 12; cf. Ezek. 41:22; 44:16). Paul’s reference to the Lord’s Supper as a participation in the “Lord’s table” suggests that the celebration of Christ’s sacrifice now serves as the centerpiece for Christian worship as did the altar—the Lord’s table in the —where the people of Israel went to worship by bringing their sacrifices to the Lord.
In Isa. 65:11 the Lord complains against unfaithful Israelites who “prepare a table for the devil [daimōn] and fill up the mixture [of wine as an offering] for Fortune.” Paul emphasizes that one cannot worship the one true God and also participate in any other worship. The church remains committed to “the radically exclusive character of Israel’s monotheistic faith
Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, “1 Corinthians,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI; Nottingham, UK: Baker Academic; Apollos, 2007), 729.
Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?
Are we going to provoke the Lord? Or as he said earlier: are we going to put Christ to the test?
Paul’s words “Shall we provoke the Lord?” echo the Lord’s complaint against Israel in Deut. 32:21 : “They have provoked me with what is no god, angered me by their idols
Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, “1 Corinthians,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI; Nottingham, UK: Baker Academic; Apollos, 2007), 729.
Paul’s follow-up question, “Are we stronger than he?” probably also reflects Deut. 32 and its emphasis on the strength of the Lord. According to Deut. 32, one of the purposes of the coming judgment will be to impress on the nation their lack of strength and the Lord’s great power (cf. 32:30, 36–38). Craigie (1976: ) comments on Deut. 32:36, “Since Israel’s defection was largely a result of the arrogance of believing in their own strength, that arrogance and belief in human strength had to be totally demolished before the people were in a position to realize their need of God’s strength. The rhetorical question posed in vv. 37–38 is designed to create awareness that other possible sources of strength were also useless.”
Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, “1 Corinthians,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI; Nottingham, UK: Baker Academic; Apollos, 2007), 729.
—this shows that in our idolatry, we are identifying ourselves with the objects of our idolatry - not the idol itself, but the god behind it.
—the god of this world
—when we make an idol out of anything (sex, etc. - give examples?) - we are doing what Adam and Eve did in the Garden. We are, through our actions, declaring exactly who we believe. We reveal where our faith really is.
--we can't identify with Christ, and with the world or its god! (Or, with each other, and then the world - that reflects on all we have communion with! We commune with each other through commjnion with Christ, as in Communion - remember Paul's point is that we need to consider each other before we do anything on the grounds of “rights" - maybe we can, but should we? Does it edify? Does it show love to my brothers and sisters? The fact that we are identified with each other because of our identification in Christ means that this goes beyond what we do when we're together [we all try to do the Christian thing when we're together! ])
