Identifying with Christ
1 Corinthians • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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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?
Welcome - we are back in our series on 1 Corinthians - break for Palm Sunday and Easter
Let’s reorient ourselves a little. Paul is writing to the Corinthians about idolatry in this section of the letter - this is a topic he began addressing at the start of chapter 8. Some of the Corinthians had been buying food in the marketplace that were the leftovers of pagan sacrifices.
And they told Paul they believed it was okay to buy this food - and to eat it - because the idols the pagan’s sacrifice to are nothing. They are merely man-made images. Plus, they knew there was only One True God. And it was YHWH, Who they worshiped.
But Paul said there was a problem. Not all of the Christians in Corinth felt the same way - they didn’t all share this knowledge. And if they saw these Corinthians eating the food, these unknowing brothers and sisters might be tempted to violate their own conscience by joining them.
So, Paul then discussed at length how what we do should not be dictated by what we believe we have the freedom to do. Rather, what we do is to be for God. And if it is for God, then it must be for God’s people.
We should do what we do for each other.
In short, as Christians, we should surrender our rights for each other if that’s what it takes to love each other. That applied to the Corinthians’ perceived right to eat of this food.
And he then points back to the nation of Israel and how most of that first generation that God saved out of Egypt did not really believe God. Even though they saw Him. Even though He provided for them over and over again. Even though they took part in all the community of faith did.
After all that, they were destroyed because they were idolaters.
And through all of this, Paul has not said whether eating the food left over from pagan offerings was right or wrong. Whether it was itself idolatry or not.
Well, Paul is now - finally - going to begin to answer these questions.
So, after talking about Israel’s idolatry, and warning the Corinthians to examine themselves, and promising that God will not let them be tempted to idolatry but would make a way of escape, Paul says plainly:
Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.
We see by the “therefore" that this is the application Paul provides for the Corinthians based on all he has said about idolatry so far, especially what he said regarding the idolatry of many of the Israelites.
He said they fell, so examine yourself, remember that God will give you a way of escape from idolatry...
...and you need to use that way of escape.
Let’s look at this with verse 13, because as I pointed out, verse 13 is so often used out of context. Both of these verses together put it in context:
No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. Therefore, [because God will make a way of escape] my beloved, flee from idolatry.
See, God is faithful and will provide a way of escape from the temptation to idolatry - the point is that we are not to try to stand up to it and resist it. He doesn’t say God will give us the strength to resist temptation no matter what.
No. We all have a limit to what we can withstand.
So God will provide a way of escape. So we are to escape - we are to run as fast as we can - we are to flee from idolatry and any temptation to it.
And while we may believe that we don’t have that temptation, because people don’t worship idols like the pagans of ancient Greece in Corinth, I think we’re fooling ourselves.
Idolatry comes in many forms. Most of us can’t even withstand the idol of technology.
Because the average Christian spends far more time with their eyes on a screen than on Christ. In a recent poll, it was determined that most Christians spend more than 3000 hours a year on TV, video games, social media, or playing games on their phones. Most Christians spend less than 65 hours a year reading their Bible.
And here’s the thing - everyone defends by saying it isn’t 3,000 hours, but no one argues the 65 hours…
And the fact that it would sound so absurd for me to suggest that we escape the temptation - that maybe we shouldn’t have the option of certain technology if it is that kind of a problem for us - tells us how controlled we actually are by these things. It shows us where our idols are.
But we are called to flee those idols. To flee even the temptation.
Can we honestly say we do that?
This is now the second time Paul has instructed the Corinthians to flee temptation to sin. There are two sins in particular that were plaguing the Corinthians - and that are a real danger to everyone, even we who believe - we are not exempt from this - and Paul singles these out and tells them to run away from them.
Because on our own, we can’t resist them. So we need to run from them.
The first sin Paul said to flee was sexual immorality - which Paul also spent a considerable amount of time talking about.
And as we have seen, Paul interweaves these ideas of sexual immorality and idolatry together throughout the letter. He relates one to another. He even gives Old Testament examples of how these were related for Israel when they fell into sin.
Because they are related.
Look, sexual immorality is a hot button issue. Things like fornication, homosexuality, pornography - these things are ubiquitous in the world and defended - sometimes very angrily - by those enslaved to them.
For the world, these things are not immoral. In fact, for the world, sexual immorality is not a category.
Though what most people really mean is that it isn’t a category for them, because what they do is not immoral. People worse than them that practice even “worse” sexual sins - that’s just wrong.
But what I do, whatever that is, there’s nothing wrong with that.
And we should expect nothing different from the world. They can’t see things any other way. They are literally incapable. Paul made that clear earlier in the letter.
Which is why my concern is more for Christians. Because we know full well that sexual immorality is a category. And it should be. Because it is certainly for the writers of the Bible. By my count, sexual immorality is the third most discussed sin in the Bible.
That it is addressed so often in the Bible should tell us something.
But my primary concern today isn’t how ubiquitous fornication and pornography are even for Christians. And they are.
It isn’t how we rationalize our sexual sin as somehow not as bad as other sexual sins, because we do.
No. My concern is that we don’t understand what sexual immorality is. It is a sin. Which means that when it is committed, it is committed against God.
Sexual immorality, at its heart, is about God. It is about misusing what God made. For Christians, it is about knowingly misusing what God made - our bodies. It is about going against God’s good design for our physical nature.
Now, why do I bring this up in the middle of talking about idolatry? Because Paul has done it multiple times in this letter. Because God does it in the Law and the Prophets.
Because by my count, the second most addressed sin in the Bible, is idolatry.
Sexual immorality and idolatry are very closely connected in the Bible. This is why God uses sexual immorality as a metaphor for idolatry so often. This is why He calls the Israelites adulterers so many times - they were unfaithful to God because of their idolatry.
So understand: sexual immorality, in any form, is physical unfaithfulness to God. And idolatry - no matter what form it takes - is spiritual unfaithfulness to God.
And the reason that sexual immorality and idolatry are so closely connected is because they are connected to the sin addressed most in the Bible: unbelief.
Both stem from the sin of unbelief.
When we commit either sin, brothers and sisters, we are just living out the fact that we really don’t believe God. That we don’t believe - if even only for the moment - that using our bodies God’s way is better. That we don’t believe abandoning our idols for God’s sake is better.
We don’t believe that He is the One worthy of our loyalty.
Just like some of the Corinthians. When it came to both sins, some of them lived like they didn’t believe God.
But Paul says they - and we - are to flee both of these things. Run for our lives away from these things. We need to escape from these temptations, here, in particular, temptation to idolatry. Because temptation to idolatry is temptation to disbelieve God.
So we need to escape.
But here’s the thing, we don’t escape if we just escape from - we need something, somewhere, someone! - to escape to.
And that is Christ. We have to escape the temptation by running to Christ.
Are you stuck in a cycle of sin? Flee to Christ.
Are you stuck in sexual immorality? You can’t resist it, so flee it as you run to Christ.
Are you stuck in idolatry? Don’t try to resist it - escape it! Flee to Christ.
Because you have to flee from your idols.
Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.
Then Paul follows that up with this:
I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say.
We miss the irony here with this translation.
“sensible” = “wise”
It is the word Paul used back in chapter 4 when he admonished the Corinthians for thinking too highly of themselves. He said somewhat sarcastically that he himself was a fool for Christ’s sake, but they were wise in Christ.
But here, the irony is that they should be able to discern what Paul is saying. They actually are wise enough to recognize the truth.
He is telling them that they can, in fact, discern the truth, because they know Christ. As he told them earlier, the truth of Christ is spiritually discerned, and they can know the truth.
What Paul has said, is true. And that should be clear to the Corinthians because they know Christ.
That what Paul has said is true should be clear to us because we know Christ.
What he just said about idols? We know it’s true. We know we have to flee from those temptations, because we know we can’t withstand them.
And it is exactly these kinds of temptations Paul is talking about when it comes to food offered to idols.
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 to 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?
Paul is talking here about taking Communion. We saw the allusion to Communion in what Paul said earlier in this chapter when he talked about the spiritual food and drink God provides.
Here, he talks about the “cup of blessing.” This is a reference to Passover.
During the traditional Passover dinner, there would be four cups of wine served. Each had a different meaning. They were all reminders of different things God has done.
The third cup of wine came to be known as the “cup of blessing.”
What a tie in Paul is making! This is the cup Christ shared with His disciples at the making of the New Covenant. Paul is tying in the body and blood of Christ with the Passover. Those who participated in the Passover meal were spared from death. They were spared from God’s judgment.
They were given life.
This is what we celebrate when we take Communion together.
We celebrate the life God has given us.
Does our living match our life?
In making this connection, Paul 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.
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 drink as a covenant community - identified with Christ - because His blood has been applied to us. We all share in it.
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 to give us life.
As Jesus taught in John 6, He is the true bread God provides from heaven. And whoever shares in that bread, will live forever.
So when we take Communion, we are identifying ourselves with His sacrifice. And we are identifying ourselves with the One He is the sacrifice to.
So when Paul says this, he transitions from what he just said: of all those that ate the manna, most God was not pleased with, and they were destroyed.
And now he moves 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, the body and blood of Christ, spiritually speaking, we are eating food offered to God by Christ.
And it binds us together as a community. We are in communion with each other through it.
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 identifying with Christ, but I am sharing in the community of all who do the same.
We partake of the food together, as one.
Paul is probably taking yet another jab at the divisions that were going on in Corinth. He’s saying that you can’t both be united in communion with Christ, and be divided from each other.
Which is why we consider each other first and let that determine what we do instead of our individual rights. We need to consider each other because we are one. What benefits you, benefits me, because it benefits the body of which Christ is the head.
There is one bread - there is one body of Christ that was sacrificed. We who share in that sacrifice are now the one body of Christ because we are partakers of Christ together.
And Paul goes to the Scriptures to give an example.
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.
We have already seen that there is a distinction between true Israelites and the physical Israelites who died because of their idolatry. There is a difference between those who are the spiritual people of God and those called as the physical people of God.
But even the physical people of God - as a whole - were called to share in the altar - to share in the sacrifices offered to God.
And this is not like Paul’s earlier reference to the priests who got to partake of the food offered to God on the altar. This is talking about the community eating of the tithes brought to the Tabernacle.
In Deuteronomy 14, Moses talks about the difference between clean and unclean foods. What should be eaten, and what should not be eaten.
Already, we see the tie in with what Paul has been discussing about the food offered to idols and the bread and wine of Communion.
But after talking about what should and should not be eaten, Moses then talks about this communal meal:
“You shall tithe all the yield of your seed that comes from the field year by year. And before the Lord your God, in the place that he will choose, to make his name dwell there, you shall eat the tithe of your grain, of your wine, and of your oil, and the firstborn of your herd and flock, that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always.
What Israel brought as their tithe to the place of God’s presence, they were to offer to God, and eat of that offering themselves.
The interesting point to note here, is that this is exactly what the pagans did. Both in Moses’ day and Paul’s day, the worshipers of a deity would come to the Temple of that deity, they would bring the requisite offering, and they would sacrifice it to their god and then all share in the food together.
This would identify them with that god and with each other as worshipers of that god.
That’s what YHWH told His people to do at His place of worship.
That’s what Christ told us to do in remembrance of Him. Identify ourselves with Him in eating of the sacrifice, spiritually speaking.
And that is Paul’s point.
Who do we identify with? If we identify with Christ, we identify with each other.
And if we identify with Christ, we cannot identify with any other god. We cannot identify ourselves with any idol.
We cannot identify ourselves any other community, including that of the pagan world.
But how often do we try to keep one foot in each community? How many weeks to we spend some time as part of the community of faith, and some time as part of the community of the world.
Talk about a hot-button issue. Let’s talk about identity. In today’s world, people can identify as whatever they want. And many of us say - “no, you are what you are, no matter what you identify as.”
And yet, how much time to we spend identifying as what we are not?
If you know Christ, you have been made new - born again unto eternal life. You are not what you were.
And you are not of the world.
How do you identify?
And this is not to say we shouldn’t be in the world. Paul already made it clear that we should be.
But when we are in the world, we still need to live as part of the one body of Christ. That’s why we need to be in the world.
We need to be in the world, but still need to identify with Christ and the community of faith that is His one body.
Ask yourself, who do you identify with most often?
Because when we come together as one, and we take Communion, we are declaring that we are part of this community.
It’s what we are.
This was true for Israel when they brought their tithes to God for sacrifice.
And this is true of us, because it was true of Christ. 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 or the people of God as a whole 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… that means they are partakers in the actual sacrifice.
They are identifying themselves with the sacrifice and the god the sacrifice was made to.
Note Paul’s logic here. 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 worshiping the One Who created them.
An idol is nothing.
But remember, the sacrifice is not made to the piece of wood, but to 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 gods like Dagon and Baal, these gods are real. They are real spiritual beings - real divine beings that were worshiped by the pagans, and represented by the idols.
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 - he is saying they identify with the god that it was 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, we lose the distinctions of the spiritual beings - these are the territorial gods of Deuteronomy 32 - the beings God put in charge of the nations after Babel - these are Paul’s principalities, etc.
Israel knew these were real living beings who ruled over the pagans on earth.
I’ll show you what I mean.
In our Old Testament, which is based on the Hebrew text, we read this in Psalm 95:
For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens.
These gods are equated with worthless idols, because 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 gods.
And that Jewish thinking was that these gods are real beings 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.
Here we see the limitations of language. These gods are lumped into this category of “demons.”
And these demons are those deities that were worshiped by the nations around Israel - and whom Israel worshiped when they fell into idolatry.
Like we read in Psalm 106:
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.
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. Even in his day.
If in eating of the sacrifice the people of Israel were 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 with - 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. Because:
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.
You can’t identify with Christ, and other gods.
You can’t identify with Christ’s, and with the world.
You can’t have one foot in for God, and one foot in for the world.
You can’t be of the body of Christ, and also of the world.
These Corinthians were trying to live on both sides of the line.
As I said, much of what YHWH commanded Israel in the Old Testament mirrored what the pagan nations around them did. The worship prescribed for them was not unlike the way the pagans worshiped their false gods.
But YHWH’s point was that what they do for false gods, His people were to do for the one true God.
And while there are so many similarities between what the pagans did and what Israel was commanded to do, there was one big difference.
Israel’s faith was to be radically monotheistic. There is One God.
Hear O Israel, YHWH our God, YHWH is One.
Or as Paul said when he began addressing this idolatry issue:
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.
The pagans, they had choices. They could choose any number of gods to follow. And often, they worshiped many gods just to hedge their bets.
But those called of the true God are given only one choice. It is follow the one true God - His way - or be an idolater.
And Paul says: you can’t do both.
And there’s the rub, because we do it anyway.
As I’ve said throughout this series: Paul does not waiver on his assessment of the spiritual state of the Corinthians. They are true believers.
Yet here some of them were, eating the food offered to false gods - and in doing so identifying themselves with those gods - even though they identified with Christ.
And here we are - true believers - and we identify ourselves with Christ. That’s why we take Communion together. We identify ourselves with Christ because we are one body.
We identify ourselves with Christ because we identify with each other and live out our communion with Christ in community with each other.
We identify with Christ.
Do we identify with idols, too?
Paul concludes this section with this:
Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?
Paul asks the Corinthians who were identifying with both Christ and the gods of the world: what are we going to do? Are we going to provoke the Lord?
We have the same question to answer.
Are we going to provoke the Lord? Or as Paul said earlier: are we going to put Christ to the test, with our idolatry?
Paul here is quoting from Deuteronomy. This is from the same passage we looked at earlier.
Speaking of the nation He called, God says through Moses:
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. You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth. “The Lord saw it and spurned them, because of the provocation of his sons and his daughters. And he said, ‘I will hide my face from them; I will see what their end will be, for they are a perverse generation, children in whom is no faithfulness. They have made me jealous with what is no god; they have provoked me to anger with their idols. So I will make them jealous with those who are no people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation.
There are overtones of Isaiah, and Hosea, and Romans here in this short passage. Physical Isreal would be rejected because of their idolatry, though the other people He called - those who are no people, as we read here - would not be.
That’s His spiritual people.
People like us. People like the Corinthians.
And Paul, after giving all of those examples of physical Israel and their idolatry, he asks the Corinthians: are we going to do the same exact thing as God’s physical people?
Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?
And of course, the answer to the second question is “no.” It is again implied in the way Paul words the question. We are most certainly not stronger than God.
The first question, however, has no implied answer. Paul isn’t saying whether or not they were going to provoke the Lord to jealousy. The Corinthians who were trying to live with a foot over each line would have to answer that question.
Because in their eating food offered to idols - and therefore to other gods - they were identifying themselves - part of the one body of Christ - with those gods.
And when we - part of the one body of Christ - when we try to live as if we are part of the world, what we do is identify with the god of this world. We partake of the sacrifices unto him through our sin.
We partake of him when we give in to our idols instead of fleeing from them.
When we make an idol out of anything - be it sex, or possessions, or even our technology - we are doing what Adam and Eve did in the Garden. We are, through our actions, declaring exactly who we believe. Who we choose to identify with.
And we reveal where our faith really is.
We can't identify with Christ, and with the world or its god!
We can’t identify with each other - the one body of Christ - and then with the world. Because that reflects on all those we have communion with!
This is why so many in the world rightly accuse so many Christians of hypocrisy. Because sometimes we try to live in both worlds - as part of two opposing worlds.
That’s what the Corinthians were doing, and that’s why Paul asks this question.
So the question is for us, too. Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy?
After all He has done?
After all He has done for us?
Because God didn’t hedge His bet. When He came as One of us to give us life, He didn’t come halfway. He didn’t come most of the way.
No. Jesus went all in for us. Because though He is God, He didn’t hold onto His rights. Instead, He came all the way to us. He crossed the line into humanity. He became fully human.
And then, as a human, He didn’t live halfway unto the Father. He lived all in. He lived perfectly.
And after that, He humbled Himself to the point of death on the cross. Death. That is going all in.
After all of that, we need to all ask ourselves:
How far in am I for Christ?
Am I all in?
Am I all in sometimes, and not so much others? Because that isn’t all in.
Is your manner of life such that those in the world know Who it is you identify with?
Or do we identify at times with the world, and its god?
Just like Paul, I can’t give the answer for anyone but myself. This is a question we all have to answer for ourselves.
But remember, we are called by Christ to deny ourselves - lose our lives - to take up our cross and follow Him. And if we hold on to our idols, we can’t take up our cross.
So I invite you, right now, to pray to God, and to give up your idols to receive what He wants to give you.
Never placed your faith in Christ - let go of what you’ve worshiped and identify yourself with the One Who gives life
If you know Christ, be honest with yourself and with God - are you all in for Christ?
