Avoiding Legalism and License
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that we all possess knowledge.a Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. 2 The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. 3 But the man who loves God is known by God.
4 So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one. 5 For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”), 6 yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.
7 But not everyone knows this. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. 8 But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.
9 Be careful, however, that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak. 10 For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, won’t he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols? 11 So this weak brother, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. 12 When you sin against your brothers in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. 13 Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.
The question for this morning’s message is this: as Christians, how do we live in the world and not let the world live in us? John gives us a stern warning: “Do not love the world or anything in the world.” He also reminds us that the kingdom of this world is ruled by Satan. Peter reminds us that we are “aliens and strangers in the world.” The world is filled with dangers and temptations for the Christian. So the challenge is how to live in the world without allowing the world to live in us. This would be a little bit easier if we did not also have a command from Jesus to love the people who live in this world. If we are to obey the command to love the people in the world, we cannot isolate ourselves and retreat into a safety zone of a Christian fortress. Can you think of a Christian you know that lives in this way? In an effort to avoid being tainted by the world, they disobey the command to love others and isolate themselves from the world in a Christian cocoon. Most of these people fall into the trap of legalism. I remember reading an article in a Christian magazine about some Christians who had bought some land down south and they were seeking to build their own Christian city. This kind of retreat from society ignores half of the New Testament commands to share the gospel.
If we don’t fall into the first trap of isolationism we err on the side of integration, that is we become so integrated into the world that there is little or no difference between us and the ways of the world which we are supposed to hate. This kind of life is an abuse of our Christian liberty called license. As we said a few weeks ago, license leads to licentiousness. These people live in the world AND the world happily lives in them. These people know that they are not bound to the false barriers of the legalist but they make the fatal mistake of thinking everything is permissible for them. I showed this slide several weeks ago because it illustrates the danger of isolationism and legalism on one side and of license on the other side. Falling to either side will ruin your faith. So our challenge at all times as believers is how to live in the world without allowing the world to live in us.
A fellow college student of mine had moved from England to the United States during his high school years in the late 70’s. He told me that one of the first things he noticed in the U.S. was the amazing number of restaurants. It’s not that they did not have restaurants in England but that we had 5-10 times more in the U.S. There were no restaurants in first century Corinth, but they did have temple feasts which were a bit like the restaurant of their day. Let me try to paint a picture of these temple feasts for you. Imagine walking into Culvers and ordering a butter burger with fries and a drink. A fairly normal occurrence, right? But before your food was served on a tray, the nice lady in the blue shirt offered your butter burger to a false god in a mini-pagan ceremony. Off to the side stands a small altar with burning coals and a statue of the Greek God Zeus. You see, it turns out that the teenage Culvers employee doubles as a priestess for the Greek pantheon of gods. So she breaks off a piece of your burger and a few of your fries and offers them on the altar of burning coals and prays, “O Zeus, ruler of Mt. Olympus and father of many gods, please accept this humble offering and send us your favor this day. Amen.” Following the pagan sacrifice, the blue-shirted teen hands you your food with a smile.
This is a little taste of what was happening in Corinth. The believers were eating at these pagan feasts where the food was offered in ceremony to false gods. Paul begins this chapter by addressing this very topic in verse one: “Now about food sacrificed to idols.” Recall that part of this letter from Paul was a response to a letter that the Corinthians sent to him. Here is a chart that breaks down the various visits and letters between Paul and the church in Corinth.
Event Date Text
Visit 1 (18 months long) AD 52 Acts 18
Lost Letter 1 AD 53-54 1 Cor. 5:9
Corinthian letter TO Paul 54-55 1 Cor. 7:1
1 Corinthians Spring 55
Visit 2 Fall 55 1 Cor. 4:19; 16:5-7
Lost Letter 2 56 2 Cor. 7:5-16
Aborted 3rd visit 56 2 Cor. 1:16; 1:23-2:1
2 Corinthians Fall 56
Paul arrived in Corinth about AD52. He stayed for 18 months and planted a church there. A year later he wrote them a letter which has been lost to us. We could call it “Lost Letter 1”. Then the Corinthian believers wrote a letter back to Paul with some of their concerns and disagreements. Therefore, in this book of 1 Corinthians we see Paul responding to several matters from the Corinthian letter to him. That is why he wrote, “Now about food sacrificed to idols” because he was starting a new subject from their letter. He picks up new topics from their letter in chapter 7, 8, 12, 15 and 16.
What is so bad about food sacrificed to idols anyway? Food is just food, is it not? First we must understand that this is not just about food that had been sacrificed to idols and then sold in the marketplace. That happened all the time. If a sheep was sacrificed to a pagan god, only a portion of it would be offered in sacrifice and the rest would be sold for profit in the marketplace—a little bit like our Culvers-Zeus story—a little bit was offered to the gods and rest it was sold to you. In chapter ten Paul made it clear that Christians were allowed to buy and consume this meat. 10:25 says “Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience, for ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.’” Therefore if a bull was offered in sacrifice at the pagan temple and then later that day you bought some steaks to take home and grill for your family, that was fine and acceptable. The situation in chapter eight had to do with Christians who were actually attending these pagan feasts and eating the meals at the temple. We know this is true because of verse 10. “For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, won’t he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols?” So they were not just buying meat in the market, they were eating meals at the pagan feasts.
It is important to understand that there was not a single person in Corinth who had been a Christian for more than about four years. All of the believers in Corinth were young believers and many were what we call “baby Christians”. Before Paul came four years prior, the entire city was completely immersed in paganism. Therefore, for all of these Christians that Paul is writing to, it had been only a few short months or years since they themselves were pagans regularly eating at the pagan temple feasts. That had been their way of life before they met Jesus—it was their normal life experience. Many of these new believers stopped going to the temple feasts after their conversion but others continued to attend the feasts. Therefore, we have two groups of Christians here. The first group were the ones who claimed to possess special knowledge about such things as eating in pagan temples. They claimed that their Christian liberty allowed them to do so. They believed they could live in the world without being tainted by the world. Incidentally, many of these people were the same ones attempting to justify visits to a prostitute. The other group of Christians were those who believed that eating in the pagan temples was clearly wrong. Paul labels this second group of Christians as those having a “weak conscience”. This would lead us to believe that they were probably less mature than those with a “strong conscience.” In our modern Christian culture we have done the same thing. If I use the term “weaker brother”, what do you think of? Don’t you imagine the weaker brother to be like our Baptist friends who don’t approve of us playing cards or going to movies? A weaker brother is someone who puts unnecessary restrictions on our Christian liberty, right? The weaker brother has a long list of do’s and don’ts—mostly don’ts. You can’t do this, you can’t do that…you definitely can’t do that! Their list is so long and so detailed that many of them fall into temptation and sin by merely reading the list of things they are not allowed to do!
But this is not at all what Paul meant by a weaker brother. In reality the Christians with the so-called weak conscience were acting with more wisdom and spiritual maturity than the others. The Christians who thought they had knowledge and liberty to attend the pagan feasts were sinning in four different ways. First they were filled with pride. Verse one was probably another Corinthian slogan. “We know that we all possess knowledge.” In a condescending way they wrote to Paul. “Look Paul, this thing about eating in idol’s temples’—we’ve got it all figured out. We have special knowledge about these things. We know that no harm can come of it so why don’t you just mind your own business.” Paul responded by writing “knowledge puffs up but love builds up.” Their so-called knowledge about Christian liberty was puffing up their heads with pride. Even if they were right about this topic they still would have been puffed up with pride, but we will discover in a minute that their knowledge was false knowledge.
Their second sin was a lack of love. Their pride was a focus on their own needs and wants and did not allow them to see the needs of others. They should have been building up their fellow believers but instead they were puffing themselves up. Pride always pushes away love. When your head is puffed up with pride there is no room in your heart for love.
Their third sin is listed in 10:21. This topic about eating food sacrificed to idols continues all the way through chapter ten. In 10:21 Paul wrote “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the lord’s table and the table of demons.” Eating at a pagan feast was like participating in a communion service for Satan. Here at Grace Church, on the first Sunday of every month we observe the Lord’s Supper, but what if we decided to observe Satan’s Supper on the second Sunday of every month? That’s a horrible thought, isn’t it? Such an event would satisfy the most hard-core Satan worshippers and certainly has no business in Christian worship. But that is precisely what these Christians were doing who were eating in the pagan temples. So we can see that this was not a simple matter of attendance at movies and the like. This was a serious sin that some Christians were defending by claiming that they possessed special knowledge.
The fourth way they sinned was by dragging those believers with a weaker conscience into this same activity. Look again at verse ten and eleven. “For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, won’t he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols? For this weaker brother, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge.” Some of the Christians were enticing others to attend the pagan feasts with them. The result was that the prideful knowledge of some Christians was literally destroying the faith of other Christians. Let us not miss the word “destroy” in this verse. These Christians were not just offended. These Christians did not have a simple moment of doubt. These Christians were destroyed by the arrogance of others. The original word for destroyed is apollumi. This is very close to another word we know: apolluon, or in English, Apollyon, the Destroyer—Satan himself. Therefore, these arrogant believers were enticing others to attend this communion service for Satan. They were literally bringing them to the feet of the Destroyer and worshipping at his feet. This is why Paul said that the faith of some was being destroyed. And all of this was being done in the name of Christian liberty!! The scary thing about this is that the faith of some was not destroyed by the world, but within the church by fellow Christians!
So how does this apply to us today? We are not attending Satanic communion services. The application for us begins with the objection of these licentious Christians. In Paul’s first letter he obviously told the Corinthian believers to abstain from attending these pagan feasts. Some objected to his prohibition by in effect saying, “What’s wrong with it?” Alright, time for a little honesty here. How many of us routinely say the same thing--“What’s wrong with it?” We all do it, don’t we? It is probably more common with our kids. If they want to watch a certain movie that we may not approve of, what is the first thing that comes out of their mouth? “What’s wrong with it?” If they want to spend the night at a friend’s house, if they want to wear a certain article of clothing, if they want to listen to a particular style of music—all of these begin with the question, “What’s wrong with it?” Parents, have you been there? Young people, would you agree that you ask this question a lot? Maybe you don’t always ask the question out loud because you know your parents will still say “no,” but you think this question, don’t you? In the quietness of your own mind you keep asking yourself, “Why do my parents have so many rules? What’s wrong with it anyway?” Here is the big problem with this question. We are asking the wrong question! When we ask, “What’s wrong with it?,” it too much like asking, “Can I get away with this?” Can I walk on these hot coals and not get burned? This is the very question that the arrogant Corinthians were asking. They said, “What’s wrong with it, it’s just food?” Just food? We know now that it was hardly “just food”. They were participating in a Satanic communion service. They were leading fellow believers to the feet of the Destroyer for the destruction of their faith. In their arrogance they asked, “What’s wrong with it?,” but they were asking the wrong question. We think we know best so in our arrogance we ask, “What’s wrong with it?” The problem is that we are asking the wrong question.
So what we need to do is to start asking the right questions. We can get three excellent questions right from what Paul said. Notice how Paul answered the Corinthians these three times
Corinthians: “Everything is permissible for me.”(6:12) Which is another way of saying, “What’s wrong with it?,”
Paul: “But not everything is beneficial.”
Corinthians: “Everything is permissible for me.” (6:12)
Paul: “But I will not be mastered by anything.”
Corinthians: “Everything is permissible for me.” (10:23)
Paul: “But not everything is constructive.”
And then Paul also adds, “Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others.”
From these three replies we can construct three excellent questions that we should be asking ourselves. Don’t ask, “What’s wrong with it?,” but instead ask:
· Is this beneficial for me and for others?
We need sure we are including the part of the question about other believers. The arrogant Corinthians did not care about others but only themselves. In so doing they led to their own downfall but they also led others to the path of destruction. Our questions should not start with arrogance but with love and humility.
· Is this constructive for me and for others?
· Will this control me or lead others to be controlled?
Therefore, when we ask real life questions like:
Should I watch this movie?
Should I wear these clothes?
Should I participate in this activity?
What we need to do is combine our question with the Biblical question. If I watch this movie will it be beneficial for me and for others? If I do this activity does it have the capacity to control me or lead others to be controlled.
So how do we live in the world without allowing the world to live in us? We start by thinking of others first and by asking the right questions.
Rich Maurer
February 18, 2007