Flee from Idolatry

14Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. 15I speak as to wise men. Judge what I say. 16The cup of blessing which we bless, isn’t it a sharing of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, isn’t it a sharing of the body of Christ? 17Because there is one loaf of bread, we, who are many, are one body; for we all partake of the one loaf of bread. 18Consider Israel according to the flesh. Don’t those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar? 19What am I saying then? That a thing sacrificed to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? 20But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and not to God, and I don’t desire that you would have fellowship with demons. 21You can’t both drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You can’t both partake of the table of the Lord, and of the table of demons. 22Or do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?

The children growing up among us are our future.

It matters a great deal that parents, and the whole older generation with them, raise their children to look beyond their schoolwork to something more.

The reason is simple: we can place our hope in the future only if the young people who will lead it are sound in body, in emotion, in mind, and in spirit.

But adults will not yield an inch of their own thinking. They measure everything by adult standards and lead accordingly, and because of this, young people are slowly sickening in the midst of it.

Parents whose own character is far from whole add stubbornness to it and easily crush their children’s ideas. Instead of opening their eyes to see far ahead, they raise them like robots that move only at the word of the grown-ups.

Our children’s success may well matter to us, but those of us who serve Christ as Lord must not overlook the spiritual war being waged around them.

Our hearts are taken up with making our children succeed, but the urgent task is to guard them from being brainwashed by the evil powers that hold sway over this world. So we must teach them about the great works of God.

Parents must first stop thinking of their children as too young to understand, and must set a clear standard of good and evil and explain it to them.

Only if we help them engrave the word on their hearts and live the life God desires will they be spared, even after they succeed, the regret of having lost their souls.

Society today is in sexual confusion and in the deepest spiritual darkness.

The mass media lay sexuality bare and thrust it into the spotlight, making young people whose judgment is still clouded take it all in without discernment, and so unsettling their values.

Because every broadcaster reports people’s evil deeds rather than their good ones, laying out adultery, murder, suicide, and fraud in every detail, young people absorb every kind of evil with nothing to filter it.

As the world moved the way the powers of evil wanted, people slowly began to change for the worse, and now most incidents no longer even shock us.

This is the fruit of Satan’s diligent labor.

Now even believers are giving ground in their faith little by little, telling themselves that this is how the world is, that this is how everyone lives; and they have grown lenient about the faith of children who drift away from the church.

The trouble is that while the world changes and even Christians are being corrupted, God does not change.

With their judgment of evil grown dull, people say that a sin of that size is nothing to worry about. But God tells us that, because he is holy, he will not save anyone who harbors sin and does not live by the law he has set.

The Corinthians had lived the way the world lives; then they heard the gospel and came into the church. But they were not readily born again.

The reason was that living by God’s law, so unlike the law of the world they had known, was hard for them.

They went on doing in the church exactly what they had learned in the world, and they compromised without even recognizing it as sin.

But from the very beginning, Paul told the Corinthian church, drifting as it was, why God had called them.

His reason was this: no matter how far the world had fallen, no matter what they had been taught in it or what the people around them thought, their attention had to be fixed on God.

Paul is doing all he can to set God at the center of the Corinthians’ hearts.

Seeing that they were still not born again even after coming to church, Paul began, through the story of the Exodus, to tell them why God had called them and how he had led them.

Until this point, when Paul addressed the church, he called them those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.

But here in chapter 10, for the first time, he uses the word “brothers.”

He does so to stress that the Corinthians are members called together into one body, with Christ at its center.

This mattered because it could never be a forgivable thing for the church, the body of Christ, to ignore the commands of Christ its head and worship the idols a fallen world had planted.

1 Corinthians 10:2

2and were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea;

As he had promised Abraham, God meant to bring the people of Israel out of Egypt after four hundred years, and to that end he trained Moses through eighty years of hardship.

That God spent eighty years training Moses shows us that his work did not happen in a moment; it was the plan of a God who waited for the right time.

Moses waged a life-and-death struggle with Pharaoh through ten plagues, and he was able to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt without leaving a single one behind.

The Exodus was fulfilled within the promise God had already given Abraham, that his descendants would come out of Egypt. Even so, the obedience of the man who would make that promise visible to the world, Moses, was absolutely necessary.

At first, even after receiving his charge from God, Moses begged to be excused; in the end, though, he obeyed, offering up his very life.

Of course, had Moses refused, God would have raised up Aaron or someone else to bring the people of Israel out.

But God called Moses because there was a reward he wanted to give him.

In the same way, when God calls his people and gives each a calling in the measure of their faith, it is because there is a reward that person is meant to receive. That is why we must be sure to obey.

Paul looks at the Red Sea parting and the people of Israel crossing through the midst of the sea, and he says that they were all baptized.

In Romans 6:3, Paul asks whether we do not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. In the same way, because the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea at the risk of their lives, they became the people of one nation with God as their King.

The sea heaved on either side as if to crash down on them at any moment, and the Egyptian army was in pursuit behind, while they drove their little ones and their livestock through the mire of the seabed. It must have been a terror no one could endure without leaning on God alone.

Once they had crossed and watched the sea close over the Egyptian soldiers, Moses and the children of Israel lifted their praise to God.

“Yah is my strength and song. He has become my salvation. This is my God, and I will praise him; my father’s God, and I will exalt him. Yahweh is a man of war. Yahweh is his name.”

Moses and Israel sang this song beside the Red Sea, but it is a song we must sing as well, we who walk the muddy roads of a world that is itself like the Red Sea.

As they sang of victory while the Red Sea covered the Egyptian army, so we who see this dark world being covered by the wrath of God should not be afraid. Knowing that the day of judgment is near, we must lift our voices high in praise.

Paul wanted the Corinthians to offer praise like this.

He longed to hear them give thanks, confessing that all their days and every circumstance they had known were not of their own making but had been guarded and given by God.

Having crossed the sea, the people had no time to prepare food, so God sent manna down from heaven.

He rained it down so that they would not go hungry for want of bread.

And when they had nothing to drink, he graciously brought water out of the rock for them.

So that Israel would not suffer from thirst, God split the rock and gave them water.

Isaiah 26:4 says, “Trust in Yahweh forever; for in Yah, Yahweh, is an everlasting Rock.”

God is the Rock.

Paul therefore called Christ, God the Son, the spiritual rock.

He meant a rock that is never shaken whatever comes, a rock that does not change, the safest rock there is for God’s people.

Imagine that some accident has left you stranded in a desert, with no food and no water, and that you have prayed to God to save you.

With nothing but desert on every side, do you believe in the miracle, that because you have prayed, food will come down from heaven and water will flow from the rock?

Or do you pray while your heart doubts that such a thing could ever happen in a desert?

Perhaps people would look around at the sand and simply pray out of habit, rather than holding on in faith that a miracle of food and water will come.

That is human nature. But God is the one who does the work of God, and so he acts according to his plan of salvation.

Because he had promised Abraham the Exodus, and promised Christ and salvation, he granted both the manna and the water from the rock in the course of keeping those promises.

Yet the people of Israel, and even we today, fail to give thanks to the God who guards us from every kind of harm that Satan would bring.

Israel met the God who worked miracles, and so have we; yet we waver when we see the power, the pleasures, and the idols of the nations around us.

On the very day they received the law, they poured out gold and made a golden calf; they committed sexual immorality with the women of Moab and suffered the wrath of God, when twenty-three thousand fell in one day.

And the people who tested God suffered the bite of venomous serpents.

To keep his promise to Abraham, God trained Moses for eighty years and led his people toward Canaan through ten plagues and many miracles. How must his heart have felt when he had to judge the very people he loved? We must ponder that and repent.

1 Corinthians 10:11

11Now all these things happened to them by way of example, and they were written for our admonition, on whom the ends of the ages have come.

Paul does not mean that the people of Israel fell in order to serve as an example to us now. He means that, seeing Israel’s fall and betrayal, we must not walk the same road.

The people of Israel saw the Red Sea part, watched manna fall from heaven, and saw with their own eyes water pouring from the rock. If they could fall, how much more easily will our frail faith crumble! It is for this reason that Paul warns that anyone who thinks they are standing should take care not to fall.

You will have known much grace and many miracles in your own life.

There must have been times when something you could never have resolved by your own strength was resolved, and you were certain that God had helped you.

And perhaps there were times when you felt dropped into the world alone, with nowhere to turn for help.

We see people lean on God while they suffer, and then, once every problem seems settled and no hardship seems to lie ahead, close their hearts to him.

But good fortune and misfortune visit every life again and again, so it is foolish to abandon God because one prayer has been answered.

Only while we remain under God’s grace does he help us overcome the temptations we can bear, and, when we meet a temptation we truly cannot bear, open a way of escape.

God shows his children the way of escape, and when he sees them obey his word, he rejoices greatly. Our Father is the one who commends them as good and faithful servants.

The Corinthians forsook this God who protects them in love, and just as Israel made the golden calf, they went to pagan altars and worshiped idols.

Had they not heard the gospel, the Corinthians would have been cast into death and sunk in hell forever. Even after receiving grace, they are worshiping idols.

Seeing this, Paul was indignant and rebuked them severely.

If only they would live by the word of Christ, the faithful God would become the Lord of their lives. Paul grieved over the Corinthians, who had cast that word aside and betrayed God.

The people of Israel, who worshiped idols even after seeing countless miracles, and the Corinthians, who attended pagan altars to worship idols and commit sexual immorality, are no different at all.

Then what kind of faith do you and I have?

What faith are we showing the God who has led us this far, revealing countless graces and miracles along the way? And what example are we setting before the souls who cling to death in this crumbling world?

Bowing down to stone and wood and the gods of this world is not the only idolatry.

When we refuse to obey what God has forbidden, our hearts are committing idolatry; and driving our children with the whip toward worldly success is idolatry too.

You are people to whom God has given wisdom.

I hope you will ask yourselves whether you are guarding the grace God has given you with that keen wisdom, whether you are obeying the laws he has granted, and whether you are beating your body into submission in order to keep the faith.

Before he died, Joshua charged the people of Israel to fear Yahweh and serve him in sincerity and in truth.

Declaring that he and his house would serve Yahweh alone, he commanded them to choose that very day whom they would serve, to put away the gods they had served in Egypt, and to have nothing to do with idols.

I have spoken of the steadfast faith of Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and the apostle Paul because that same spiritual line of faith runs down to you.

Like the people of Israel, you promised to serve Yahweh alone.

But like the Corinthians, you may also have sat in the place where God is betrayed.

But God has brought you here today to hear this sermon. In doing so he is giving you a chance to turn back, just as Paul earnestly pleaded with the Corinthians to take Israel as a warning and turn.

May those of you who think you stand come down to a humble place and repent; and may those who face a temptation too heavy to bear hold fast to the God who makes a way of escape.

Those who earnestly long for God’s grace can receive it in full measure, and to those who strive to live by his word he will always grant a way of escape.

Those who know God’s will and live by it will find Christ, our Rock, holding their faith firm so that it does not waver; he will seat them in a high and glorious place and help them not to be put to shame.

May you promise to serve God alone, obey his word, and enjoy his great blessing.