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 who are growing up now are our future.

It is very important for parents, and for the whole older generation, to raise their children to look beyond their studies.

For only when the young people who will lead the future are healthy physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually can we set our hope on the future.

But adults will not give up their own ideas in the least, and they set every standard to suit adults and lead everything that way. So young people are growing sick in the middle of it all.

The imperfect characters of parents, with stubbornness added on top, easily crush their children’s thinking. Instead of opening their children’s eyes so that they can see far ahead, parents are raising them like robots that listen only to what adults say and move only at their word.

But you who serve Christ as your Lord must not overlook the spiritual war, however much your children’s success may matter.

The urgent task is to protect our children so that, while our hearts are taken up with making them succeed, they are not brainwashed by the evil powers that rule the world. So we must teach our children about the great works of God.

Parents must first let go of the idea that their children are too young, set clear standards of good and evil, and explain them.

Only if parents help their children engrave the Word on their hearts, so that they can live the life God wants, will they be spared the regret of losing their souls even after they succeed.

The world today is in sexual confusion, and it is in the deepest spiritual darkness.

The mass media expose sexual matters heavily or play them up, and they are shaking the values of children so that young people, whose judgment is not yet clear, take it all in without discernment.

Every broadcaster reports people’s evil deeds in detail rather than their good deeds, and covers adultery, murder, suicide, fraud and the like closely. So every evil method is soaked up by young people just as it is, with no filter.

As the world moved the way the evil powers wanted, people slowly began to be corrupted, and now they are not even surprised by most incidents.

This is the result of Satan working hard.

Now even believers are giving up their faith little by little, thinking that the world is like that and everyone lives that way, and they are lenient about the faith of their children who keep away from the church.

But the problem is that although the world is changing and even believers are being corrupted, God does not change.

People’s judgment about evil has grown dim, so they say that that much sin is fine. But God is saying that because he is holy, he will not save those who harbor sin and do not live by the law he has set.

The Corinthian believers had lived the world’s way, then heard the gospel and came into the church, but they were not easily born again.

For it was hard for them to live by the law of God, which was so different from the law of the world they had lived in.

They did in the church just what they had learned in the world, and they compromised without even recognizing that it was sin.

But Paul told the members of the Corinthian church, who were being corrupted, from the very beginning why God had called them.

For however corrupt the world may be now, whatever education they had received in the world, and whatever people thought, they had to focus on God.

Paul is doing his very best to set God at the center of the Corinthian believers.

He watched the lives of people who had come to the church and still were not born again. Then Paul began to tell them, through the event of the exodus, why God had called them and how he had led them.

And until now, when Paul addressed the believers, he called them those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.

But in chapter 10 he uses the word ‘brothers’ for the first time.

The reason is to stress that the Corinthian believers are members called together with Christ at the center.

For when the church, the body of Christ, would not take the commands of Christ its head and worshiped the idols a fallen world had planted in it, that was never something that could be forgiven.

1 Corinthians 10:2

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

As he had promised Abraham, God trained Moses through hardship for eighty years in order to bring the people of Israel out of Egypt after four hundred years.

God trained Moses for eighty years. That shows that God’s work did not happen in a moment; it was the plan of a God who waited for the right time.

Moses fought Pharaoh at the risk of his life through the ten plagues, and he was able to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt, every one of them, without leaving a single person behind.

It was fulfilled within the promise God had already made to Abraham, that his descendants would come out of Egypt. Yet the obedience of the one who would reveal that promise to the world, Moses, was absolutely necessary.

At first, even after receiving his mission from God, Moses flatly refused, but in the end he obeyed, offering up his own life.

Of course, if Moses had refused, God would have raised up Aaron or someone else to lead 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 believers and gives them a mission according to the size of their faith, it is because there is a reward that believer is to receive. So we must surely obey.

Paul looked at how the Red Sea parted and the people of Israel crossed through the sea, and he said that they had all been baptized.

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

The sea heaved on either side as if it would crash down on them at any moment, and behind them the Egyptian soldiers were in pursuit. Walking through the muddy sea with small children and driving their animals along would have been a terror no one could bear without relying on God alone.

After crossing the Red Sea, as they watched the sea cover the Egyptian soldiers, Moses and the children of Israel sang 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 before the Red Sea, but it is also a song of praise that we must sing as we walk the muddy roads of the world, in a world like the Red Sea.

They sang a song of victory as they watched the Red Sea cover the Egyptian soldiers. In the same way, we who have realized that the day of judgment has drawn near must not be afraid as we watch God’s wrath spreading over a dark world; we must lift up our voices in praise.

Paul wanted the Corinthian believers to offer praise like this.

He wanted a song of thanks, owning that all the time and all the circumstances they had lived through until then were not something they had made by their own strength, but something God had protected and given.

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

He sent it down from heaven so that the people would not go hungry for lack of food.

He also gave the grace of bringing water out of the rock for a people who had no water to drink.

So that the people of Israel, who had no water, would not suffer, God split the rock and gave them water to drink.

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

God is a rock.

That is why Paul called Christ, who is God the Son, a spiritual rock.

He meant a rock that is not shaken in any situation, that never changes, and that is the safest rock there is for believers.

Imagine that you had an accident and were stranded in a desert, and with no food and no water, you prayed to God to save you.

There, with desert on every side, do you believe in the miracle that because you prayed, food will fall from heaven and water will come out of a rock?

Or even as you pray, do you doubt in your heart, thinking that surely such a thing could not happen in a desert?

Most people would probably look around the desert and simply pray out of habit, rather than having faith that a miracle of food and water would happen.

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

He had promised Abraham the exodus, and he had promised Christ and salvation. So in the course of keeping those promises, he granted manna and water from the rock as well.

Yet not only the people of Israel but even we today fail to thank God, who is protecting us so that we do not meet all kinds of misfortune from Satan.

Both the people of Israel and we ourselves have met the God who worked miracles, and yet we are shaken when we see the power, pleasures and idols of the world that the Gentile nations have.

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

And the people who tested God suffered the pain of being bitten by fiery serpents.

God trained Moses for eighty years to keep his promise to Abraham, and led them toward Canaan through the ten plagues and many miracles. We must repent as we think about how God must have felt when he judged the people he loved.

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 away so that they would be an example for us today. He means that as we see Israel fall away and betray God, we must not walk that road.

The people of Israel saw the Red Sea part, saw manna fall from heaven, and saw with their own eyes water come out of the rock. If even they could fall away, it is all the easier for our faith, weak beyond measure, to collapse. That is why Paul said that whoever thinks he stands should be careful that he doesn’t fall.

You too will have experienced much grace and many miracles in your life.

There will have been times when a problem you could never have solved by your own strength was resolved, and you were sure that God had helped you.

And there will have been times when, as if you had been dropped into the world all alone, there was no one at all you could turn to for help.

We see people who lean on God while they are suffering, but once it seems that all their problems are solved and there will be no more hardship, they close their hearts to God.

But everyone’s life brings good times and bad times over and over again. So it is foolish to abandon God just because you once received an answer to prayer.

For only when we stay under God’s grace does he help us win when we meet a temptation we are able to bear, and open the way of escape when we meet a temptation we truly cannot bear.

When God has shown his children the way of escape like this and then sees them obey according to his word, he is greatly pleased. It is our Father who commends us as good and faithful servants.

The Corinthian believers abandoned this God, who protects them with such love, and they attended Gentile altars and worshiped idols, just as the people of Israel made a golden calf.

The Corinthian believers, who would have been cast into death and fallen into everlasting hell if they had not heard the gospel, are worshiping idols even after receiving grace.

Seeing that, Paul was indignant, and he rebuked them severely.

Now, if only they lived by Christ’s word, the faithful God would become the master of their lives. Yet they had thrown away that word and betrayed God, and Paul grieved over those Corinthian believers.

The people of Israel, who worshiped idols after seeing countless miracles, and the Corinthian believers, who attended Gentile altars, worshiped idols and committed sexual immorality, were no different at all.

Then what kind of faith do you and I have?

What kind of faith are we showing to God, who has shown us countless graces and miracles and led us this far? And what kind of example are we setting for the souls in this crumbling world who are holding on to death?

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

A heart that does not obey, even when God has commanded us not to do something, is idolatry, and whipping our children on toward success in the world is idolatry too.

You are believers who have received the wisdom God gives.

Ask yourselves whether you are keeping the grace God has given you with sound wisdom, whether you are obeying the law God has given, and whether you are beating your body and bringing it into submission to keep your faith.

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

He told them that as for him and his house, they would serve Yahweh, and commanded them to choose that day, in that place, whom they would serve. And he commanded them to put away the gods they had served in Egypt and not to worship idols.

The line of spiritual faith that ran through Abraham, Moses, Joshua and the apostle Paul has come down to you. That is why I have been speaking to you about their unchanging faith.

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

But like the Corinthian believers, you will also, at times, have sat in the place where God is betrayed.

Yet God has you hear this sermon, here and now, to give you the chance to turn back, just as Paul earnestly pleaded with them to take Israel as an example and turn back.

If any of you think you stand, come down to a humble place and repent. And if any of you have met a temptation you cannot bear, hold on to God, who makes the way of escape.

A believer who earnestly longs for God’s grace can receive grace in full measure, and God will always grant a way of escape to the believer who strives to live by his word.

Christ, who is the rock, will hold fast the faith of believers who know God’s will and live by it, so that it is not shaken. He will seat them in a high and glorious place and help them not to be put to shame.

Make your promise to serve God alone, and obey the Word. May you enjoy God’s great blessing.