1502 - "Getting to know Corinth and its history & culture"

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1502. Over the next couple of days, we're going to talk about Corinth. And I hope you'll do some study on your own. There's a lot that you can now dig up on Corinth because Corinth has been dug up. And there are constantly digs going on there. If you come and study with me in Corinth, you will see things that will just knock the top of your head off. A lot of things have been uncovered that date back to the days of the Apostle Paul and the church at Corinth. There's so much history about the commerce, the athleticism, the Greek mythology that's associated with the city. And it was a city of wealth, of status, of religion. It was a city of commerce, and it was strategically uh located. It was a historic city. It was large and expansive. And we're going to talk about the church there and just how confused and chaotic that church was, especially after Paul left. And we'll talk about that in a couple of days. Now, all of this is related to what I want to specifically talk to you about in a couple of podcasts away from now, and that is the ecstatic utterance and what went on at Corinth. And I want to try to explain that to you from a historical standpoint, from a biblical standpoint, yes, but nothing is done in a vacuum. Jesus didn't come into a world in no setting. There was a setting. It was designed by God. In the fullness of time God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem us from the law. And so he came into a world that was ready for him, a world that was prepared, a world that had preaching centers all over the earth, one in Corinth, that is a synagogue. Everywhere the apostle Paul went in the Greco Roman world, there was a synagogue waiting on him, except a place that I've told you about before. It was a Roman colony in what is modern day Greece, it was Macedonia then, and it was the Roman colony of Philippi. Its port city, just ten miles away, was called Neapolis then, and it was a city that had so few Jewish men in it that there wasn't even enough for a synagogue, which had to have a minion to even have a synagogue. That was ten. There weren't even ten righteous men, as the Jews would say. But there were godly women there. You remember that they were out beside of the creek outside the city. They were by a river and they were meeting there, and Paul went out and met with them, and God opened the heart of a very wealthy, prosperous businesswoman, executive businesswoman named Lydia. This was a city that was very much unlike Philippi. This was a city that logged as many as ninety thousand people, ninety thousand population in four hundred BC. And so it was a major city during the days of the Apostle Paul. Now it was strategically located on an isthmus. We have an isthmus in Central America where the Panama Canal runs through and it connects the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. Well, there was an Isthmus there and it was much, much more narrow than uh Panama and the Isthmus there. As a matter of fact, it was just a little over four miles, and it had Kincrea, Sincrea on one side where the Aegean Sea is. Now the Aegean Sea is part of the Mediterranean. It's just the northern finger that has Greece on the left of it as you go toward the Bosphorus that runs out of the Black Sea, and it separates the continent of Europe from the continent of Africa, and that's where Istanbul is. It was called first of all Byzantium, and then it changed its name for the Emperor Constantine, who moved the capital from Rome there for the Eastern Empire, which is in modern day Turkey. When the Ottoman Turks came in, they renamed what was Byzantium and Constantinople Istanbul. And so it has Turkey on one side and it has uh Greek Isles all in between in the AGN. Beautiful, beautiful sea. I was just there uh a couple of months ago, two and a half months ago actually, and was at Corinth. It was uh absolutely spectacular. But there is a canal there now, but there weren't during the days of Paul. Corinth was on the western side of that isthmus at the Gulf of Corinth, the Saronic Gulf was the gulf or the port at Kincrea. Both of them are absolutely beautiful, breathtakingly beautiful, and uh Greece is beautiful there, and that isthmus separated uh the Peloponnesia where Sparta was and is, uh, but ancient Sparta was there, and from the mainland where Athens and many of the other places that you're very familiar with, Thesonika and so forth, geographically it was a critical spot. And because of its location, it was a center also for athleticism. As a matter of fact, Corinth was known for its athletes, athletes that came from all over the earth to train at Corinth and then be a part of the Ismanian Games, which were only second to the Olympic Games. It was uh so much different than it is today. The Ismanian Games and many of the athletic contests of ancient times only had male uh participants, as a matter of fact, all of them did during the days of the first century. They practiced and many performed uh naked. They practiced many times in what was called a gymnasium. We call that with a soft G gymnasium, but the word for naked is the word gymnos. And so that was where we got our word gymnasium, and because that was the place where the athletes practiced and they always practiced in the nude because of reasons I don't even want to get into, but it's just uh very practical reasons, uh gross but practical. So I just want you to understand that this led to all kinds of debauchery. If you were an adulterer and you were a fornicator, many times they would call you a Corinthian because they were so noted for that. And to Corinthianize was to become a fornicator. So this is the atmosphere that the apostle Paul went into to be used by God to start one of the great churches of the ancient world. But you just need to know that it was a very religious city. It was a great center for Judaism. They had a huge tabernacle there. As a matter of fact, Crispus, the first time the my family name was ever used was there. Crispus was the chief ruler of the synagogue, and he became a follower of Jesus, the Messiah. And you can read about that in chapter 18 of the book of Acts. But the Apostle Paul stayed there the second longest time that he did anywhere. He stayed there a year and a half, only Corinth. He stayed at Corinth three years, and that is the only place where Paul stayed longer than Corinth. He had a great ministry there. It was an up and down ministry. He had just come, and we'll talk about this a little more in the next podcast, but he had just come from what I uh believe in my own research and study was the most depressing and downtime of the Apostle Paul's life as far as his success in ministry is concerned, as he would have called success, and that is baptizing people and winning people and discipling people, because in Athens he had very little success. It changed Paul, it marked Paul. And when Paul came to Corinth, he came with a somewhat renewed mindset that he was going to preach Jesus and not just Jesus from a philosophical standpoint, like he did on Mars Hill, as he talked with those who were from every kind of uh ancient uh Greek philosophy. He wanted to preach Jesus and him crucified, and he came not in words of wisdom. Now, these are some of the very sentences the apostle Paul said. So I'm not just coming at this trying to isegete this passage, read into it the passage I'm reading right out of it. The Apostle Paul in First Corinthians 1, 2, and 3 really talks about the foolishness of philosophy and the wisdom of men and how far that'll take you, and it'll take you to hell. Because no one ever debated anyone into heaven. It is uh we need to be ready to give an answer for anyone that asks us for the reason for the hope that's within us. We need to be apologists to all of us, and we need to sharpen our minds and our hearts and always be ready to answer people and tell them that for the reason that we have hope, not just some emotional, feely touchy sentimentality, but the hard cold facts, the hard hot facts, the fact that Jesus died and uh proved himself to be the Son of God. He did it by what he said, and he did it by his deeds. He did it by his resurrection from the dead, and I witnessed by hundreds and hundreds of people. That was before he ascended to heaven. And since that time Jesus has appeared to many. Uh yes, appeared to many. And uh don't let that startle you because he appeared to the apostle Paul and evidently taught the Apostle Paul for a long period of time, probably as long as three years in Arabia. You see, God's not bound by us and our limited frame of mind. Before the New Testament was written, God worked in ways that uh we would be unfamiliar with today unless we were living in Iran or some kind of Muslim country or some kind of country uh like communist China or a place where the word of God is not allowed, God still appears to people there in dreams and visions because uh when people uh desire, when they respond to the grace of God that's given, the knowledge that's in the heart of every man, that's what Romans chapter one says. When people witness the sun, the moon, the stars, the rhythms of the seasons, and they desire to know God, God will get them more revelation and more light, and he will continue to do that until he gets the gospel to them because God's not willing that any should perish, but all should come to repentance. And so Corinth was a religious city, it was a commercial city, it was a city that was teeming with people from all over the earth, every kind of ethnicity was there, and it was very, very religious. The great temple of Apollo was there. So I want you to look and study between now and the end of the week. I want you to look up two things. First of all, look at Corinth. You can look that up. There's so much that's out there now, and with AI you can find out a lot about these cities. And then look up the Oracle of Delphi, D-E-L-P-H-I, Delphi. We call it Delphi. We put a long eye on everything in English, but the term is Delphi. And uh you will learn that there was another huge center of worship and a great temple of Apollo. The other great temple that was dedicated to Apollo and and strictly to him was in Corinth. And it is absolutely uh fascinating to just see the ruins of that temple today with its great columns. As a matter of fact, if you see any kind of picture of Corinth, you will see pictures of huge, huge columns, because this was a Doric city uh with all kinds of architecture, and that was part of why people came to Corinth is the architecture. Also, uh it was a place of commerce. Uh the uh Corinthian bronze was one of the great trades of the days of the Apostle Paul, pottery, a great handmade pottery that was there and hand painted, and just the architecture. And so it and Delphi were two of the great centers of Apollo worship. They had more than that in common. As a matter of fact, when I was in Delphi, I showed the people that were with me the Corinthian Gulf, which was just right below us, and between where you are and Delphi, you can look just below you in the valley and see over a million olive trees. Over a million, over a million olive trees just right below you in that beautiful Corinthian valley that is uh near the Corinthian Gulf, across from the city of Corinth. The city of Corinth is just out of view of Delphi. Now it's miles away, but it was very close in proximity from the standpoint of two things that happened in both. Something called enthusiasm, to be filled with God. That's where we get our term enthusiasm. The oracle at Delphi. You can read about that. There's been a lot of research done there. And what was happening as far as ecstatic utterance in Delphi uh was very much akin. I have studied this at length, uh, was very much akin to what was going on, this trance-like speaking in ecstatic gibberish and utterance. I believe it was demonic in both places. Paul had to deal with that. We're going to deal with it. And uh for those of you that have been involved in glossolalia and ecstatic utterance and speaking in tongues and so forth, not the tongues of the New Testament in the book of Acts, but uh something that was different at Corinth. Because as I've tried to show you, there is not two different gifts of tongues or three different gifts of tongues. The only time we know exactly what the gift of tongues is, and that by tongues, I wish we didn't even use that word because the word is language. That's the way we would say it. We wouldn't talk about tongues, we would talk about languages. Now, when we use that word tongue, we're using it in a metaphoric sense. And so I want you to understand that the New Testament gift of tongues is very clearly what happened on Pentecost and what happened at Cornelius House and what happened other places in the book of Acts is not ecstatic utterance and enthusiasm. It is indeed the supernatural ability to speak a foreign language that you have never studied before, previously studied, and God supernaturally endows you with the ability to do that, and that is the spiritual gift of tongues. We're going to look at Corinth more because it has a lot for us to learn from that city, and I hope to explain that to you. But what I want you to do is put some study into that this week. Look at Delphi, at the Oracle of Delphi, learn what that was, learn what happened there, and study Corinth. Not necessarily the biblical passages yet, but I want you to notice something. When it comes to spiritual gifts, there's only four primary passages in the New Testament on that, and we'll look at those tomorrow. I want you to understand that the longest passage on spiritual gifts is in 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14. And sandwiched right in the middle of that is the great love chapter. Why? Because the more gifted a congregation is, the more wealthy a congregation is, the more educated a congregation is, the more and greater is the need for everything and everyone there to operate in agape love. Because without that, then all that I just mentioned will turn into trouble. Well, that's all we have time for today. For On the Way, this is Tony Chris.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org, then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's Questions at Tony C R I S P dot.org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.