Fleeing From Idolatry

Unpack Paul’s warning in 1 Corinthians 10:14–22 that idolatry divides our allegiance from God. While the Corinthians faced the specific temptation of participating in idol feasts, the deeper danger remains for us today: treasuring created things above the Creator. Because God alone deserves our total loyalty, we are called to flee from every form of idolatry and run to Christ, who remained faithful to us even when our hearts were divided.

Transcript

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The sermon text reading for today is 1 Corinthians chapter 10, verses 14 through 22. You can find this passage in the Sanctuary Bible on page 1742. Please listen as I read God's Word. Therefore, my dear friends, flee from idolatry. I speak to sensible people. Judge for yourselves what I say. Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body, for we all share the one loaf. Consider the people of Israel. Do not those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar? Do I mean then that food sacrificed to an idol is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God. And I do not want you to be participants with demons. 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. Are we trying to arouse the Lord's jealousy? Are we stronger than he? Here ends the reading. If I have not yet had the chance to meet you, my name is John, and I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood. Grateful to be together with you this morning. I don't know where you come from this morning or this week, all of you. Some of you have come out of great weeks, some of you have come out of difficulty, and uh no matter where you come from this morning and no matter what you're carrying with you, uh, we know that uh you're not here by accident. And so we uh trust God that he is going to speak to each one of us here this morning in the right way, and so we trust him for that. Uh if you are newer to Elmwood, uh whether this is your first time here or whether you are new-ish to Elmwood, uh, I want to invite you to something coming up in just a few Sundays called the Welcome Party. So on Sunday, June 7th, it's going to be right back in the fireside room, back through those uh glass doors there. It's just a chance to connect with other people who are new to Elmwood and learn about some next steps and ways to get connected. And so if you are newer to Elmwood, we'd love for you to join us and meet some other folks who are newer to Elmwood and uh some of our ministry leaders and others here at the church. With that, let me invite you to join me in a word of prayer as we come to these verses today. God, especially with a passage like this, we come to you confessing that we need your help. Sometimes there's things that we come across in the Bible that feel so foreign to us, and sometimes it uh feels difficult to understand. And so, God, we ask that you would be our teacher this morning. I ask God that you would take these words that I have prepared and that you would cause them to land on good soil. Lord, I ask that you would help all of us here to leave today, not just understanding what this passage says, but responding with a heart of gratitude for what you've done for us in Jesus. God provide each one of us here today exactly what we need. And as always, we look to you for these things. Pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Uh we have been in a series of messages going through the letter that we call 1 Corinthians. We have today and next week, and then we'll be taking a break for the summer. I'm taking a eight-week sabbatical this summer, so I'll be gone, and we'll be going on to some other message series during the summer, and then we'll come back to pick up in chapter 11 at some point in the future. But we've been in this series looking at this letter that we call 1 Corinthians, and it's a letter where the man named Paul, who planted or established this church community in the city of Corinth, he's writing letters back and forth with them to address a number of problems that exist in this church community. If you spend any time reading this book, you pretty quickly realize that this is kind of a messed-up church. They're wrestling with and dealing with all sorts of different things, and Paul is writing to them in order to help them see how the good news about Jesus is what changes and transforms those different areas of their life. So he's showing them how the good news is the solution to all of these different problems that they face, whether it's uh sin or idolatry or whatever the problems are that they face, he points them to Jesus and how seeing and truly believing the good news of the gospel, of who Jesus is and what he's done for us, is the answer, is how they can experience life transformation and life change. So that's what this letter is really about. And we have been in this section in chapters eight through ten. And uh, in this part of the letter, chapters eight through ten form one sort of unit in the letter, and it's here that uh he's been talking about some things that to us can feel culturally foreign, but as we've been seeing and as we'll see today, are very relevant to our modern context as well. So, what I want to do today is I want to look at this passage you heard read and try and pull back some of the layers to get to sort of the the heart or the core of what Paul is talking about and addressing within this church community. So, on the surface, as we have been talking about, what we see is that what Paul's addressing is this that they are consuming food sacrificed to idols. This is where it feels really weird and foreign to us, because we just don't have this type of thing in our cultural environment, at least in the same way. But some of those who were members of the Church of Corinth were going to participate in what are called idol feasts. So, what happened was there were these banquets that would take place in these temples to other gods, the gods of the Roman Empire, and these Corinthians were going to banquets that were hosted inside of those temples, and they were consuming food that had been offered in sacrifice to the gods of that temple. And so Paul is writing to them in this section of the letter saying, guys, you can't do this. You must not participate in these idol feasts. Not because the food is bad, you know, not because the meat is undercooked or doesn't taste good, but because in doing so, they are participating in idolatry. And so this is the second level down. So on the surface, he's talking about food sacrifice to idols, but that's not really the main issue. Beneath the surface of that is the issue of idolatry, where he's saying you cannot be present and participate in this kind of thing without having a share in what is actually happening. He says that by participating in these idol feasts and consuming of this food that's been sacrificed to idols, he says that they are actually joining in and participating in the idolatry that's taking place in that temple. So they're eating food that's offered in sacrifice to idols, but underneath that is what's really happening is idolatry. But we can go one level deeper, and this is what we see in our passage today, where Paul tells us that in idolatry, their allegiance is divided. In their idolatry, their allegiance, their loyalty is being divided. So, Paul, as we look at these verses, what we see today is that he wants the Corinthians and he wants us to see the allegiance dividing power of idolatry. The allegiance dividing power of idolatry. That's what we're going to spend our time thinking about and exploring today. And I think the place we need to start as we come to a passage like this that can feel so culturally foreign to us with maybe ideas or practices that don't make any sense to us is I think it's it's helpful for us to sort of pull back a little bit and begin by looking at the the principle that is behind Paul's thinking here. Okay, and that principle is this God demands and he deserves our total allegiance. Now, Paul doesn't explicitly say those words in this passage, but he doesn't have to, because we know that Paul was he was thoroughly steeped in the Hebrew Bible, which is what we call the Old Testament. And because the Old Testament is steeped with this idea that God both demands and deserves our total allegiance, we know that this is something that was just in Paul's mind, in sort of in the background as he was writing this. Now, this is uh this idea that God both demands and deserves our allegiance and our loyalty is something that is uh it's all over the entire Bible. But there's uh one place I want to bring you to uh briefly to show you uh maybe the clearest and most well-known example of this, and then we actually find it in the Ten Commandments. So the Ten Commandments are found in the book of Exodus, and it's in the book of Exodus we see that God uh delivered his people from slavery in Egypt, he brought them to Mount Sinai in the wilderness, and he brought them there so that he could enter into a covenant relationship with them. He entered into a covenant partnership with them. And at Mount Sinai, he entered that relationship, he committed himself to them, and then the expectation on the other side of that was that they would express their exclusive loyalty only to him. And we see this in commandment number one. Okay, you don't have to read far in the Ten Commandments to find this, where the first commandment is, you shall have no other gods before me. Now, in the ancient world, it was normal and it was even expected that you would offer sacrifices to multiple different gods for multiple different reasons. So each city and each region had its own set of gods or deities. There were gods for work and for different areas of vocation, and gods for things like fertility and for wealth and for gods of war and gods of, you know, for just about everything. And so this was this was the cultural and religious air that the people breathed. And so it was just expected, it was normal that everyone offered sacrifices to numerous different gods depending on what you wanted to get from those gods. So that was the world that they lived in. No one in the ancient world had just one God, but Yahweh, the God of the Bible, demanded the exclusive allegiance of those who were in relationship with him. He said, You will have no other gods besides me. Not only did he demand their exclusive worship and allegiance, he also, the Bible says, deserves it. The Bible says that God created us not because he was lonely or in need of something from us. You know, it's not like God was caught up in a kind of cosmic boredom and he, you know, felt like he'd, you know, needed some affirmation, and so he'd create some people that would, you know, worship him and say nice things. No, the Bible says God did not create us because he needed something or because he was lonely or because he was bored, but it was out of the overflow of his triune love that he created us so that we could share in the goodness of his created world and to have part of and to share in the very life and love of the triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit that has existed for all of eternity. That is why God created us. And the Bible, the whole story of the Bible shows us time and time again that he is loving, and that he is compassionate, and that he is kind and he is generous, and he is good, and he is just and he is faithful. And every single story you come across in the Bible, I guess some of them are confusing, some of them it can be difficult maybe to see this, but every single one of the stories we come across in the Bible tells us another reason why he is worthy, why he deserves our allegiance, and why he deserves our loyalty. Every single story tells us. So not only does he demand our worship, because he created us and we belong to him and he owns us, not only does he demand our worship, the Bible also says that he deserves it. And that's the that's the principle that sort of is is underneath the surface of what Paul is writing here, and it's with that in mind that we can understand why Paul is so concerned about the idolatry of those who are in the city of Corinth. And it's because idolatry divides our allegiance. That's what idolatry does. Idolatry divides our allegiance. Uh, we see this in these uh verses here. Let me look into this with you. So this passage that you heard read this morning is uh it falls into two parts. There's verses 14 to 17, and then verses 18 through 21. And there's a word, maybe you were you heard this as the text was being read, there's a word that is repeated uh many times. I think it's five in these verses, and it's a word that ties it all together, and it's the word participation. Participation is the word that is repeated throughout this. And what Paul is doing in these two sort of uh sets of verses here is he's comparing, he's making a comparison between two different meals. Did you hear that? When it was read? So in verse 16 and 17, he says this. He says, Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body, for we all share one loaf. So here's what he's doing. He's he's pointing us to the Lord's table or to the communion meal, which we have to remember was uh in the first entry world, it was not a small little cup of juice and a cracker, it was a full meal. It was based on the Passover meal. And so he points to the Lord's table or to this communion meal, and he says, At this meal, food and drink are consumed. And the result of that consumption of food and drink is that there's participation that happens. He says there's participation with Christ. He says, When you drink the cup, you're participating in the blood of Christ. When you eat the bread, you're participating in the body of Christ. So food and drink are consumed, and the result of that is participation. Then in verse 20, he describes a different meal, and he's talking about the these idol feasts that these Corinthians were participating in, and he says this in verse 20: the sacrifices of pagans, that is, those who are not Jewish, who don't worship the God of the Jewish people, the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God. And I do not want you to be participants with demons. 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. So he points to a different meal, which is the idol feast that they're participating in. And notice he says that the same exact things are true of both of these meals. On the one hand, the Lord's table, he says, food and drink are consumed, participation is the result, and he says, the same is true with these idol feasts. Food and drink is consumed, and the result is participation, but the object is different. They're not participating in or being joined to uh God or Christ, they're being uh joined to uh demons, he says. Uh uh demonic spiritual forces. Uh uh What is what is this word, this word participation that he uses? It says you have participation with Christ, you have participation with with these demons. Uh what does that even mean? Uh let me just uh do my best to try and uh uh get to the root of this. Uh the Greek word that is underneath that English translation of the word participation, which the NIV does a great job of translating the same word with the same English word, so you can see that this is the same thing he's talking about. Okay. So the Greek word underneath the English word participation is a word that some of you have have heard of before. It's the Greek word koinania. And this is a word that uh it sort of its generic sense, it means fellowship. And so sometimes in the Bible you'll you'll see this translated as fellowship, and that's a good translation, except for the fact that most of us think of like surface-level social gatherings when we hear the word fellowship. Okay? And for those of us who maybe grew up in the church, we think of, well, fellowship is like when you get together and there's cookies and there's tea and there's things like this, and you just kind of hang out with people. And it's a sort of surface-level social interaction, and that's sort of what comes to our minds when we think of fellowship, but it's so much deeper than that. So uh let me just try and put some uh visuals to this. Uh when you go to the state fair, if you're a state fair person, and you go to the state fair, you are there in that same space with like a million people all at the same time. And there is no koinania that you share with those people. Okay? You're in close proximity to all these people, but the only thing you share is a love for large crowds and overpriced food. Okay? That's all the state fair is. Kidding, it's better than whatever. I've offended all the state fair people, so there's no koinania at the state fair. But on the other hand, think about it like this the relationships that are forged when you take a road trip across the country with friends from high school, in that road trip environment, koinania happens. I want to show you a picture from uh when I did this. This uh goes way back into the you know the annals of John's life. You could see what I was like in high school, okay? Uh so I took a road trip with some of my friends and we left at like five in the morning. So it was miserable, everyone was tired, I took the first shift of driving. So we're driving, and everyone else in the car is sleeping. And so, what did high school me think was a good idea? Was to take this picture. All three of us are sleeping. We're not, because I had to take the picture. I close my eyes for a second, okay? We were in Iowa, so even if I drove off the road, we wouldn't have hit anything, anyways. So it's not like it was all that unsafe, but that's the kind of stuff uh high school me did. And those dudes who are sleeping in the car, some of those guys I still talk to and hang out with. There's a kind of uh bond, uh a relationship, a partnership that you experience through an experience like that. Or think about college roommates. The people that you uh get to be college roommates with, some of you either do now or will one day still vacation with those college roommates 10 years after the fact. That's koinania that you have with them. Think about someone who was by your side the entire time through a crisis, who is with you, maybe when others weren't. You share a bond with that person, a kind of fellowship, a koinanea with that person. So that's really what is at the heart of this. It's it's a relational connection. It's more than just we occupy the same space, it's a it's a kind of partnership. A bond is created between you. That's what koinanea is. And the Bible says we were designed for, we were created for koinanea with God. We were designed for relationship, for that level of intimacy and fellowship with Him. And what Paul is trying to help these Corinthians see here is that by participating in idolatry, they are offering themselves in koinonia to demons. By offering themselves, by participating in idolatry, they are offering themselves willingly in a kind of fellowship and participation with that which is opposed to God. That's what he says is taking place here. And he says, You share fellowship with Christ when you participate in this meal, when you participate in this kind of thing, you Share participation. You're forging participation with demonic spiritual forces by participating in this kind of idolatry. He makes it very clear that they cannot share in the table of the Lord and the table of demons at the same time. You can't have both. And this idolatry is dividing their allegiance. He's saying, you're not just being you're not loyal to me. You're becoming loyal to these things over here instead of me. God demands and he deserves our total allegiance, and idolatry divides that allegiance. And this is why Paul is so spend so much time trying to address this with this church in Corinth, because by participating in idolatry, they are sabotaging the very thing for which they were created. They were created for fellowship and for relationship with God, and they are forging relationship with something else through this idolatry, and he won't let them do it. What's important for us to remember as we read this is that what Paul talks about here with this food sacrifice to idols, this is one example of idolatry. Okay? Keep this in mind, because if you're like me, your instinct, when you read a passage about eating food that's been sacrificed to an idol in a temple, you're like, next page, please, what does this have to do with me? I don't feel tempted to do that. This has nothing to do with me. And so it feels like this is sort of irrelevant for us. But the reality is that it is not irrelevant for us. If you've been around Elmwood for just about any length of time, you know that we talk about idolatry uh somewhat regularly. And uh we we we try to come back to sort of the heart and the essence of what idolatry actually is. Because in the modern Western world, we tend to immediately dismiss the idea that like we ever commit idolatry because we've sort of narrowly defined it as, well, it's when you bow down to statues that are idols, or it's when you, you know, like them, you you go to these feasts, you know, or it's when you use a Ouija board, or it's when you do tarot cards or whatever the thing is that you might associate with that, and we think, well, I don't do that. So therefore, idolatry isn't a thing that is important for me, it's not a thing that I need to think about. But what we regularly try to do is come back to the essence of what idolatry is and be reminded that idolatry is not first about, you know, offering ourselves in, you know, prostrating ourselves before little statues. It's treasuring anything in creation above the creator. That's the heart of what idolatry is. So uh idolatry is not first a matter of our behavior, it's first a matter of our heart. Sin and idolatry cannot narrowly be defined as when you do bad things. Idolatry is first a matter of misplaced worship, misplaced affection. It's looking to something that is not God to provide for you what only God can and is designed to provide for you. And that's what idolatry is. And if that's what idolatry is, it means that this whole conversation about what Paul says here is not off the table for us. It's not irrelevant for us. The connection that I think uh this helps us make in the modern world is this. When we choose idolatry, we allow the allegiance dividing influence of demonic forces into our lives. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, uh, that's some good pastoral hyperbole right there. You know? Uh you may think that when Paul writes this, you're like, man, just calm down. Everything's gonna be fine. It's not as bad as you think. Like, just don't make this into a bigger thing than it is. I I would like to make the case, just like very briefly, that I'm not making this out to be something bigger than it is. I promise you, it is every time I stand up here, I fight against making things bigger than they need to be, because that's how you can get a point across, but it often isn't helpful. Okay, so I don't want to make this to be a bigger thing than it is. I just think the text makes us realize that this is a bigger thing than we oftentimes think it is. The Bible says that there is a spiritual dimension to our world that we cannot see with our naked eyes, but that is as real as the material things that we are able to see. And within that spiritual world, there are spiritual beings that exist. And some of those spiritual beings have rebelled against God, live in opposition to God and to his purposes, and the Bible names those spiritual beings. It says that those spiritual beings are called demons. And we see all throughout the Bible, we see in the ministry of Jesus, he's uh sort of driving back these demonic spiritual forces. These demons, as they're called in the Bible, are in the most literal sense of the word, they are anti-Christ, meaning they are against Christ. They are against God, they are against his purposes in the world, they are against you. If you belong to God, even if you're here today and you're not a follower of Jesus, those demonic spiritual forces would love to keep you from knowing the one who created you. They would love to ruin your life and to shipwreck you. Those demonic spiritual forces have some amount of influence in our world, the Bible says. And what Paul is getting at here is that when we choose idolatry, we surrender to those, to that demonic influence. When we choose idolatry, our allegiance with God and other things is divided, it's fractured, and in doing so, we give ourselves in a kind of partnership with that which opposes God. That's what's taking place when we commit idolatry. And so this is no small thing that he is getting at here. So just think about this uh the example of the idolatry of approval. Okay, this is one of those uh very ubiquitous. It's it's it's everywhere. The idolatry of approval. Right? We are hardwired by God to desire people to see us and to know us and to affirm us. It's built into us by God. And we are designed so that God is the one whose voice over us is supposed to have the final say in what we actually believe is true about us. But so often we find ourselves because God's voice maybe doesn't feel as we don't often feel it in the same way we feel when someone else says something nice about us. We end up looking to other people and to other places for that sense and that source of approval. And the evil one wants nothing more than for you to treasure human approval over God's. Those demonic spiritual forces want nothing more than for you to doubt his love for you, and to doubt his affection for you, and to doubt the affirmation that he has spoken over you in Christ, they want nothing more than to lead you to question what God has spoken and to question what God has made clear. Paul is saying here that when we feel the pull of the idolatry of approval, and you could enter any other form of idolatry here, okay, there's idolatry of money and possessions and security and safety and approval and politics and pleasure, and there's all sorts of other things where we look to those things to provide for us, but only God can. And Paul is saying that anytime we look to something besides God, any time we commit idolatry, we can be certain that that pull we feel is demonically inspired. That there are demonic spiritual forces that would love to lead you away from the one who loves you, that would love to lead you away from Christ. If we take what Paul says seriously, it means that when we idolize something like approval or whatever else it is, we are allowing that allegiance, dividing influence of those demonic spiritual forces to be at work in our lives. We give them room to take up residence. When we feast at the table of idolatry, whatever brand of idolatry you find yourself most drawn to. When we feast at the table of idolatry, we surrender to something that is by nature demonic. It is opposed to God and his purposes in the world. We give ourselves in koinonia to those things that are opposed to God. That's what idolatry is, that's what idolatry does. And the scary part about this whole thing is that this stuff is so subtle, isn't it? You know, when we think of uh our interaction with things that we would consider maybe demonic, you know, you may have in your mind, like you think of the exorcism movie, and like, well, people's heads are gonna spin around and furniture is gonna fly across the room and lights are gonna turn on and off by themselves, and you think like, well, that's what demonic activity looks like. And Paul is saying, do you realize that when you give your affections to something or someone besides God, that is a demonically inspired thing that you're doing, and you're participating in something that is by nature opposed to God and his ways in the world and his plan for you? It's not just the crazy stuff. So, what do we do with all this? Uh the answer that Paul gives us here in verse 14 is pretty clear. He says, flee from idolatry. Flee from it. Pretty much no one flees from something that's good. You flee from things that are dangerous, you flee from things that will threaten you. And Paul's telling us, flee from this. You have to recognize the danger that exists in giving yourself to these things. We must take it seriously and we must flee from it. And as we do so, there's there's two sides to that. So the first side is that we flee from idolatry. Okay, obviously, he says it here. Flee from it. And what that means is that we need to continually become the kinds of people who are vigilant, the kinds of people who are thoughtful and honest about ourselves and about our motives and about the condition of our hearts and the things that our hearts are drawn to, and the degree to which we love those things. We have to be the kinds of people who do the hard work, and it is hard work of identifying idolatry where it exists in our lives, not if it exists in our lives. We have to identify it, we have to uproot it, we have to kill it, we have to fight it at any time we see it, and at any cost, we must fight against it because it will ruin us. And so we have to be people who flee from idolatry. We have to be the kind of people that will be willing to ask ourselves questions like In what ways is my loyalty divided? What are the things that I love too much? In what areas do I feel most tempted to find what I need in the creation rather than the creator? So, yes, we have to flee from idolatry, but this is not a this is not a just flee from something. The other side of this is that we flee towards something as well. We flee from idolatry and we flee to Christ. We flee towards the one who is worthy of our allegiance to Christ, the one who is worthy of our loyalty, our undivided loyalty, because he remained loyal to us. In the last part of his life, Jesus, he was with his disciples, and they very sort of arrogantly and ignorantly, especially Peter in this situation, opened their mouths and said, you know, Peter says, Well, if everyone else deserts you, I never will, Jesus. I will die with you. I will die for you if I have to. And then at the very first sign of the slightest bit of opposition, some little servant girl is like, Hey, aren't you, weren't you with Jesus? And he's like, I don't know the man. And you're like, okay, so where was where was that, Peter? You know, where was all the enthusiasm you had just like a few verses ago when you said that you would die with him? At his moment of greatest need, Jesus' own disciples, the one who spent three years in the flesh with him, they all disowned him. They promised their loyalty to him, and they failed. They were not loyal to him. They were not faithful to him. And in spite of that, Jesus was still faithful to them. Jesus went all the way to the cross and he suffered and he died for people just like Peter. Four people just like the rest of the disciples. Four people just like us whose loyalties are so divided, and we may want to do the right thing. And by God's grace, so many of us do want to do the right thing, and we still find ourselves pulled into the trap of idolatry. We find ourselves loving things that we shouldn't love or loving them too much. The good news is that in spite of our sin and in spite of our unfaithfulness and our disloyalty, he remains loyal to us. He remained faithful. And at the cross, we see that God is unwaveringly loyal to us. He's unwaveringly loyal to us. And so the response is not only to flee from idolatry, but to flee to him. Flee to Christ, find refuge in him, find forgiveness, not just for your past idolatry and sin, but for the idolatry and the sin that you will commit in the future. Flee from idolatry. Flee from free flee to Christ. One of the ways that we can respond to Paul's instruction to flee from idolatry and to flee to Christ is what we do each week here at Elmwood is we come to the communion table. And we get to share in the very meal that Peter, Paul, who wrote this book? Paul. We get to share in the very meal that Paul was talking about here. And it's in participating in this meal that we get to share a kind of fellowship and union and koinania with Christ. So we're going to come to the communion table now. I invite you to take a few moments of silence for confession and reflection. And if you're here today and you've never made a decision to follow Jesus, why not make today the day that you choose to follow Him and get to experience life together with Him? But take a few moments of silence and confession, and then we will come remember Christ at the communion table.