All to the Glory of God

So we are entering into lesson five of the Corinthian Letters series, and while chapters five through seven of First Corinthians related to sexual issues, in chapter eight through ten, Paul moves to issues related to idolatry.

So the big issue addressed in our lesson today is how does the church relate to a society where idolatry is the norm? All right, that was the case in Corinth.

Idolatry was the norm.

That's what people basically considered to be everyday life, normal life that people would experience.

All right, so the situation was this.

Every Roman city had a temple for pagan worship, often worship of the emperor and worship of pagan gods.

And so you had two issues facing the church.

First of all was the issue of feasts in the church.

If your neighbor wanted to get married, for example, the temple not only had worship services, but they had a catering service, and it had a Michelin star, you know? So a lot of people were simply having their weddings, having significant events, birthdays, whatever, in the temple, and that was the norm.

How should a Christian relate to that? Is it okay to enter a pagan temple for what in your mind are secular purposes? Okay, the second issue that they are faced with was that the sacrifices in the temple would, of course, be blessed by the idol, et cetera, and then the food, the meat, et cetera, would not be segregated as such.

It would just go out into the meat market.

And if you were shopping for chops or whatever, there was no label on it says, "This was blessed by the temple." It simply says, "This is meat," you know, "You want it or don't you?" So the issue that faced Christians there as well is, should you make that distinction between, you know, idol meat and stuff that was done in the farm outside of town? How should Christians relate to that? So those are the issues that face the church.

And so is it okay to attend the temple for what in your mind are secular purposes? Is it okay to eat food that may have been sacrificed and blessed in the temple? So there seemed to have been three types of Christians in how they related to this.

There were Christians that would do neither.

They would not enter the temple, neither would they buy their food in the regular marketplace.

They would either get it locally sourced at some farm somewhere, or they would be vegetarians.

So there were people in the church who said no to both of those.

There were others in the church who said yes to both of those.

An idol is nothing, you know.

What's the big deal here? If I'm going in there for a wedding, that doesn't hurt anybody.

A second attitude was that, you know, food in the market, you don't know, it doesn't matter.

Just, you know, the fact that it was in the temple is meaningless in terms of the quality of the food.

So you had Christians who would do neither, Christians who would do both, and there were some that would say, "Eh, entering the temple, not good, but food in the market, who cares?" kind of a thing.

So you had three different opinions.

Paul seems to kind of go the middle route here.