For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor
rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor
depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the
love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
1 Corinthians 10:23-24
& Romans 8:38-39
I want to skip ahead to Paul’s
conclusions about eating food sacrificed to idols. He began by explaining that
knowledge alone could not create understanding and inform behaviour; he concludes by
explaining that all things are lawful but not necessarily helpful or
constructive. In the intervening passages, he seems to digresses but he does so
to fully explain and illustrate his conclusions. I think it useful to now
reflect on those conclusions, so that when we reflect on the points he
makes in the ‘digressions’ we might better understand how to apply them to our own lives.
I hope you will see what I mean by the end of the series.
‘All things are lawful’. Modern translators tend to
put the phase in quotation marks because it seems likely that Paul is quoting
back to his readers their own conclusion and agreeing with it. At least, he
agreed as far as it went.
By ‘all things’ Paul simply meant everything. The
original Greek word is used in the New Testament over 1,000 times and can be
translated many ways, such as each, every, any, everything together, the whole.
The precise scope of what the word means in any sentence depends on the context
but throughout the letter Paul uses it in a way that implies everything
in all creation. This is particularly clear towards the end of his letter, in 1
Corinthians 15:24-28, when he explains how God has made ‘all things’ subject to
Jesus Christ – the only things being excluded being God (that is, God the
Father) himself! There was, however, a naturalness – or a natural aspect – to
‘all things’ that will become clear tomorrow.
It seems to me that the Christians in Corinth had
become too confident in their belief that nothing could separate them from the
love of God. They were sure that they could not lose their salvation, and I
think they were right to be sure, but they overlooked a lot of other things that could happen.
While God would continue to love them, they could lose his favour and fall out
of fellowship with him. They would continue to be ‘Christian’, and it would
not be in name only but with a future in heaven assured to them, but they could
lose both the ability to help others see the truth about Jesus and the future
that God had planned for them.
Their theology had become too sophisticated and
they needed to ‘get real’.
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Scripture
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Handling
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