The Nature of Christian Freedom (Part 3 of 3)

The Bible encourages us to embrace freedom in Christ. But how do we find the narrow path between following rigid rules and becoming legalists, or acting like we're free to do whatever we choose? Today on Truth for Life, we'll see how the Apostle Paul addresses this issue, an issue all of us face as we seek to live out our Christian freedom. Alistair Begg is teaching from 1 Corinthians Chapter 8. Those of us who were present last time may recall that we found that there are two extremes which recur within the church of Christ and which are to be avoided. The first extreme is legalism.

The other extreme is what we refer to as license. The Bible offers to us neither legalism nor license as the way in which we would understand Christian freedom. But the verses before us, as with the rest of Scripture, provide for us the key to living within the framework of freedom. Now, in seeking to expound these verses, what I'd like to do is focus, first of all, on the facts which he provides. Fact number one you'll find in verse 4, an idol is nothing at all in the world. Now, the reason that that is significant is because in verses 1–3, he has been talking, he has introduced the subject, which is food sacrifice to idols.

And we saw that within the context of the Corinthian church, this was causing absolute chaos. Some people who were knowledgeable and mature were saying, Hey, listen, this is not a problem. You can buy food in any store. You can go to anybody's house. You can eat anything you want.

There's no such thing to be worried about. On the other hand, scrupulous individuals who were not as knowledgeable, who were not as mature, did not find themselves able to distance themselves from the issues of food offered to idols. And so Paul is now returning to the subject and says, So then about eating food sacrificed to idols, fact number one, we know that an idol is nothing at all in the world. Now, this was something very close to the heart of Paul, because when he had gone to Ephesus, which is recorded in Acts chapter 19, 24 and following, he had been the basis of a riot. And the reason the riot had broken out was because a fellow called Demetrius was making a bunch of money selling little silver shrines.

You may remember the story. And when Paul comes into town and proclaims the gospel, the lucrative business of Demetrius and his cronies begins to dry up. And so they endeavor to deal with this man and his strange teaching, and Demetrius gets his fellow craftsmen together, and he explains to them in these words.

Paul has convinced, he says, and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus. He says that man-made gods are no gods at all. So in other words, in his public proclamation, he was in accord with what he was prepared to instruct the Corinthians in in responding to the questions which had come to him by means of his letter. The psalmist says the same thing, Psalm 115 and verses 4–7. The psalmist is making the exact same point. Why did the nations say, Where is their God? He says, Our God is in heaven.

He does whatever pleases him. You see, the nations surrounding the people of God were saying, Hey, where are their gods? They don't have a god.

They would come in and they say, There's no shrines here. And if there are no shrines here and no symbols and no effigies and no statues and no altars, presumably they don't have a god at all. So the psalmist says, Oh yeah, we've got a god. Our God is in heaven. In contrast, he said, But their idols are silver and gold, made by the hands of men.

They have mouths but can't speak, eyes but can't see, ears but can't hear, noses but can't smell, hands but can't feel, feet but can't walk, nor can they utter a sound with their throats. Then look at this verse 8, Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them. This is tremendous stuff for the people who are living in the mainstream of our cities, surrounded by these idols that can either see or hear or walk or talk or feel or make sounds, and yet myriad people bowing down before them. Does the Bible speak to our day?

Yes, it definitely does. Fact number one, an idol is nothing at all. In the New Age phenomenon, God is conceived of as an impersonal force or as a creative energy. That, you will see, is in direct contrast to what Paul now enunciates, which is the second fact I want you to notice.

Number one, an idol is nothing in all the world. Number two, there is no god but one. He says it in verse 4.

He comes back to it at the beginning of verse 6. For us there is but one God, the Father from whom all things come and for whom we live, and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. This is one of the first things that Paul would ever have learned in all of his life. He would have learned immediately the Shema, and his father would have taken him at his knee, and he said, Now listen, Saul, this is what I want you to learn. The Lord our God is one.

Say that after me, Saul. And Saul would have repeated it at his father's knee, and that truth would have been burned into his life. And now as he has come to faith in Jesus Christ, he understands that his monotheistic understanding of God the Lord is embraced in Christ and in the Holy Spirit too. And that is what he affirms here in verse 6 as he ties together the deity of both the Father and the Son. The fact that the Holy Spirit is not mentioned in the verse should not be a concern to us.

It is not within the framework of his purpose. But he is here affirming this truth, that the Father and the Son are equal in status and in authority while they differ in function. Notice everything is from the Father, and we exist for the Father, while all things originated from the Father. Notice they came through the Son, and it is through the Son that we live. This is very, very important.

We may want to skip over it. But people say, well, I just know God. I mean, I was out on a mountainside, and I know God. Or I like to think of God in my own way.

I like to think of him as a cosmic genie. Or I know that God is an impersonal force. Or within the framework of the New Age, we are God. God is us. We are all God.

We are absorbed up in divinity. Now, what does the Bible say to that? The Bible says, not on your life, Charlie. Well, I mean, not literally it doesn't say that, but that's basically the message that it proclaims. No way, Hosea, it's not true. I mean, you may affirm it if you want, but it is not true.

That is a downright lie. It is a lie that comes from the evil one. For what we have—and there is only one God—he is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And it is through Christ that we come to the Father, and it is through Christ that we live in him. He who has the Son has life, and he who is not the Son of God does not have life. This life is in his Son, and by believing, we have life in his name.

Okay? Fact one, an idol is nothing at all. Fact two, there is no God but one.

Fact three, verse eight—and we're getting now to the heart of the matter concerning food—food does not bring us near to God. Now, we may immediately say to this, we look at this and say, well, of course, we knew that. I mean, that's a ridiculous idea.

Okay, but that's fine. So, you want to feel kind of snotty towards the Corinthians, do you? Like you know a lot more? There are a ton of people sitting out in an auditorium like this, and we've got all sorts of crazy notions about what brings us near to God. Some of us think that because we've had a good week, it brings us near to God.

I want to ask you a question. Do you think you're nearer to God when you've had a good week than when you had a bad week? Do you think you'll ever be more acceptable to God than you are tonight? You may be more useful, but you'll never be more acceptable, because our acceptance before God is in the person of Christ and on the basis of the work of Christ, which is a finished work, and all of our acceptance is right there.

So that on the day we stand before God, we'll still only have the same answer, no matter if we live to 150, and the answer is this. Jesus died for my sin. I'm a sinner. He died for me. That's all I've got to say, Father. And the Father say, that's all you need to say.

Let's go. These people were all messed up. They thought if they didn't eat the food, they were better.

If they ate the food, they were better, or they were worse, or whatever it was, they were horribly confused. So Paul says, well, let's just lay it down as a basic axiom. Food doesn't bring you near to God. And actually, the absence of food does not keep you from God.

Phillips again. Now, our acceptance by God, says J.B. Phillips, is not a matter of meat. If we eat it, that does not make us better men, nor are we the worse if we do not eat it. So that ought to put the issue in its place. But of course, it didn't put the issue in its place. It was a major issue. Because it had become, for these folks, absolutely central to their Christian thinking.

And so consequently, what was central had become peripheral. And that, of course, is the framework that happens so often amongst the family of God when it loses sight of the main issues. Fourth fact—because that one needs no further explanation—food doesn't bring you near to God.

The tiniest child that's here tonight can understand that. The fourth fact, in verse 12, is that when we sin against our brothers or our sisters, we sin against Christ. When you sin against your brothers in this way, which we'll come to in a moment, and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. What Paul is affirming here, and what we're about to understand, is that the issue of freedom is not simply a personal matter.

Both our attitudes and our actions have an impact upon our brothers and sisters. I wonder, when Paul wrote this verse—or maybe dictated it to his amanuensis, his scribe—I wonder if he wasn't actually thinking of how this had become real in his own experience. The fact is, he says, when you sin against your brothers in this way, you're sinning against Jesus. What was the discovery that he made on the Damascus Road? He was going down the road, and he was very devout. He thought that he was doing the best thing for God, stamping out these unruly Christians and these crazy people that were roaming the streets of Jerusalem and beyond. If anyone had interviewed him, he would have said, I am devout, I am religious, I am committed, and I'm going to put to death once and for all this spurious notion about Jesus of Nazareth, and a great light shines from the heaven, and he looks up, and the Word of God comes to him from the heavens, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute? Now, he didn't say, Why do you persecute the church?

He says, Why do you persecute me? And in that moment, Paul realized the nature of what it is to be a Christian. To be a Christian is to be in Christ. Therefore, when we offend against our brothers and sisters who are in Christ, we offend against Christ.

You see, none of us have any right to look down on each other. We may have personal preferences, we may have people we like better, or our personalities fit better than others, but we have got no mandate anywhere in Scripture to look down on a brother or a sister in Christ, because they are one for whom Jesus died. Believers are united with Christ. There is a high dignity in Christian calling.

My brother or my sister tonight is someone for whom Jesus died. There are no unimportant members of the body of Christ. We must remind ourselves that Jesus lives in all of them. And therefore, when we say, Oh, we've got freedom to do whatever we like, we need to recognize, well, no, we don't. We have got freedom to do what Jesus likes.

And what Jesus likes is when we treat one another the way that we would like to be treated by each other. So there is no place for the vicious blow, for the vigorous strike, which would wound the conscience of those who have not matured to the understanding of the knowledge concerning which Paul is affirming truth here. Now, the whole issue—you need to go up to verse 7—is simply this. Paul says, Not every Christian has come to a mature understanding of the subject of idols.

Isn't that what he's saying in verse 7? Some people, he says, are still so accustomed to idols. Their pre-Christian days were so marked by idol worship that when they come to this issue of food that may have come from the temple of an idol, they still think of idols as being real.

They can't completely shake off the thoughts and the associations. Their consciences are not yet strong enough to allow them to eat idol food without the possibility of it pulling them back to their former idolatrous activity. And consequently, he says in verse 10, If these people then, with a weak conscience and a limited level of maturity, see those who have come to a measure of maturity, eating in an idol's temple, won't he say they'd be tempted to eat what has been sacrificed to idols? Won't they be tempted to say, Oh, well, if he goes in the idol's temple, there's no reason why I can't? But, says Paul, there may be a reason why they can't. And the reason that they can't is because that they can't is because they can't handle it. And for them, then, to go and act in this mature way will only reveal the fact that their consciences are still so sensitized to what marked their past that it is impossible for them to go through that process, to eat in that temple, to attend that concert, to share in that meal, without that it brings them back to sinful thoughts, connected with their previous sinful practices, and may even be a temptation to draw them right back into that previous lifestyle. That's why, you see, verse 5 and the fact that it contains is both a corrective to the mature as well as being a comfort to the weak. We are no worse if we don't eat. That's a comfort to those who feel that they can't.

And we are no better if we do. That's a corrective to those who can. Let me go from the facts that are given to the application. Here it is in verse 9.

It's a straightforward application. We probably have been expecting it if we haven't noticed it by reading it. "'Be careful,' he says, "'that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak.'"

That's the application of this whole thing. It is, if you like, a word of warning. You must be careful that your freedom to eat meat does not in any way hinder anyone whose faith is not as robust as yours. That's his word of warning to the church. Remember again, in the first three verses, he says, knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. He says, I don't want you to get fat heads with your knowledge of what you can and cannot do.

I want you to grow, as it were, in your awareness of love, recognizing that love changes everything. And love circumscribes freedom. And Christian freedom is exercised within the framework of loving one another. And loving each other demands care that what we are realistically, truthfully, biblically free to do and will not be held accountable for doing, we may find that we are forced to restrict that freedom in order to apply the principle of 1 Corinthians 8.9, so as not to be a stumbling block. The strong, out of love, must readjust to bring on the weak and not the other way around. So we understand that things that might not otherwise be wrong for us become wrong if it is a stumbling block to the weak. Let the principle be the principle, and ask the Spirit of God to speak to you in your own life tonight about what it might mean.

Now, this begs a question which I know is in the minds of those who are still awake. And it is the question, well, how in the world does this prevent us—how in the world are we going to make progress at all towards maturity if every time anybody with the least jolly little scruple about anything puts up their hands and says, Excuse me, I can't do that? Does that mean that we've got to shut down the whole thing till this little guy finally gets with the program?

Maybe. But let me quote you, Calvin. Calvin discriminates between the weak who have a genuine concern—you know, a real, genuine conscience issue in their lives. He discriminates between the genuinely weak individual and those whom he calls tough giants who want to play the tyrant and put our freedom under their control. These individuals, he says, are not being led into sin by weakness. They are simply eager to find fault with others.

Okay? So there is a difference—and this is because it's for great spiritual wisdom, especially in relationship to the leadership of a church, just in the same way as the leadership within a home. You've got to know whether your child has got a genuine concern or whether they're trying to manipulate the family. And that's where you need spiritual discernment, and that's why God gives discernment to leadership in the church, because there will be some people who have a genuine conscience issue, but there will be other people who have never got off dead center ever in their lives. They're rigorous. They're legalists.

They're a pain in the neck, and all they ever want to do is find fault with everything that goes on that is different from whatever fifteen rules they got the day after they came to faith in Jesus Christ. And so, in other words, if you're going to go with that, you will eventually end up with a completely legalistic framework of life. If you let the pendulum swing all the other way, you're going to be involved in antinomianism and license and chaos. So we have the principle right here. Straightforwardly, in a sentence, we see this.

The actions of the strong must not be such as to afford a hindrance to the progress of those who are genuinely weak. Finally, from the facts to the application to Paul's testimony. Verse 13, Paul's conclusion maybe has a little bit of hyperbole in it.

Maybe not. What does he say? He says, If what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall. In other words, he's so concerned that he will present every man mature in Jesus Christ, he wants to make sure that he doesn't hinder the weaker brother. He sees how important it is that it is not his own rights but the wider responsibilities of the brotherhood which frame his activities. Love, he says, will restrict its liberty for the good of others. For some people, in relationship to secular literature, they've decided they're not going to read any more garbage secular literature—not because they're not free to read it, but because they don't want that to be an influence on those who are around them.

And some people have quit reading novels that they really enjoyed because they recognize its impact on another's life. And so many of the questionable things that have in some churches been listed with the ten regulations or in other churches are just completely ignored, and people say, Oh, we don't know, and who in the world cares? The Bible says they're going to have to be addressed on the basis of biblical principle.

And that's always a lot harder. Because people come in and they say, Tell me what to do. And our answer ought to be, Well, there's principles in here for you to apply. If there's a rule, we'll enforce it. If there's no rule, there'll be a principle. And if there's a principle, you're going to have to learn how to apply it. And none of us lives to ourselves, none of us dies to ourselves, and one day we will stand before God and we will give an account.

So don't fall into the trap of the ten things that you cannot say or do. Recognize that it is not true to suggest that the energetic Christianity of the New Testament envisages that the strong will be permanently shackled by the weak. Nevertheless, it does envisage that the strong will always act towards the weak with consideration and Christian love. Thereby, love changes everything, frames freedom, and introduces us to the reality of what it means to live in the power of the Holy Spirit.

You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. I hope you're enjoying our study in 1 Corinthians. To complement the instruction in this series, we want to recommend to you a book that's titled Gospel People, A Call for Evangelical Integrity. As we heard from Alistair today, the Apostle Paul warned believers against allowing the central issues to become peripheral. Paul frequently clarified the difference between man's instruction and God's instruction. He always pointed to Jesus and encouraged the church to hold firmly to the Gospel message. And the book we're recommending, Gospel People, instructs us to avoid being divided or diverted by secondary issues.

Instead, we are to stay focused on what Alistair often calls the main things and the plain things. Ask for your copy of the book, Gospel People, when you donate to support the ministry of Truth for Life. You can do that at truthforlife.org slash donate or call us at 888-588-7884. Thanks for studying God's Word with us today. The Apostle Paul taught that those who preach God's Word deserve to be supported by those who benefit from the preaching. So why didn't he claim this right when he was in Corinth? Join us tomorrow to find out. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.