The Bible clearly warns that idols are ultimately worthless false gods.
So why did the Apostle Paul also warn Christians about the dangers of making pagan sacrifices even though Christians don't believe in pagan gods? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg investigates the dangerous force behind idolatry. Now, to 1 Corinthians chapter 10, and when you get your Bible open on your lap, let's pause for a moment and bow in prayer once again. Lord, we have spoken to you in prayer. We have praised you in our song. And now we come to these moments when we believe that you will speak to us in a way that is beyond simply the voice of a man. And so we pray for alertness, that our minds may be engaged, that our hearts may be stirred, that our wills may be challenged, and that our lives may be renewed. For Jesus' sake.
Amen. We're returning to the portion of Scripture that we were looking at last time in 1 Corinthians 10. We said then that we're dealing with one of the dangers of freedom, of which he addresses three in this chapter, having dealt with the danger of presumptuousness and about to deal with the danger of legalism, to which we will come again. He now, in verses 14–22, is dealing with the danger of compromise. The context is such that some of the Corinthians were apparently taking their freedom in questionable matters just a bit too far. And as a result of that, they were flirting with idolatry. Paul consequently warns them in no uncertain terms that—and you'll see this in verse 21—"they just can't have things both ways."
You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too. We saw last time that the approach that he takes is warm. Verse 14, he calls them his dear friends. The approach that he takes is directive. He is urging them not to any kind of leisurely contemplation of sin, but rather to run from it and to run from it quickly. His approach is also an encouraging one in that he seeks from them not their blind submission but rather that they would use their critical faculties as intelligent people. And that was and remains a reminder to us of the way in which the Word of God should be proclaimed and the way in which the Word of God should be received. The picture of the people of God under the Word of God is not a congregation under the Scriptures proclaimed by a man, but is the man and the congregation all underneath the Scriptures given by God. Therefore, it falls to those who proclaim the Word of God to constantly be calling the listeners to think.
And that is exactly what Paul does. In verse 15, he says, I speak to you as sensible people think. And then he asks a question in the opening part of verse 16. Then he asks a second question in the second half of verse 16, and then he provides an explanation in verse 17. And in point of fact, this is a pattern which I found in this little section, insofar as now from verse 18 to the end, he does the exact same thing all over again. He says, Think, then he has a question, then he has another question, then he has an explanation, and it's over. It's pretty good.
At least it was helpful to me. So, let's pick it up at verse 18, where he says, Think. The word that he uses here is actually consider. Consider, he says, the people of Israel. The people of Israel, the Jews, had a sacrificial system which centered at the great altar in the temple of Jerusalem. This sacrifice in Jerusalem, in this place, was one in which everyone was involved. And they were involved on three levels. They were involved with their offering, they were involved with God, and they were involved with one another.
So he says, I want you to think about that, and then he immediately follows it with his question number one. Do not those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar? Now, you remember last time we said this word, participation, communication, koinonia, meant something far more than some superficial celebration of that which was external, but rather it was a heart-level exercise of faith and commitment to be involved in this way. And so he said, When the Israelites sacrificed to the LORD, they participated in it by eating. And when they ate the sacrifices in so doing, they were sharing in everything for which the altar stood. They were participants. They were communicants. It was far more than some mere ordinary eating that nourishes the body. If you've been following the news this week, you would notice the judgment that was sent down by the high court or the Supreme Court concerning the group of people who were offering animal sacrifices in the course of their worship.
And when interviewed, it was very clear that those people knew what they were doing. They were not prepared simply to say that this was an external thing. No, they said, What we're doing is our communion. We cannot let this go.
We must do this. Because when we participate in this way, we express who we are, what we are, and what we believe. And interestingly enough, the only people that had much to say about it were animal rights activists.
But that's another subject altogether. The fact of the matter is, they understood what was involved in terms of participation, and that's exactly what he's saying about Israel. To eat for an Israelite was to be part of all the benefits that were being represented—the benefit of forgiveness, the benefit of membership of God's people, the benefit of growing in grace and in holiness. Indeed, we could say quite simply that any Israelite who refused to eat of the sacrifices would thereby disassociate himself from the altar and therefore disassociate himself from everything that was associated with it. Now, Paul's argument is very clear and very important.
The issue, he says, is not abstract and external, but it is actually actual and internal. When we share in communion, you don't get a good meal, right? You don't even get a snack. So it doesn't nourish you physically. If we share in communion without any spiritual participation, it doesn't do anything to us spiritually either.
So it's facile and useless. For we neither get fed physically nor do we get fed spiritually. That's why it is a nonsense to participate in it without first having participated in the reality of who Christ is and what he's done. Now, he says, when you think of the Israelites, they understood that perfectly.
They knew what they were doing in the sacrificial system, and they understood it. Question number two then follows. Verse 19. And here he is anticipating a deduction that some might make, and it would be a false deduction.
They might deduce, on the basis of what he's saying, that these idols were reality. And so he asks the question. Typical lawyer. Very, very good. Sets up the question first, and then he answers it.
It's excellent work. We can learn from this. Do I mean then that a sacrifice offered to an idol is anything or that an idol is anything? Now, the readers must immediately say to themselves, good question, that's what we wanted to ask you. Because it sounds as though what you're leading towards is an application of this truth that demands our conclusion in that way. We're supposed to assume, presumably, that since you're so concerned about idolatry, that this idolatry stuff must be real, because you keep using this word participation, and you're driving to this conclusion. So Paul, recognizing that they may be thinking he's about to contradict what he said in verse 4 of chapter 8, where he said so then about eating food sacrificed to idols, we know that an idol is nothing at all in all the world and that there is no God but one. Well, he said that in chapter 8. Now, is he saying something different in chapter 10? So his question is this. Am I implying that a false God really exists, or am I suggesting that that which is sacrificed to any God has some value?
Now, once again, will you notice that he appeals to the sense and sensibilities of the Christian people? Think it out, he says. Do I mean this?
Do you think I mean this? In other words, just don't open your head up like some kind of old cookie box or cookie jar and wait for me to shovel stuff in. That's the stuff that cults are made of.
That's the stuff that silliness is made of. He says, You'd better come, and you'd better use what you've got in that cookie jar stuck on the top of your shoulders, and you'd better use it properly. Think this out. Then comes his explanation in verse 20.
No, he says. An idol is no God at all. But we need to realize that at the same time, such idols cannot safely be treated simply as blocks of wood or lumps of stone. It's a great mistake, he is saying, to assume that behind an idol there is just a vacuum. Because in point of fact, something far more terrible than a pseudogod or pseudogods really exists behind idols. So while I want you to know that the idol itself is simply a block of wood that may be chopped up and burned or a lump of stone that may be taken and thrown in a cellar, behind all idols—whether statues or the idols of our minds and the making of idols in the culture of the late twentieth century—behind all idols is a force far more significant than a God that doesn't exist.
Now, what is this force? He says it is a demonic force. What the Bible proclaims, and clearly is this, that there are legions—lots of them—fallen angels who are under the malevolent rule of Satan. Their total existence is about one thing—destroying, if they could, and hindering, while they may, the work of God and the progress of the people of God. And it is these demons or these fallen angels that are the force behind all idolatry. Therefore, all altars, all sacrifices, all worship that is set up without the intention of worshiping the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—although not necessarily consciously and deliberately all such worship—is ultimately, says Paul, the worship of demons.
Now, you need to understand this, loved ones, this morning. There are only two sources from which this stuff may come. It either comes from Christ and is marked by truth, or it comes from Satan and is marked by error. Therefore, I don't care how nice the building looks in which the people go. I don't mind how religious they are in their expressions of devotion. If their understanding of the gospel is less than the gospel, and if their worship is not the worship of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, then no matter how well-intentioned they may be, no matter how upright they may be, no matter how moral they may be, many of them do not know that they are actually involved in demonic activity. We cannot have places that deny the deity and substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ involved in worship without that worship actually and ultimately being idolatry, and the significance of the idolatry is the fact that behind it is demonic activity. If you wonder why the church is in the state it's in today, you've got to think through 1 Corinthians 10 verses 14 to 22. When men and women pay homage to idols, believing it to represent a God, or even believing them to be nothing at all—because you've got both groups—well, they'll say to you, I don't believe there's anything here. I just do it, but I don't believe anything is in it. Some will say, Oh yes, I believe that we are worshiping somebody who got channeled from the past, and they reincarnate themselves at various points in history, and I believe that.
Absolutely junky. It's bogus, you see. But Satan is glad to send one of his emissaries to make sure that when the worshiper shows up, they're not disappointed. Because they encounter something. They don't encounter the stone. They don't encounter a vacuum.
They encounter a spiritual energy, just in the same way as the Corinthians were encountering this in their expressions of idolatrous worship. They were saying to Paul, You said we're free. Hey, we're free. We can go here. Our heart isn't into it.
It doesn't matter. Paul says, Don't be so stupid. What is happening in there is not simply something which may be dismantled and recreated in another place. What is happening in there is from the pit of hell itself. It is demonic.
Now, that is why, you see, since behind the unreality of idols, there exists the reality of demonic activity. That's why when Paul writes to the Ephesians in Ephesians 6—and you should just turn to it in case you're not familiar with this portion of Scripture—in Ephesians chapter 6, what does Paul tell us? He urges us to put on the armor. He urges us to be strong in the Lord. Because, in verse 12, he explains, we're not struggling against flesh and blood. But we're struggling against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. I put it to you this morning that this is not fully dawned, I don't think, on the twentieth-century church. Because we're still out fighting with cannons on the ground and neglecting the fact that what's going on here is Star Wars. Take the total preoccupation of our time and our convictions. What is it?
It's completely earthbound. The devil loves it! Conservative evangelicalism in America is consumed with the thought that if we can only recreate the earth, we will win the battle. If we will only do this, then that will happen. The devil stands by and goes, Oh, let them keep it up! This is fantastic! Because I ain't fighting on this level!
I am moving at a different level! That's why Paul later, he says to the Corinthians, he says, the weapons of our warfare are not the weapons that other people use. We say to ourselves, Well, why wouldn't we use the weapons other people use? After all, they write letters, don't they? After all, they protest. That's the only thing they can do. We don't use those weapons, because they don't work. Not at the level of spiritual wickedness they don't. Yes, we're stuck with it, loved ones.
This is what he says. Our weapons are the proclamation of the transforming grace of God in the gospel and prayer. You mobilize American Christianity to get down on its knees and pray, you'll see changes in places on the earth, but it's because the battle was fought in the heavens. We're trying to change the heavens by fighting on the earth. We are not going to do it.
You won't do it. And I am tired of listening to people speak as if the proclamation of the gospel was to try and get the Western world sorted out. God is not interested in the politics of the Western world, ultimately. God is concerned about his kingdom. And the proclamation of the gospel is not a means to a democratic end.
The proclamation of the gospel is so that men and women who are trapped and enslaved in sin may be liberated because their life is very short, and they're going to spend eternity somewhere, and they will either spend it with the demons in hell, or they will spend it with the saints in glory, and it won't matter a dime where they lived and how they voted and what else they did. Now, you haven't heard much of this, and you won't hear much of this, because this runs right against the grain. But you're sensible people.
So you check your Bible, and you see if what I'm telling you is true. We're trying to move the altars around. We're trying to move the idols around.
We're trying to get rid of them at this source. They don't exist. But the hosts of hell are arraigned in great force.
Now, let's stay with his argument, because I can feel myself going off on a major tangent here. Demons are able to exercise considerable power. A lot of stuff that is, apparently, occultic is doubtless exaggerated, and much of it is fake. But it is not all exaggerated, and it is not all fake. A great deal of it is real. I think, for example, the explanation of statues that weep is either a man with a watering can, strategically positioned, so it's fake, or it is force, and if it is force, it is demonic force, it is evil. And it constantly draws people away into realms of deception and into experiences of darkness.
So, for example, a number of people I heard about did certain things for their graduation parties, unable to think up things. You see how the world is left without the influence of Christ, but some people were having palm readers come to the graduation parties so that they could introduce the youngsters to this kind of thing. Well, what about that? Well, a lot of it's fake, but some of it's force, and if it's force, it's satanic. You can't touch it.
You can't fool with it. "'Because this is the case,' says Paul, I do not want you to be participants with demons." Notice that at the end of verse 20. The sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God. Now understand that, and therefore, do not be participants with demons. You see, presumably people were arguing, as I've said, that since they didn't believe in it, it couldn't harm them. Paul says, Don't be so naïve.
It will not only harm you, but it will also harm people who watch you, who will be confused and may in turn be compromised by their actions. The whole argument of verses 14–22 is this. Religious ceremonies, whether pagan, Christian, or Jewish, involve participation of the worshippers. And the worshippers participate with the object of their worship and with each other. Since that is so, it is consequently completely inconsistent for believers to participate in any expression of worship that is apart from and contrary to Christ and the Scriptures.
So verse 21. It's just not possible to sit down at both tables. You can't drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too. You can't have a part in both the Lord's table and the table of demons. They are mutually exclusive. To be in fellowship with Christ means that we cannot be in fellowship with demons.
To be in communion with demons means that we are cut off from communion with Christ. Jesus taught similarly. Matthew chapter 6, he said, No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You can't have it both ways. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life with the message he's titled, You Can't Have It Both Ways.
We'll hear the conclusion tomorrow. Now if you are a pastor and you share the Apostle Paul's love for God's Word, his passion to see unbelievers become committed followers of Jesus, here at Truth for Life strengthening the local church is an important outcome of our mission. And last month we launched a new website feature specifically for pastors and church leaders.
So if you're involved in pastoral ministry or church leadership, let me encourage you to visit truthforlife.org slash churches. There you will find free and low-cost Bible teaching materials that will support your work and will strengthen your church. For example, right now pastors are able to download a free five-week Advent preaching guide drawn from Alistair's teaching. It's designed to help you prepare weekly Christ-focused sermons through the Christmas season.
While you're on the webpage, be sure to sign up for quarterly updates. That way you won't miss out on any of the newly released materials like free study guides or books or video teaching from Alistair designed specifically for pastors. Again, go to truthforlife.org slash churches. And if you're not a church leader, keep in mind that every time you give to Truth for Life, you are making free or at-cost resources available for your pastor, your church, other pastors as well. And when you donate today, we'll invite you to request a copy of a book called Gospel People. This is a book that explains what it looks like for believers to agree to disagree on non-essential issues while agreeing to stay focused on the core of our unity, the gospel. Ask for your copy of the book Gospel People when you donate to support the ministry of Truth for Life go to truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapine, thanks for listening. Tomorrow we'll learn some of Satan's subtle schemes to draw us into idolatry and away from God. I hope you can join us. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
