Dear friends,
“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up”. What a challenge Paul gives to us in the first verse of his answer to the Corinthians’ question about food offered to idols.
As we continue our discussion of this part of 1 Corinthians, I hope you will share with us the wonder of thinking lovingly about knowledge. For knowledge, especially the knowledge of God and his ways, is very important. But knowledge, like many good things, can be used for evil as well as for good. Without love, our knowledge will be used for our benefit instead of the benefit of others. And so we will fall under the condemnation of being puffed up instead of building others up.
It is just so fascinating how Paul’s discussions of particular problems in 1st century Corinth open up for us such permanently important topics.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: Today, we will look at the second half of 1 Corinthians 8.
1 Corinthians 8:7–13
However, not all possess this knowledge. But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, will he not be encouraged, if his conscience is weak, to eat food offered to idols? And so by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died. Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble.
Peter Jensen: The context of this passage is, as we know, the issue of eating food offered to idols. We heard last week about the contrast between the knowledge that puffs up and the love that builds up. In our previous episode, we thought about knowledge; so this week, we are going to think about love.
We know that the idols that we are told about in this passage are nothing. It’s likely that the Corinthian Christians were making that claim, and therefore eating food offered to idols, rejoicing in the knowledge that idols have no existence. 1 Corinthians 8:5–6
For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”—yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
How does this knowledge “puff up”?
Phillip: It puffs up because we’ve taken it out of the context of our relationship with God and with each other. So we’re not knowing as we ought to know, as 8:2 says. Love and knowledge are important, but knowledge must be shaped in relationships, preeminently with our relationship with God whom we worship. True knowledge is therefore humble. It’s humble because of the fact that we don’t know everything, and also in the sense that our knowledge must always be put in the service of God and others, rather than in self-aggrandisement.
Peter: One of the problems, though, is that we don’t know exactly what the Corinthian question in 8:1 is about. The ESV, which we’re using here, has quotation marks around the phrase, “And all of us possess knowledge.” We don’t know whether those quotation marks are in the original passage or not, but let’s assume for the moment that they are. In that case, the Corinthians are saying, “All of us possess knowledge, and that knowledge means that we are free to do as we like with the food offered to idols.” We can’t be sure whether they were going to the temple to worship the gods by partaking in a communal religious meal there, but with the knowledge that there are no gods of such sort; or if they were simply eating meals in the temple, as many temples had dining rooms used for occasions such as weddings. The passage could also be referring to eating meat that had been sacrificed to the idols and subsequently sold and brought in the marketplace. Any or all of these situations described could have been involved in this business of food offered to idols.
Phillip: 8:10 says, “For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, will he not be encouraged, if his conscience is weak, to eat food offered to idols?” Seemingly, some people were eating inside the temple, but was that the same as worshipping the idol in the temple? In 1 Corinthians 10:25, Paul says, “Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience.” So you could buy meat that happens to have been offered to an idol. However, while we don’t understand the exact context of the Corinthians, we do understand the principles of Paul’s answer, and the fundamental principle that’s spelled out in 8:1 is love.
The modern world loves the word ‘love’, but what does it mean to us? We see God’s love in the giving of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ who laid down his life for us. It is the sacrificial love, not because of the worthiness of the recipient, but because of the generosity of the lover, that he will lay down his life for us. So why does Paul make such a strong statement about this to the Corinthians? What’s the point of this contrast between knowledge and this incredible love that we have in the cross of Jesus?
Peter: It is strange, because the appeal to the fact that eating food offered to idols is harmless, because idols are nothing, is based on the truth. But the problem was that not all had grasped this truth. 8:7 tells us, “However, not all possess this knowledge. But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.”
Phillip: 8:1 says, “All of us possess knowledge,” but 8:7 reminds us that “Not all possess this knowledge.”
Peter: That’s right. The knowledge possessed by the Corinthians was the key, in their mind, to freedom. We all long to have freedom, and they now had the freedom to do things which others were unable to do because of their conscience. This of course raises the question of conscience, and what it means to have a weak conscience. There’s a song I remember from our childhood, sung by Jiminy Cricket in the movie ‘Pinocchio’, which went, “Always let your conscience be your guide.” Parents would pat their children on the head and say, “Listen to Jiminy Cricket.”
Phillip: Hollywood has not proven to be a very good teacher of conscience over the years. The fact that you have a conscience may be a testimony to your innate sense of right and wrong, but your conscience is as sinful and in need of reshaping by the word of God as the rest of you. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things.” Thus the conscience must be educated. Paul is here speaking of the weak conscience, but the way he speaks of it generally is different to what most people expect, because the weak conscience for Paul usually reflects the abstainer, or legalist. For instance, the Jew who had become a Christian, but who kept the old food laws, was often critical of those who didn’t. Here in 1 Corinthians, we see that those with weak consciences seemed to be those who believed that they were defiled by eating food offered to the idols. They had not yet absorbed the idea that as the idol was nothing, eating food to the idols didn’t matter.
There’s nothing new in this—this is just Paul writing in a missionary context. Similarly, new Christians are often confused about our beliefs. Old Christians can be confused too; we don’t get to 100% in our knowledge of the word of God. But new Christians carry all kinds of baggage from the past, especially when they’ve had previous associations with certain things. They become vulnerable on these issues when their consciences haven’t yet been educated about them. The vulnerability may be that they’re tempted to go back to it, or it may be that they’ve become reactionary towards it. I remember some people who, having lived in a decadent world of rock and roll, found that they could not have anything to do with rock music because it just took them back in association to a world that they knew. But the Corinthians are brothers and sisters in Christ. We’re not talking about non-Christians at this point. If you’re in the know about there only being one God, what should you do when you see your brother or sister still caught up with that reaction?
Peter: The last thing you should do is allow knowledge to puff you up. When we are in the know—and believe me, I’m speaking from personal experience—we could easily say, “I must continue my rights to freedom. After all, the gospel has set me free, and I must be allowed to have that freedom. Firstly, I am theologically in the right, after all; I have the Bible on my side. Secondly, who are they to remove my freedom? Thirdly, they should learn a lesson by seeing me act in this way.” There are considerable powers in these arguments which affect us, so we’re often tempted to use them. For example, I have a right to drink alcohol, because alcohol is not forbidden in the Bible, and we have been set free. Therefore, I might say, I must be allowed to drink it even if it’s a difficulty for other people.
Phillip: There is an aspect to it as well, where we might be tempted to think “These poor people, they haven’t yet understood the gospel as they should. I’m a mature Christian because I’ve understood, whereas they haven’t.” Alcohol is a good example of this. In my early years as a Christian, I took drinking alcohol as sinful. That was an error in my thinking. I was, at that point, feeling like a strong Christian because I didn’t drink alcohol, when in fact I was a weak Christian because I thought alcohol was wrong. Now I’ve come to understand that the drinking of alcohol is not wrong; God made wine to “gladden the heart of man” in Psalm 104, and Proverbs 31 talks about giving strong drink to those who are in pain. While I’ve come to understand this, I still don’t drink alcohol. I think the alcohol industry in Australia is a terrible blight on our society, and there are other terrible problems that come with alcohol such as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. But I don’t think it’s a matter of sin. That is, I’ve come to a better knowledge, but that knowledge does not allow me to have that sense of superiority over others; instead, it changes how I relate to others on the subject of alcohol.
The word of God speaks in surprisingly different ways to people. You spoke of that freedom, that right. But the weak person sees it as a stumbling block. There can be great confusion in the Christian community on this issue, and Paul is dealing with all kinds of confusions and disagreements in the church. He says, 8:8, “Food will not commend you to God,” meaning that neither eating nor refraining from it will make a difference. But notice the reversal: he puts down those who think they’re strong, who think their eating is a sign of their spiritual strength. He continues, “We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.” But the weak see the strong eating in the temple, and the weak are then encouraged by the strong and their example to think that it’s alright to eat idolatrously.
Now, the strong person eating in the temple is not eating idolatrously, because he doesn’t believe that the idol has any power, strength or significance. But of course, the weak person thinks the idols are real, and eating food offered to the idol is compromising for them. So when the weak person compromises like that, he goes against his conscience. Strong words are used here in 8:11 to refer to the weak person’s own destruction, and 8:12 says that it is “wounding their conscience”. The consequence of all of this is that the strong person, who is giving the example to the weak, is not just sinning against their brother or sister, but sinning against Christ. Because when my actions would destroy or ruin the brother for whom Christ died, I’m not just sinning against him, but against Christ who died for him. Wounding the weak brother’s conscience is a dreadful thing.
So we come to this extraordinary personal confession of Paul in 8:13, “Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble.”
Peter: But is this always the case? I can think of historical incidents where a person’s conscience was not just weak, but completely wrong. My favourite illustration is of a Nazi camp commandant who went and confessed to his boss that he’d allowed some Jews to escape. He was confessing a ‘sin’, which was the exact opposite of sin, because his conscience was so perverted. It wasn’t just weak.
Phillip: No, ‘weak’ here must refer to those cases where it’s a matter of indifference. It’s neither right nor wrong that you eat meat offered to idols, but the weak brother or sister sees it as vital to their piety, their worship of God.
Peter: I think back to Romans 14:23, “For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” That too may throw some light on what is meant here.
Phillip: Yes, I’m doing something which itself is neither right nor wrong, but if I do it in defiance of God, it is wrong.
Peter: Indeed. But what are the principles on which Paul is basing his argument? These will have power across a range of issues, not just the issue of meat offered to idols.
Phillip: The principles derived from what you and I would see as strange topics have been so removed from our culture, but they are still very important principles. Knowledge can puff me up, especially when it’s not part of loving God and loving my brother. The mature Christian is not the one who knows the most; the mature Christian is the one who, with knowledge, sacrificially loves the most. Love is more concerned with the other person’s welfare than with the self, especially self-pleasure or even one’s own explicitly legitimate pleasures. Furthermore, we should not go against our conscience, even when it’s ill-informed, nor should we encourage others to go against their conscience even when it’s ill-informed. Though we should seek to inform conscience, we must see the seriousness of sin and the limitations of knowledge. We must see the preciousness of our brothers and sisters in Christ, and that sinning against them is sinning against Christ. Love builds the other up, and it builds us up too.
Peter: Indeed. Central to the whole argument is 8:6, “Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” There’s so much there to unpack, but we get the idea of the almighty oneness of God, with its implications about how we are to understand our world. We’re not living in a world without purpose; we are going towards a destination with its implications, therefore, for our faith and for the future. There is the fatherhood of God with its implications for the love of God and his knowing us. There is the Lordship of Christ with its implications for his deity, the triune nature of God. Then there is the question of the nature of the freedom that the gospel gives us.
Phillip: We will come to that next week, in 1 Corinthians 9.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this talk on 1 Corinthians 8 called The Knowledge That Liberates.
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