1 Cor. 10:1-13
How many of you parents out there
wish your kids could learn from your mistakes? How many of us today are really
trying right now to learn from the mistakes of our predecessors which is what
Paul is offering to us and hoping to help us accomplish? In today’s message,
part of our series in 1 Corinthians exploring life in the Spirit, Paul is
sharing some illustrations from the ancient past. And his point is, what
happened to them can happen to us.
Paul showed that just because a throng of millions was on the journey from Egypt to Canaan, that doesn’t mean they were all believers in the mission or cause for which God had called them out of Egypt. In the first part of our text, Paul emphasizes that yes, these were the called out people of God. They all experienced several blessings of God’s grace. These four verses clarify that the Israelites that left Egypt and wandered in the wilderness for 40 years were saved. They had observed Passover, which was an act of faith, and they had come out of Egypt, a picture of salvation.
Paul pointed out that “They were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” By mentioning baptism into Moses Paul was bringing up the Corinthians issues with who they were following. Remember at the beginning of this letter Paul said, he was thankful that he hadn’t actually baptized more than a few of them because he didn’t want that to contribute to their factions. This is particularly significant because the people on the wilderness journey questioned Moses’ leadership, just as some of the Corinthians were now divided over whether Paul should lead them.
Paul also said, “They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink;” And as we already know from this letter the spiritual food of the Lord’s Supper had also become a problem in Corinth. Paul said of the ancient believers, “they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.” In saying that the spiritual rock they all drank from was Christ Paul makes a very strong connection to the ancient people and the current people in Corinth who also drink from Christ, and so do we. This shows that God was not different in the Old Testament. The New Testament is a continuation of the same story.
It looks like a lot of the Israelites who left Egypt were just along for the ride. Being a part of the assembly was seemingly better than remaining a slave in Egypt but their ideas about freedom didn’t match up with God’s demands for loving obedience to his commands. Sometimes in fact the difference between what they thought they should be doing and what God was actually doing was so different that they complained, “It would have been better for us to stay in Egypt. And that’s why Paul concluded the first part of this reading saying, “Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered in the wilderness.”
And so Paul is pointing out that in Corinth, just because a throng of so called believers was along for the ride, enjoying the same blessings as the rest of the Christians, that doesn’t mean they were all true believers in the mission and cause for which God had called the Corinthian pagans to believe in Jesus. Judging by their bad behavior that Paul rebukes in this letter, a lot of them were acting as if they weren’t really spirit filled Christians but were just along for the ride, having found that being a part of the loving community called the church was better than being poor and taken advantage of by the selfish pagans.
This message might be summarized as, learn from the History of Israel, going to Church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car! The point is that a lot of people who attend church, then and now, never really become Christians in the sense that the Bible calls for. Paul was originally writing this of course so that the Corinthians could learn from the mistakes made by the Israelites and make sure it doesn’t happen to them.
But then of course since this is inspired Scripture, God caused it to be preserved for our benefit too. Like Israel in the Old Testament, we too have received many spiritual privileges. In the same way that Israel was “under the cloud,” we have experienced God’s protection and guidance. In the same way that Israel “passed through the sea,” we have “passed from death to life” (John 5:24). In the same way that Israel was “baptized into Moses,” we have been “baptized into Christ” (1 Cor. 12:13). In the same way that Israel ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink, we celebrate the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:17-34). In the same way that Israel was “followed” by Christ, Christ follows us (Heb. 13:5).
Now make a personal application. To what degree do you revel, or rejoice in the spiritual privileges that God has given you? Can you honestly say that you are awed by the fact that God saved you, in spite of your sin? Do you ponder the wonder that out of all the people in the history of the world, God chose of His own initiative to save you? When you think of Christ on the cross for you what emotions well up in your heart?
So you see, in spite of the differences in circumstances, as people, we have a lot in common with the people who were in those circumstances. No matter what the circumstances are, people tend to react in very similar ways, especially when it comes to responding to God’s acts of deliverance and protection and God’s call for faith in Him. Therefore we should be eager to learn from the mistakes made by the ancient Israelites and make sure it doesn’t happen to us. But what exactly is it that happens? What happened to them that could happen to us? We’re not out in the desert. We don’t worship idols. We’re not running from slavery to go and make our own new nation, are we? We’re not like the Corinthians either. We’re not selfish pagans coming out of a deeply sinful, ungodly lifestyle. Most of us were raised in church, how could we not be Christians?
In Paul’s examples he said the causes of God’s death dealing reactions to the children of Israel were idolatry in one instance, testing the Lord in another, and merely grumbling in the last. The one theme that binds all these together is a failure of faith. So this is about faith. We are all called to a life of faith and Paul’s message is about the ways we lose faith. This is not about our behavior. It is about our spirituality. But of course all of our behavior springs forth from our spirituality. We live according to the faith we have, whatever faith it may be. Your life is your living interpretation of the Bible.
Idolatry is to put your faith in anything other than God. Idolatry is fake faith. The opposite of idolatry is “I am.” I say that because the idolater is basically saying to God, “No, you’re not.” Testing God is no faith. The opposite of testing God is trusting God. Testing God is designed to eliminate the need for faith by having God prove himself. And grumbling is the simplest lack of faith. The opposite of grumbling is gratitude. Grumbling is the complaining that comes from the failure to believe that God knows what he is doing and can take care of you. Grumbling is weak faith. And of the three faith failures Paul listed in this text, the easiest of them all for God’s people to fall into is grumbling.
This is because as soon as things aren’t going the way we’d hoped they would or think they should, we get uncomfortable. When we feel discomfort we automatically grumble. It is in our nature. Why even when you just get physically hungry, your stomach grumbles whether you want it to or not and sometimes people hear that right? It’s embarrassing. So we all know that grumbling is bad. But if we live according to the sinful nature, we can’t help it. That’s why babies cry isn’t it? Something has made the baby uncomfortable, so he cries. It’s perfectly natural.
What’s spiritual is to trust. Can you imagine a baby so contented and grateful for the parents it has that when his stomach grumbles he thinks to himself, “That’s ok. My mommy will be here soon.” That would be trust. But maybe babies do trust. We actually don’t know for sure. I mean, has any one ever studied babies to find out that they actually start crying the very moment they feel hungry? Maybe they do sit around and wait, quietly cooing even though they feel hungry, having faith that mommy will be there soon. But for some reason, mom never shows up until the baby starts crying! Mom doesn’t know the baby’s hungry until baby says so in the only language it knows.
Does the baby trust mommy if the baby cries when it’s hungry? Yes. He does. If he thought mommy wouldn’t come to feed him he wouldn’t waste the energy trying to call her. There are many babies in European orphanages who will not be fed until the attendant is able to get there, no matter how hard they cry. So they stop crying. And they don’t trust anyone. They have detachment disorder.
So I am not saying good Christians never cry. What the Bible teaches is that no matter how bad life hurts, you can and should trust that God loves you and will attend to you in your time of need. Don’t detach from him. Trust him, no matter what. Adults can learn a level of trust through hardship that is more sophisticated than a baby’s. But that doesn’t mean we learn to stop crying, because if we stop crying when we hurt that might mean we have started believing that God doesn’t care. And when we begin to believe that we might develop a detachment disorder and that is when we start to reinterpret God’s message and start to do things apart from his revealed will.
So go ahead and cry until God comes, just like a baby in the crib. That is childlike faith, believing that he will come. There are plenty of Psalms in the Bible that cry out to God for relief from suffering, persecution and injustice. But even as they cry, most of them also end with declarations of faith and trust in the God who does love them, does care and will do what is right, at the right time.
On the other hand, crying that doesn’t trust in God’s provision and accept God’s kind of provision with gratitude easily turns into the kind of grumbling that complains about God’s failure to provide and stops believing that God will. Grumbling is criticizing instead of giving thanks. Gratitude is the opposite of grumbling. Grumbling is telling God how big your problems are when you should be telling your problems how big your God is. The reason grumbling is such an easy trap for us to fall into and genuine faith is so hard is because by nature we want God to be different than he really is. We want Him to do things our way instead of letting him do things his way.
God is really different from us. And we find it hard to believe. That’s why we need to stay close to the Bible and keep reminding ourselves that God is good. God is different. But God is good and we can trust Him. Remember last week’s sermon about strict training in discipleship? The danger of failing to exercise strict training is now illustrated in today’s reading. It is actually quite easy for Christians, who once were full of the Spirit and excited about serving the Lord, to get discouraged. Many are zealous when they begin following Jesus Christ, but over the years, they begin to get distracted. Some marry, have kids, and begin to focus on saving for retirement rather than saving others. Some start with God as the ‘main course,’ but slowly they make him in to a ‘side dish.’
In many cases, as a person grows older, they may they grow colder. Young believers are filled with an energy and idealism that supersedes many older people in the church. Some of the older believers who have grown cold might see the young zealot as a threat; they see them as something that needs to be chained up and reigned in rather than unleashed. Maybe the reason they seek to change the enthusiastic believer is because they are the ones who need to change; they need to repent; they need to return to Christ; they need to become more like the new believers. Some of the old believers need to renew the enthusiasm they once had as new believers. Or if they never really were new believers, maybe that’s what they need to do.
Or what if all we really need is a good reason to get excited about being Christian? Today, relatively few think of Christianity as a call to enter a new kind of living – a life jacked up with adventure, mission, and divine destiny. Faith for many is nothing more than fire insurance from hell – an acquiescence to rule keeping (it’s the least we can do) and a safety net of forgiveness when we break the rules… On this view the human experience of faith isn’t much more than a life of stumbling and bumbling around, holding on to faith the best we can till Christ sees fit to bring us home.
“But what if the Christian life is supposed to be more than that? What if it is a calling for us to step into something larger than ourselves? What if God is inviting us into something more than hell avoidance? What if he is inviting us to participate in some kind of divine quest?”1
I think it is a divine quest. And that’s exciting! Of course it’s hard. Just like it was hard to get through the wilderness and face the Canaanites so long ago when the Israelites were invited out of Egypt to begin their divine quest for the Promised Land. If we trust in God and follow him, we have a lot to look forward to!
1 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6416068-what-bothers-me-most-about-christianity. This is apparently a quote from Gungor’s book, provided in a comment posted by a person identified as Debi.
Paul showed that just because a throng of millions was on the journey from Egypt to Canaan, that doesn’t mean they were all believers in the mission or cause for which God had called them out of Egypt. In the first part of our text, Paul emphasizes that yes, these were the called out people of God. They all experienced several blessings of God’s grace. These four verses clarify that the Israelites that left Egypt and wandered in the wilderness for 40 years were saved. They had observed Passover, which was an act of faith, and they had come out of Egypt, a picture of salvation.
Paul pointed out that “They were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” By mentioning baptism into Moses Paul was bringing up the Corinthians issues with who they were following. Remember at the beginning of this letter Paul said, he was thankful that he hadn’t actually baptized more than a few of them because he didn’t want that to contribute to their factions. This is particularly significant because the people on the wilderness journey questioned Moses’ leadership, just as some of the Corinthians were now divided over whether Paul should lead them.
Paul also said, “They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink;” And as we already know from this letter the spiritual food of the Lord’s Supper had also become a problem in Corinth. Paul said of the ancient believers, “they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.” In saying that the spiritual rock they all drank from was Christ Paul makes a very strong connection to the ancient people and the current people in Corinth who also drink from Christ, and so do we. This shows that God was not different in the Old Testament. The New Testament is a continuation of the same story.
It looks like a lot of the Israelites who left Egypt were just along for the ride. Being a part of the assembly was seemingly better than remaining a slave in Egypt but their ideas about freedom didn’t match up with God’s demands for loving obedience to his commands. Sometimes in fact the difference between what they thought they should be doing and what God was actually doing was so different that they complained, “It would have been better for us to stay in Egypt. And that’s why Paul concluded the first part of this reading saying, “Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered in the wilderness.”
And so Paul is pointing out that in Corinth, just because a throng of so called believers was along for the ride, enjoying the same blessings as the rest of the Christians, that doesn’t mean they were all true believers in the mission and cause for which God had called the Corinthian pagans to believe in Jesus. Judging by their bad behavior that Paul rebukes in this letter, a lot of them were acting as if they weren’t really spirit filled Christians but were just along for the ride, having found that being a part of the loving community called the church was better than being poor and taken advantage of by the selfish pagans.
This message might be summarized as, learn from the History of Israel, going to Church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car! The point is that a lot of people who attend church, then and now, never really become Christians in the sense that the Bible calls for. Paul was originally writing this of course so that the Corinthians could learn from the mistakes made by the Israelites and make sure it doesn’t happen to them.
But then of course since this is inspired Scripture, God caused it to be preserved for our benefit too. Like Israel in the Old Testament, we too have received many spiritual privileges. In the same way that Israel was “under the cloud,” we have experienced God’s protection and guidance. In the same way that Israel “passed through the sea,” we have “passed from death to life” (John 5:24). In the same way that Israel was “baptized into Moses,” we have been “baptized into Christ” (1 Cor. 12:13). In the same way that Israel ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink, we celebrate the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:17-34). In the same way that Israel was “followed” by Christ, Christ follows us (Heb. 13:5).
Now make a personal application. To what degree do you revel, or rejoice in the spiritual privileges that God has given you? Can you honestly say that you are awed by the fact that God saved you, in spite of your sin? Do you ponder the wonder that out of all the people in the history of the world, God chose of His own initiative to save you? When you think of Christ on the cross for you what emotions well up in your heart?
So you see, in spite of the differences in circumstances, as people, we have a lot in common with the people who were in those circumstances. No matter what the circumstances are, people tend to react in very similar ways, especially when it comes to responding to God’s acts of deliverance and protection and God’s call for faith in Him. Therefore we should be eager to learn from the mistakes made by the ancient Israelites and make sure it doesn’t happen to us. But what exactly is it that happens? What happened to them that could happen to us? We’re not out in the desert. We don’t worship idols. We’re not running from slavery to go and make our own new nation, are we? We’re not like the Corinthians either. We’re not selfish pagans coming out of a deeply sinful, ungodly lifestyle. Most of us were raised in church, how could we not be Christians?
In Paul’s examples he said the causes of God’s death dealing reactions to the children of Israel were idolatry in one instance, testing the Lord in another, and merely grumbling in the last. The one theme that binds all these together is a failure of faith. So this is about faith. We are all called to a life of faith and Paul’s message is about the ways we lose faith. This is not about our behavior. It is about our spirituality. But of course all of our behavior springs forth from our spirituality. We live according to the faith we have, whatever faith it may be. Your life is your living interpretation of the Bible.
Idolatry is to put your faith in anything other than God. Idolatry is fake faith. The opposite of idolatry is “I am.” I say that because the idolater is basically saying to God, “No, you’re not.” Testing God is no faith. The opposite of testing God is trusting God. Testing God is designed to eliminate the need for faith by having God prove himself. And grumbling is the simplest lack of faith. The opposite of grumbling is gratitude. Grumbling is the complaining that comes from the failure to believe that God knows what he is doing and can take care of you. Grumbling is weak faith. And of the three faith failures Paul listed in this text, the easiest of them all for God’s people to fall into is grumbling.
This is because as soon as things aren’t going the way we’d hoped they would or think they should, we get uncomfortable. When we feel discomfort we automatically grumble. It is in our nature. Why even when you just get physically hungry, your stomach grumbles whether you want it to or not and sometimes people hear that right? It’s embarrassing. So we all know that grumbling is bad. But if we live according to the sinful nature, we can’t help it. That’s why babies cry isn’t it? Something has made the baby uncomfortable, so he cries. It’s perfectly natural.
What’s spiritual is to trust. Can you imagine a baby so contented and grateful for the parents it has that when his stomach grumbles he thinks to himself, “That’s ok. My mommy will be here soon.” That would be trust. But maybe babies do trust. We actually don’t know for sure. I mean, has any one ever studied babies to find out that they actually start crying the very moment they feel hungry? Maybe they do sit around and wait, quietly cooing even though they feel hungry, having faith that mommy will be there soon. But for some reason, mom never shows up until the baby starts crying! Mom doesn’t know the baby’s hungry until baby says so in the only language it knows.
Does the baby trust mommy if the baby cries when it’s hungry? Yes. He does. If he thought mommy wouldn’t come to feed him he wouldn’t waste the energy trying to call her. There are many babies in European orphanages who will not be fed until the attendant is able to get there, no matter how hard they cry. So they stop crying. And they don’t trust anyone. They have detachment disorder.
So I am not saying good Christians never cry. What the Bible teaches is that no matter how bad life hurts, you can and should trust that God loves you and will attend to you in your time of need. Don’t detach from him. Trust him, no matter what. Adults can learn a level of trust through hardship that is more sophisticated than a baby’s. But that doesn’t mean we learn to stop crying, because if we stop crying when we hurt that might mean we have started believing that God doesn’t care. And when we begin to believe that we might develop a detachment disorder and that is when we start to reinterpret God’s message and start to do things apart from his revealed will.
So go ahead and cry until God comes, just like a baby in the crib. That is childlike faith, believing that he will come. There are plenty of Psalms in the Bible that cry out to God for relief from suffering, persecution and injustice. But even as they cry, most of them also end with declarations of faith and trust in the God who does love them, does care and will do what is right, at the right time.
On the other hand, crying that doesn’t trust in God’s provision and accept God’s kind of provision with gratitude easily turns into the kind of grumbling that complains about God’s failure to provide and stops believing that God will. Grumbling is criticizing instead of giving thanks. Gratitude is the opposite of grumbling. Grumbling is telling God how big your problems are when you should be telling your problems how big your God is. The reason grumbling is such an easy trap for us to fall into and genuine faith is so hard is because by nature we want God to be different than he really is. We want Him to do things our way instead of letting him do things his way.
God is really different from us. And we find it hard to believe. That’s why we need to stay close to the Bible and keep reminding ourselves that God is good. God is different. But God is good and we can trust Him. Remember last week’s sermon about strict training in discipleship? The danger of failing to exercise strict training is now illustrated in today’s reading. It is actually quite easy for Christians, who once were full of the Spirit and excited about serving the Lord, to get discouraged. Many are zealous when they begin following Jesus Christ, but over the years, they begin to get distracted. Some marry, have kids, and begin to focus on saving for retirement rather than saving others. Some start with God as the ‘main course,’ but slowly they make him in to a ‘side dish.’
In many cases, as a person grows older, they may they grow colder. Young believers are filled with an energy and idealism that supersedes many older people in the church. Some of the older believers who have grown cold might see the young zealot as a threat; they see them as something that needs to be chained up and reigned in rather than unleashed. Maybe the reason they seek to change the enthusiastic believer is because they are the ones who need to change; they need to repent; they need to return to Christ; they need to become more like the new believers. Some of the old believers need to renew the enthusiasm they once had as new believers. Or if they never really were new believers, maybe that’s what they need to do.
Or what if all we really need is a good reason to get excited about being Christian? Today, relatively few think of Christianity as a call to enter a new kind of living – a life jacked up with adventure, mission, and divine destiny. Faith for many is nothing more than fire insurance from hell – an acquiescence to rule keeping (it’s the least we can do) and a safety net of forgiveness when we break the rules… On this view the human experience of faith isn’t much more than a life of stumbling and bumbling around, holding on to faith the best we can till Christ sees fit to bring us home.
“But what if the Christian life is supposed to be more than that? What if it is a calling for us to step into something larger than ourselves? What if God is inviting us into something more than hell avoidance? What if he is inviting us to participate in some kind of divine quest?”1
I think it is a divine quest. And that’s exciting! Of course it’s hard. Just like it was hard to get through the wilderness and face the Canaanites so long ago when the Israelites were invited out of Egypt to begin their divine quest for the Promised Land. If we trust in God and follow him, we have a lot to look forward to!
1 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6416068-what-bothers-me-most-about-christianity. This is apparently a quote from Gungor’s book, provided in a comment posted by a person identified as Debi.
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