1 Corinthians 8:7-13

June 17, 2018

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

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The sermon starts at 13:45 in the audio file.

Or, How to Eat Right

We eat food every day, multiple times a day. Food is one of the most mundane, as in earthly rather than heavenly, things we concern ourselves with, and yet God says that even our eating and drinking is supposed to be for His glory (1 Corinthians 10:31).

What are our responsibilities when it comes to food? How important are the ingredients? The source of those ingredients? The chemical make-up of those ingredients? The preparation/packaging of the food? Should you research and investigate the motives of anyone who had any part in getting the food to your table? What if the people who grow/make/sell you your food are idolators?

We come to the hinge point in 1 Corinthians 8. Last Lord’s Day we began to talk about food, especially food associated someway or another with idols. The Christians in Corinth were Kuyperian Calvinists, before that was even possible of course. They had the knowledge of God’s sovereignty over every thumb’s width of grain and vegetable and animal. They knew that idols couldn’t compare, let alone compete, with the one, true God of gods and Lord of lords.

Food eaten at a pagan temple couldn’t actually give power to a “so-called god,” even if people actually believed that they were praising that god. Meat bought from the butcher shop connected to the pagan temple couldn’t have effective idol cooties. Only one God gives food, and while some “gods” might have been real demons disguising themselves (see 1 Corinthians 10:20), even if those demons claimed to be givers of corn and wheat and cows and sheep, the Corinthian Christians knew the actual and ultimate source behind every bite: God Himself. “All things” are “from” the Father and “all things” were made “through” Jesus Christ.

The problem, as we began to see, is that some of the Christians held this knowledge in a way that magnified themselves rather than their brothers, which means they were not actually honoring God either, no matter how accurate their slogans about God’s sovereignty were crafted. What they knew was (mostly) true about God, except they showed that they didn’t truly know God because He is the God of love. We’re supposed to love like Him, not just know about Him.

Those who were conscious of God’s sovereignty were not conscious of (some of) their brothers’ consciences. Some brothers were loving their eating (and perhaps socializing) more than loving their brothers’ souls. What should have been building up the body was destroying it.

Paul calls the Corinthians to be conscientious consumers. But this is not being conscientious about the food as much as it is being conscientious about the God of food and their brothers in the Lord. There is a way to eat clean, to eat right, and it has more to do with how we consider the consciences of our fellow consumers and less to do with what we put in our mouths.

The Problem (verses 7-8)

The Corinthians knew that all the Corinthians had the knowledge (8:1), but they didn’t know that they were also wrong. However, not all possess this knowledge. Paul isn’t referring to the nonbelievers in Corinth, but to some of the believers in the church. It’s not that some of them had received different teaching, it’s not as if some of them were Arminians, or evolutionists. The rest of verse 7 explains the problem: their head knowledge hadn’t fully informed their conscience.

But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. Paul introduces us to a category of believer: the weak in conscience. Conscience is an important, but not infallible (meaning that it could be wrong) [...]