1 Corinthians 8:1-6

June 10, 2018

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

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The sermon starts at 16:15 in the audio file.

Or, A Primer on the God of Food

Food is a strange and fascinating subject. The growing, hunting, purchasing, preparing, cooking, eating, cleaning up from, and thinking/talking about food occupies perhaps the majority of waking hours for the majority of the people in the history of the world. Food belongs with big business, big parties, and is one of God’s big gifts.

Food is also a god for many people, used to medicate or distract, or because they believe humans have an obligation to honor the vegetables and animals that become our food. Food is associated with the gods, given from them or demanded by them. Food has been associated with sacrifices of worship since at least the sons of Adam and Eve.

The Bible says a lot about food, and food is the presenting problem in 1 Corinthians chapter 8, it is an issue again in chapters 10 and 11, and though chapter 9 isn’t about food, it provides an complementary example that teaches us something about food.

I don’t have the ambition to say everything that can be said about food in the upcoming sermons. I don’t claim to know all there is to know about food anyway. And I am particularly interested in the context in Corinth and Paul’s instructions to them first, though there are principles with plenty of application for us in a different setting with our own set of problems.

This is another branch growing from the same root problem among the Corinthians. They knew enough to be mean to each other, they heard enough of Paul’s teaching to spread their pride on almost everything. They had so-called knowledge, which actually led to so-called snobbery. They believed in the sovereignty of God, and applied that doctrine to the subject of food. But based on how they treated one another it was clear that they did not actually know the God of food.

So-called Knowledge (verses 1-3)

The issue in this section of 1 Corinthians relates to conscience (verses 7, 12) over consuming certain food (verses 1, 4, 7-13) among the community of believers in a culture full of idolatry (verses 5, 9-13).

It is not a new issue; certainly Paul had worked through some of theses problems during his stay and teaching in Corinth. But some of them had taken his teaching in unhelpful ways and had written to him for confirmation. Paul does some confirming and a good amount of correcting.

Now concerning food offered to idols. This is the same formula that he used in 7:1 and 7:25 to bring up topics from their letter to which he’s replying. First was married celibacy, then singleness and betrothal, now food. The subject of food and worship takes up all of chapter 8 and much of chapters 10-11, with chapter 9 related in a different way.

Food offered to idols is one word in Greek (a form of εἰδωλόθυτος) and means “something offered to a cultic image/idol“ (BDAG). It could have been eaten in a few different contexts. It could have been food provided at social events held in a pagan temple (compare it to maybe the fellowship hall of a Baptist church), it could have been food sold by the pagan temple butcher shop, or it could have been food bought and served by a pagan friend who invited you for dinner. There is a social level, an economic level, and a personal level.

It appears that Paul quotes (as the ESV represents) from their letter: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” He will provide the content of this knowledge in verses 4 and 6, but before he talks about the knowledge, he talks about the relative importance of knowledge and how knowledge that leads to snobbery over fellow believers is not as impressive as we think.

This “knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up. This is the same root of puffing-pride as mentioned previously in the letter (1 Corinthians 4:6), an[...]