Love for God and His people and the fear of God demand that we flee from idolatry. Paul sums up everything that went before in this discussion about food offered to idols with this one principle: “Do all to the glory of God” (v.10:31). Commitment to God’s glory above my own desires will lead me to follow Paul’s example and lay aside my rights for others. Paul simply followed the example of his Lord, the Suffering Servant, Jesus, and so must we.

Of the billions of people today who worship literal idols, spirits, the dead, and other spiritual powers, many will come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. When they do, they will need to know how to navigate the Christian life as an extreme minority believer under the threat of persecution. Disciples of Jesus need to know how to relate to idolatrous practices all around them.
In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul taught us that the love of Christ for other believers should motivate us to have nothing to do with idolatry and food offered to idols. In chapter 9, Paul uses himself as an example of love in laying aside our rights and preferences for the sake of the Gospel. He showed us that it takes focused purpose and self-discipline to maintain the servant love required to influence people for Christ.
Now in chapter 10, Paul continues his explanation of how believers are to relate to idolatry all around them.
The Danger of Idolatry
Israel was not careful about idolatry and thus fell away from God. When we read the Old Testament, we see that most of the people of Israel in the wilderness (and nearly every generation thereafter) fell into idolatry and demon worship. Even with seeing numerous miracles that illustrated plainly that Jehovah was the One True God, experiencing supernatural acts of judgment against their sin, and hearing the many strong warnings from God about idolatry and its consequences, they still turned to idolatry.
Paul urges us to take Israel’s failure seriously and “not desire evil as they did”[1] (v.6). Idolatry proved to be Israel’s downfall. Idolatry and spirit worship usually encourage sexual immorality, so we see the connection between the two in both the Old and New Testaments. This was true of idolatry in Corinth as well. False worship elevates ritual and religiosity and degrades God’s true standard of righteousness. Worship degenerates into obtaining our goals and desires and avoiding tragedy.
God’s Promise
Following this warning, God gives us a promise through Paul that He will never allow us to be tempted above what we can endure by His grace. We always have a way to escape temptation:
“No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (v.13).
Remember, this promise is given specifically to believers who have come out of idolatry and demon worship, encouraging them that they can stay true to Christ.
Flee!
An accurate understanding about idolatry’s futility does not make us invulnerable to it.
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Written by Charles B. Williams |
Sunday, June 11, 2023
In these blessings, we find the description of the citizen of heaven (Phil. 3:20–21), and with it, a heavenly pattern, for it marks the man who recognizes that this world cannot truly satisfy and reminds us that true blessedness is not found in the fading pleasures of all that this fading world offers. And it is here that we see the greatest blessing of all: that this pattern makes us ready for heaven, by molding us into the image of the King of this heavenly kingdom.

At the close of every Lord’s Day, the minister is afforded the tremendous privilege of pronouncing the benediction of our triune God on his assembled people: “May the Lord bless you, and keep you . . .” What beneficence! What boon! What bounty! to become the recipients of the divine favor and protection of the Maker and Redeemer of heaven and earth!
But then Monday comes, and once more we find ourselves engulfed in a seemingly endless wave of tragedies, both personal and corporate: an ailing father, a failed engagement, a divided congregation, a people in turmoil. Have the blessings failed? Has God forsaken his people?
Many of us recognize that divine favor is not materialistic, for the Scriptures never promise a life of influence, ease, or pleasure. At the same time, the sorrows we endure can so overwhelm us that we are left feeling confused and helpless. Bearing under the fury of a world that hates us from without, and the terrors of a conscience awakened to the depth of our own sin from within, such circumstances leave us utterly humiliated and exposed to our own inadequacy. And we ask: where is the blessing?
It is within this context that our Savior addresses his own, a people wounded and wearied under the weight of their estate of sin and misery. Matthew recounts to us those glad tidings Christ has brought as he pronounces the inauguration of the long-awaited kingdom, the blessings conferred upon the recipients of that kingdom, and the mode in which such blessings come as we await its consummation.
A Conflict of Kingdoms
The opening chapters of Matthew’s gospel narrate the irruption of the heavenly dawn into the earthly realm of sin and darkness. Against the backdrop of yet another mock Pharaoh comes one greater than Moses, the virgin-born Davidic Son, upon whose shoulders rest the government of an ever-increasing, unshakable kingdom (Isa. 9:6–7).
For sure, the nation had long awaited a deliverer, but their expectations were too small, too earthly. As Jesus travels from town to town, heralding the kingdom’s arrival, the people expect a political Messiah who will expel the Roman legions from their midst, not the demonic hordes. They hold to delusions of grandeur—of earthly power and prosperity—not spiritual liberation. The citizens want a theonomic revolution and festal buffets, while the rulers want only parlor tricks and magic shows. Yet Jesus’s message of the kingdom, summarized in the Sermon on the Mount, proclaims, not simply a better kingdom, but a different kind of kingdom. As Daniel portended, and as Luther recognized at Heidelberg in April 1518, the difference between the kingdom of Christ and the kingdoms of men was not a difference between dwarves and giants, but between light and dark. It was a difference not simply of size, but of kind. It was the difference between heaven and earth. And as this heavenly kingdom has irrupted into the earthly plane, it operates according to a different set of principles. The Beatitudes (Matt. 5:1–12) describe what life as a citizen of heaven looks like here on earth, as that light shatters and scatters the darkness. These blessings take on a particular form, upending Israel’s, and our, expectations.
The Blessings of the Heavenly Kingdom
When we consider the Beatitudes, we must first recognize what they are not. They are not natural dispositions. The great nineteenth century novelists—Hugo, Dickens, and Tolstoy—wrote of the poor, almost as if poverty itself was an unqualified virtue. Today, others do the same, but with respect to particular personality traits. Our Savior, however, does neither. He does not pronounce favor on a particular economic class; nor is he declaring that God’s grace is restricted solely to the morbid, the introvert, or the blissfully naive. Rather, the blessings of the kingdom befall those who have been subjugated by grace and reconciled through the mediation of the Son.
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We ought also to remember God’s name whenever night falls upon the soul, whenever sorrows or trials seem to have obscured the very light of God’s face. In such moments, we are to remember God’s character as expressed by His holy name. Today, we are to remember particularly that we now call God our Father because of our adoption through His Son. If He has given us so great a gift, how much more will He be steadfastly with us even through the long nights of the soul?

I remember your name in the night, O LORD,and keep your law.
Psalm 119:55 ESV

Here the psalmist declares that his nightly meditation is upon the name of the LORD. As he lay in his bed, he thinks upon the nature and goodness of his God, for God’s name reflects His character. We observed this, of course, in Exodus with the LORD revealing and then displaying the grandeur of His name to both the Israelites and the Egyptians, and that declaration (“I am the LORD”) continues to be one of the great refrains throughout the remainder of the Old Testament.
This bears two applications.
First, we ought to have God’s name in mind whenever we are most alone. It is common that in the night people face, because of the stillness and solitude, the existential realities that they distract themselves from throughout the day.
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