Sermon: Flee From Idolatry (Part Two): Faithfulness
The Example of Israel
#1703-PM
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 12-Apr-23; 85 minutes
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transcript:
I have a question for you today. Nothing too straining of the gray matter. What is the toughest sport in the world? What do you think is the toughest sport in the world? And by toughest I mean the most demanding on the athlete who specializes in that event. Now we are not talking weird sports or anything that is a one-off thing that somebody might try to do for a Guinness world record or something like that. But the most demanding sport on an athlete who specializes in a particular event.
To find out, ESPN put together a panel of experts made up of sports scientists from the US Olympic Committee and academics who study exercise, science, and anatomy, and athletes and sports journalists who have spent a great deal of their time in athletics. ESPN identified ten categories of human athleticism. These are endurance, strength, power, speed, agility, flexibility, nerve, durability, hand-eye coordination, and analytic aptitude. And they ranked 60 different sports in these areas on a scale of 1 to 10.
Now, the panel's conclusion surprised the execs at ESPN. The number one toughest sport in the world: Boxing. Out of 100 points boxing totaled 72.375 and it edged out ice hockey by 0.625 points. So ice hockey and boxing are pretty close together. Football, third, was four points back of boxing. Basketball, fourth, was 4.5 points back. So they are pretty close together, and wrestling, number five, was nearly nine points back. Martial arts, tennis, gymnastics, baseball, and soccer (in that order), rounded out the top ten.
You are probably wondering what the bottom five sports were. I will tell you the bottom five. The least tough, the least demanding on each athlete were curling, bowling, shooting, billiards, and fishing. That is the number 60 sport.
This list also then showed which athletes were the most athletic of all athletes and boxers were on top. These were the ones who had to be the most well rounded in their athleticism. Boxers scored very high (high is over 6.0) in every skill category except analytic ability. And in that one, they were only 5.63, so that means they were a little bit more than 0.37 underneath 6, and flexibility. They did not have to necessarily be real flexible. In that they scored 4.38.
Let us go to the other end of the spectrum though. Professional fishermen scored over 2.0 points in only two categories. And those are hand-eye coordination at 2.38 and analytic ability at 2.88. They have to know where to put their hook. Now, compared to boxing's 72.375 score, which was number one, fishing's total score was a measly 14.5. Now, for Ronny and me, most people do not consider race car drivers athletes, but they scored a respectable 47.85, ranking number 32 on the list. They scored extremely high in what category do you think? Nerve. 9.88, they were .12 under the top score on that. That was the highest. They were also very high in hand-eye coordination, 8.80, and analytic ability at 7.5. So they are indeed athletes.
Now, the point is that I have been getting to is that boxing is a full spectrum athletic endeavor. To be a champion boxer, the athlete must not be a specialist. That is, he cannot just be a guy who runs around the ring and never gets a punch landed because he is so fast and agile. He cannot just pack a powerful punch. He has to have a lot of other skills to be able to win in that sport. So he does have to have endurance and speed and agility and nerve and durability and coordination and all the other things too. He must be smart and tactical to plan and implement a winning strategy. He must be an all around athletic freak and astoundingly focused on his preparation and training. He has to be self-disciplined, more than any other athlete, and unswerving in his drive to hoist that championship belt that he will get after fighting his way to the top.
As an athlete, as a boxer, he places no trust in luck. He places no trust in his opponent's weaknesses. In fact, he believes his opponent is stronger than he, better than he, and he must prevail by being the more complete boxer. His attitude is that he must be superior to his opponent in every aspect of fighting. This is why top-level boxers seem so cocky. It is their supreme self-confidence in their readiness to beat any contender that would dare step in the ring with them.
Let us go to I Corinthians 9, if you will, verses 24 through 27. We will quickly go over this passage that we went into in quite a bit more detail last week. And we will pick up the boxer right as we get toward the end of this.
I Corinthians 9:24-27 Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it. And everyone who competes for the prize is temperate [or disciplined] in all things. Now they do it [that is, these athletes] to obtain a perishable crown, but we for an imperishable crown. Therefore I run thus: not with uncertainty [not aimlessly, I am very purposeful]. Thus I fight: not as one who beats the air [That is, as I explained last time, like a boxer who does not land any punches. Paul concludes in verse 27]. But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.
He is setting up or he is using an analogy from athletics, particularly the runners and the boxers, to show us as Christians in the Christian fight just what we have to do to win. We have got to be all in and we have to be self-disciplined. Remember, last time I said we have to be in it to win it. Why even get into the contest if we are not desirous of winning, of reaching the goal, of getting the prize? And so he tells us here that we have to have this approach to life. That our contest, our race, our match, however you want to put it, is the Kingdom of God and our opponent is Satan, obviously, in this world, but ourselves too, because we still have a nature that wants to go another direction. And so we have to put our full effort and determination into this fight so that we can win, we can get the prize at the end.
So in our Christian fight, we must train like the boxer minus the cockiness. Although we need to be confident in our path and in our goal and in our Savior, the Trailblazer, the Forerunner, the One who gives us the example. Like the boxer must do to win the champion's belt, we must train, we must be training all the time. We must never step out of training lest we grow flabby and fat and lose ground. And we must excel in a broad spectrum of skills and virtues to achieve the righteous character of Jesus Christ, who is the goal and who has forged the path to the Kingdom of God before us, setting an example of how it must be done.
Our skills that we need to learn are things like the Beatitudes which we just went over last year from Matthew 5:3-10, the fruit of the Spirit, which we have gone over many times. Dad did a quite a long series on the fruit of the Spirit, but all those things listed in Galatians 5:22-23. Also, our list of skills are like those in the virtues that Peter lists in II Peter 1:5-7 and the Ten Commandments and so many others that are listed throughout the Bible that the apostles and the prophets tell us we need in order to achieve the Kingdom of God.
As we saw in Part One of this series, we must exert ourselves with wholehearted devotion and self-discipline to win our race or prevail in our fight. Mostly I have been directing this against our selfish carnal bodies and our human nature. Not that we go in a ring toe-to-toe with Satan or that it is our job to change the world and go out there and fight all the bad attitudes and bad behavior in the world. Our real fight is against ourselves, mortifying the flesh, prevailing against our human nature.
So, in this second sermon, we will focus more directly on the problem that we need to overcome, which is essentially the distractions and diversions we place in our own way that come from within and divert us from our goal, from the trail, from the path we are supposed to be taking. And we make ourselves stumble in our race. Or, because of these distractions and diversions, we pull our punches in the fight, forgetting that we are in a fight to the death. As Mark said today, this journey is our life. Using my analogy, my metaphor, this race is our life. This boxing match is our life, however you like to look at it, and we have got to do everything we can to win.
In a word, what I am talking about in this sermon is idolatry. That is the chief sin of mankind. That is the stumbling block that hinders our progress toward the Kingdom of God. It is the element that, well, it weakens, it wrecks our faith and I will show you how as we go through.
Let us go back to another of Paul's epistles, Romans chapter 1, verses 16 through 23. And then we will also read verse 25. Romans 1:16, where Paul writes as he is beginning a very long doctrinal dissertation. It runs through the first 11 chapters. He is setting up something here for this long discussion, this long argument that he is making about the true doctrines of God. So he starts here in a general way and he is telling us the general principles that he is thinking from in order to get more specific, to narrow it down to the individual as he goes through these various things that he will talk about in chapters 2 through 11.
Romans 1:16-23 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, "The just shall live by faith." For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead [or divine nature], so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things.
Romans 1:25 who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
This chapter (as I was struggling to say a few minutes ago), this passage deals with the large principles that apply to every human being. And he is trying to let them know the flow of his thought here so he can get to them on a personal basis. Now, in verses 16 and 17, where he speaks about the gospel, he gives the reader the basis of his teaching, why he is teaching the way he teaches, what the Word is, what the Logos is, what the the logic is, if you will, that undergirds his teaching. And he says, it is the gospel, and he is not ashamed that that is where his thinking begins. His thinking begins in the gospel of God. And he defines this gospel as the power of God, the dunamis, the dynamic dynamite of God. You know, how things just are exploded. There is a great deal of energy in it. It is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes.
Now, maybe that seems like it comes out a little garbled, and we do not quite understand it. The New Century Version of the Bible renders this, "It is the power God uses to save everyone who believes." We could also say, it is the energized tool that God employs to bring us to salvation. It is what God made, if you will, based on His own character that He uses to bring us along, to get us where we need to go.
So, through its words, which contain the revealed righteousness of God, a just and faithful believer is empowered toward salvation or we could say directed toward salvation or maybe even, just depending on how you look at it at certain times, we are carried to salvation on its power. There is a lot that God does to enhance our progress toward the Kingdom of God and sometimes it looks like He is carrying us quite a bit.
The gospel then becomes the opponent of the unrighteousness of men. Even better, it is the powerful antidote to humanity's spiritual disease. It is the cure.
Now, as he begins here to expose the disease, which is human ungodliness or human unrighteousness, he points out humanity's flaws. That is what we get in this next section. It begins, he says, with mankind's purposeful ignorance of God. And not only of God, of His way of life, and that includes humanity's intentional suppression of the truth, darkening his heart and thus leading to futility and wickedness. Without the light of God's revelation, which is in the gospel, humans look no higher than themselves. And like I said, it is purposeful that they ignore the gospel. They ignore God even though it is readily available and easily seen if they would just acknowledge it, but they do not.
And without the gospel of God, which contains God's righteousness, God's perspectives, God's opinions, God's everything that we need to know, without that humanity has fashioned its gods out of the filth of darkened human minds. So these gods have come from within themselves or they are something that they see out there in the world of creatures. So their gods are based on sinful men or on animals of one kind or another or of bits of gas in the heavens that shine brightly. And they put personalities on them, human personalities, thinking that they are the abodes or the actual bodies of certain beings like themselves. So they base all their gods on things that they can see which are men and creatures and heavenly bodies and that sort of thing.
So in this way, Paul establishes human idolatry through deliberate ignorance and suppression of the truth. And he says that is humanity's predominant failing, that their gods are made from within themselves and that they purposely turn their heads and suppress the truth. It is true. Human beings know that God exists. They can run from the truth all they like and make as many denials as they like, but it always comes back to bite them. It hits them in the face—there must be a God.
The problem is they just refuse to acknowledge Him. Certainly, as Paul says there, they will not thank Him for anything. You ask most of the people who are, let us say, agnostics and you get them to the point where they say God may exist, but then they will say He has made a hash of things. Look at all this suffering. If there really was a God who cared about us, then it would not be this way. And so they flip a switch in their mind and deny God in full.
Now, why do they fail to acknowledge Him or why do they refuse to acknowledge Him? Why do they refuse to be thankful? Well, the answer is pretty simple. It is bound in man's sinful heart. And that is, if they acknowledged Him and thanked Him for what He did, that would oblige them to obey Him and His righteous law and that they will not do. They absolutely refuse to do this because they love to indulge themselves in the pleasures of sin.
If we would look in Hebrews 11 and the example of Moses (which was gone through this morning in a small way), we would see that he forsook the passing pleasures of sin in order to serve God. But most people will not. Of course, Moses had a specific calling, a very powerful calling. And so he could see, "Hey, there's God in that bush and it's not burning down! There's a voice coming out of there and He's telling me this is holy ground." And so he forsook all of that in order to do God's work.
And then there is the example of a man, we will pick a modern man, philosopher and novelist Aldous Huxley. He is the one that wrote A Brave New World about 100 years ago, maybe a little bit under 100. But he admitted his anti-Christian bias in his book, Ends and Means, which was published in 1937. This quotation summarizes the secret anti-God bias of most of humanity and certainly of intellectuals, as he was. And frankly, people tend to follow what intellectuals think. You know, the ones with the pointy heads and live up in a tower somewhere. And they make these pronouncements from on high assuming that people will follow them. And unfortunately, they do. But this paragraph from Aldous Huxley verifies Paul's explanation that we saw here in Romans 1.
I had motive for not wanting the world to have meaning, consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with the problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.
So he wanted to have sex as much and as often as he wanted. And he wanted to devise his own political system. Like nearly every human being, he chose himself and his assumptions as his authority in everything. He followed his own way. See what happened here? He worshipped himself.
Let us go back to Exodus the 20th chapter, where the Ten Commandments are. It is no mistake that the first two commandments concern idolatry and forbid them, forbid idolatry.
Exodus 20:1-6 And God spoke all these words, saying: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself any carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands [of generations], to those who love Me and keep My commandments."
Pretty stark here, what He says. No other gods at all, no images, no idols. To those who refuse this, He says here, He is going to visit them for their iniquity. For those who keep this commandment and worship Him, He gives mercy to thousands of generations—a lot of blessings as well.
As my dad explains in his sermons and articles on the Ten Commandments, the first commandment here deals with what we worship or you could say who. But the first deals with what we worship. And the second has to do with how we worship. So one has to do with the object of our worship. And the second has to do with the methods we use to worship.
The first one demands that worship should be directed only toward God and nothing other than Him. As a matter of fact, He alone is worthy of worship. There is nothing outside of Him that is worthy of worship and thinking otherwise is sheer foolishness or intentional rebellion, like we saw from Aldous Huxley.
The second commandment teaches that, as Jesus says in John 4:24, we must worship Him in spirit and in truth, not through some physical object or image, not an icon, not a necklace with a cross on it, not with anything physical. Now, why? Why does God forbid us to use aids, is what I have heard the term in Protestant and Catholic circles. That these are not really idols or icons, these are just aids to worship. I mean, look at the rosary. Is that not wonderful, this little thing with beads on it? And so you could count your prayers and how many Hail Mary's that you have said to, um, um, well, she is not a goddess, she is the mother of God. And it starts building on it as you talk to such people that, yeah, yeah, they are really idolizing, not only the rosary, but the thing that the rosary stands for, which is a glorified human being, in their eyes, who now sits at God's right hand and rules the throne room with an iron fist.
I mean, that is how it comes out, because these Mary worshippers think that she has control just about over everything. Pray to Mary. She will get her Son to heal you. I mean, it does not quite come out that way, but she will whisper in His ear and, you know, it is like she is the one behind the throne that is ruling the universe! Where they got that I have no idea except Semiramis but that is another sermon.
Now, I asked the question, why does God not want us to use aids in our worship? Any kind of idol, any kind of jewelry, or whatever we would happen to use in order, we think, we justify, to worship the true God. Well, the answer is very simple. Because even if the true God is the object of worship, the worshippers soon limit Him to the attributes of the idol or to the image. The easiest way to illustrate this is the use of the Golden Calf incident. They were saying, "This is your God, O Israel!" meaning that this Golden Calf was standing in the place of God representing God to the people. But it would not have been long before the people thought of God as a bullock with the attributes of a bullock and the strengths of a bullock and also the weaknesses of a bullock. And suddenly their God is a bullock and not God.
And that is the way it works with everything. It limits the Holy One of Israel to something physical, to something that is not true. You put God, the real God, the spiritual God, up against anything else and there is no comparison. Whatever attribute you decide to test between God and whatever this object is, God is always superior—and far superior. And so an idol takes out that superiority and it brings God down to the human level or even beneath that to the animal level or even to the inert mineral level of something like a meteor, a shooting star, some sort of rock that is going on in orbit in the heavens. It is not God and it denigrates God significantly.
So, we have here in the Ten Commandments the basic law of God's Kingdom, this forbidding of idolatry in all its forms and focusing all of our worship on the One who deserves it. That is, God Himself.
Let us go back to I Corinthians and we will pick up where we left off last week. We are going to read the first 15 verses here and then we will split it up into about three sections and take it in those little chunks. Now, I want to, just as a preface before we read this so that this is in your mind. This chapter is Paul's way of explaining to the Corinthians what their primary problem was. Remember, he had gone over in the first several chapters, some of the things that were going wrong in the Corinthian church, some of the problems that they were having, and he is getting to the point where he is now coming to define why they are having such terrible problems. And in chapter 10, his thinking starts to coalesce.
I Corinthians 10:1-15 Moreover, brethren, I do not want you to be unaware that all our fathers were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ. But with most of them God was not well pleased, for their bodies were scattered in the wilderness. Now these things became our examples to the intent that we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted. And do not become idolaters as were some of them. As it is written, "The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play."
Nor let us commit sexual immorality, as some of them did, and in one day twenty-three thousand fell; nor let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed by serpents; nor murmur, as some of them also murmured, and were destroyed by the destroyer. Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, on whom the ends of the ages have come. Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you except such as common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it. Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak as to wise men; judge for yourself what I say.
That is the section we are going to be focusing in on in the rest of the time we have today.
Like I said, the chapter is Paul's way of explaining to the Corinthians their primary problem. It is like the world's and its like humanity's and it is like physical Israel's: it is idolatry! Still! Their lack of understanding, why he called them carnal, and why they were arguing with him was due to their idolatry. Their lack of growth was due to their idolatry. Their cliques and divisions were due to their idolatry, their sexual peccadillos, their lawsuits against one another, their marriage problems, their problems with offenses. They were all due to their idolatry. That was the root problem.
Now, they may not, and probably were not, bowing down to Greek idols in the temples there in Corinth. They were not worshipping, like physical Israel, a golden calf but they were putting something or someone else in the place of God in their lives. And on that basis, they were conducting themselves in ways contrary to God's instructions, because their motives, behaviors, their attitudes, their emotions, everything was coming from a spoiled source. Not God's pure source, but coming from another source.
Let us read the first five verses again as we jump into this section.
I Corinthians 10:1-5 Moreover, brethren, I do not want you to be unaware that all our fathers were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ. But with most of them God was not well pleased, for their bodies were scattered in the wilderness.
Paul sets up his comparison here of God's physical people Israel and them, the Corinthians and all the rest of the church, as God's spiritual people. He is making a comparison between the two bodies: the body of the children of Israel in the wilderness and the body of spiritual Israel. Remember, we are called the Israel of God in Galatians 6:16, that is walking through the wilderness of this world toward the Kingdom of God. So Israel, without Paul saying it directly, is a very good type of the church, a physical type. And of course, he mentions here that they were examples to us in the next section.
Now, what we see here is this set up of a mass of people walking through the wilderness. Well, first we have them walking through the sea. They were in the cloud and in the sea and they were baptized to Moses, as it were. And so they were this group trying to make it across the wilderness to the Promised Land. And they followed Christ and they drank of all that He provided them in the wilderness. And we see in these few words that he uses to describe what was going on there, that the same things that we think of in spiritual terms happened to them, but on a physical level. They had their baptism, they drank and ate of the things that Christ provided them in the wilderness.
And there is an allusion here of like the pillar of fire and the cloud that was leading them where God could be seen, if you will, His presence was known, and He led Israel through the wilderness in this windy way over 40 years, finally ended up on the banks of the Jordan, and their descendants then were able to cross over. This is what we are going through.
Then we get to verse 5, and verse 5 says with severe understatement, that with most of them God was not well pleased. I love that. It makes you think, uh-oh. And then he really capitalizes on that understatement by saying, "for their bodies were scattered in the wilderness." He is saying it was strewn with their bodies all across the wilderness, all along the trail that they took over Sinai and up toward the River Jordan—bodies everywhere. It was all along the path.
Somebody figured it out that they were probably burying about, I think it was 90 or so bodies a day, every day in their 40 years through the wilderness in order to get rid of that original generation that were not allowed to cross into the Promised Land. I mean, think about it. If you are a nation of 2.5, 3-4 million people and you are moving across a desert, how many do you think would be dying? You know, the old people, the sickly, the young who are weak. Every tribe would have to have a burying crew and they would be putting holes in the wilderness in the sand for all the bodies that just suddenly gave out as they went through the wilderness.
His wrath, God's wrath on these people whom He had led through the wilderness, His wrath against their ongoing, persistent, and stubborn sins was so fierce that all that marked their trail were corpses. That is the image that God wants you to have here about how "not well pleased" He was with these people. That the whole trail was just one big cemetery across all of the Sinai Peninsula.
So despite the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire leading them, their failure to reach the Promised Land proved that though they had walked behind the pillar, they had not followed Christ. Their path was purely physical and their deaths then point to the existence of critical, unrepented sins. I mean, what does Romans 6:23 tell us? The wages of sin is death. And so there must have been a lot of sin because there was certainly a lot of death over those 40 years. And these sins were not just occasional weaknesses but intrinsic way-of-life sinfulness. They never got it. I mean, even the simple commands they did not really keep.
What Paul is saying here in a roundabout way is that the children of Israel never really left Egypt. I mean, they physically left Egypt and they walked across the way, but they died. They died before achieving the purpose that everybody had walked out. And so their lives, even after being freed, were futile. They just died in the wilderness because of their sins.
Let us read the next five verses or so. This is how Paul wants us to think about this, to process.
I Corinthians 10:6-11 Now these things became our examples, to the intent that we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted. And do not become idolater As some of them. As it is written, "The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose to play." Nor let us commit sexual immorality as some of them did, and in one day twenty-three thousand fell; nor let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed by serpents, nor murmur as some of them also murmured and were destroyed by the destroyer. Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, on whom the ends of the ages has come.
Notice how he bracketed this whole section. Verse 6 and verse 11 both tell us that these are examples to us. So this is very important that we get this point and he had to reiterate it to make sure it stuck.
These things that he mentioned as examples, these incidents that happened in the wilderness are something we should think thoroughly about in our walk, our path toward the Kingdom of God. He says there is a correspondence here, especially in a place like Corinth where they were not far from the immoralities and the cultural practices of the Israelites coming out of Egypt. I mean, our world is a bit different. We live in a pagan Christianized world. They lived in a pagan pagan world. That is about the only difference because people are still the same.
So we have to come to understand that the things that God led Israel through during their wilderness trek are things that we have to learn from. We have to take deep lessons from them because they act as a witness to us. They are actually sharp warnings to us about the way that we think and the way that we behave. Their story then is a cautionary tale. It is a true story. Real people lived and died so that you would have this as an admonition, you would have their experiences as an admonition so you would avoid the potholes in your spiritual walk and not die, your body strewn in the wilderness like theirs.
So what is He saying? We do not want to be like the Israelites, is what he is saying. We must learn from their failings or suffer God's wrath as they did. We do not want our bodies strewing in the wilderness in these days because it would be far worse for us than it was for them, because we have tasted of the good gift. We have the Holy Spirit. So while they experienced physical death, if we acted as they did, we would suffer spiritual death and wind up in the Lake of Fire. The stakes are far higher for us, and that is why we need their example. And God made sure in the holy days, in the feasts, that we got a dose of this every year. That we are made to think about the Israelites and their coming out of Egypt, at least during this feast, if not in other feasts as well. As a matter of fact, the Feast of Tabernacles about the Israelites dwelling in booths. We are always drawn back to that because God does not want us to miss the point. Do not be like them! It is not good for you.
The apostle here lists five sins that we need to be very careful to avoid because they are five sins that tripped the Israelites up and made them not achieve their goal, made them lose their race, made them fall on the mat in their match and never get up again.
Now, these five things are lust or craving for evil things. It is taken from Numbers 11. (If we had more time, I would go through each one of these, but I do not want to take that time right now. Maybe someday we will get to going through these five incidents.) This is the one where they murmured against God and were so hungry, crazed for meat. God was not giving them what they needed as energy as they went across the wilderness. And so God gave them quail, all around the camp up to three feet thick, and they went out and gathered these and they died while the meat was between their teeth in a plague that God sent because of their cravings for things that God did not provide.
Those evil things that they craved, even though it was clean meat, it stood for all the things that we desire to sate our own appetites that God has not given us up to now. So it could be actually a desire for something good that God would provide. Was not quail meat good? It was something that they could use in a righteous way, but their lust, their craving for it turned it into a bad thing because they did not have any self-discipline and it became a god to them.
The second thing is idolatry itself. He specifically points to the Golden Calf incident in Exodus 32. And I do not want to go into these very deeply. But here is the case where they made a god for themselves, fashioned from their own ideas about what God would look like based on what they had probably worshipped in Egypt, because bull worship was quite popular in ancient Egypt, the Serapis bulls and that sort of thing. But this is using not just a form or an image, but also using a foreign god. Again, outside of what God had provided.
Then of course, the third one is sexual immorality. This is from Numbers 25 and their fornication and/or adultery with the Moabite women which Balak and Balaam finally got the Israelites to succumb to. But this is again another sin, going outside the camp, outside the norms, and satiating their lust. There is a lot more that we can draw from this. But clearly this is breaking the seventh commandment if nothing else. But it was also not being content with what God had provided within the tribes of Israel, within the church. This is going outside for that sort of fulfillment, if you know what I mean.
The fourth was tempting or testing or provoking Christ. This is from Numbers 21. Again, the Israelites murmured and God sent serpents among them and killed a great deal of them because what they had done was that they basically got on their high horse and said, "Can God provide a table in the wilderness?" They provoked God by trying to limit Him again and challenging Him to do something for them, to satiate their hunger and their thirst. So this is something we need to be careful about because this is trying to goad God into doing our will rather than His own.
The final one, the fifth one is the one I have mentioned a couple of times in going through these five, and that is complaining or murmuring. This is probably from Numbers 14, although as Mark was speaking this morning, I thought, OK, they grumbled in Exodus chapter 14, Exodus chapter 15, Exodus chapter 16, Exodus chapter 17. And you know, you go into Numbers and they are grumbling and murmuring and complaining up through Numbers. So let us just say that this was their general attitude. They were discontent with everything about what God had done, their walk toward the Promised Land, they had a criticism of everything, all that God wanted to do to them was stupid. Why did You drag us out here into the wilderness just to die, our bodies strewn all over the desert, accusing Him of being unthinking, and always having a bad attitude. Forever criticizing the work of Moses and Aaron, thinking they were too big for their britches, saying we are just as holy as you are. You know, a lot of things that they complained about throughout the time.
So Numbers 14. This was the incident where they came up to the border of Canaan and they sent in the spies and the spies came back. Ten had a bad report and told the people, even though Joshua and Caleb were saying no, no, no, no, we can do this. This is not too bad. You know, God will go forth us and fight for us. But they got the bad attitude and started complaining, why did you drag us all the way across the desert and let us die at the hands of Canaanites. And so God said, "I've had it! This generation will die. Over the next 38 years all of you will die. Only Joshua and Caleb will go into the land because you complained and I got sick of it because you always complain."
So those are the five things: lust or craving, idolatry, sexual immorality, provoking Christ, and murmuring. Those are five large areas that we as God's spiritual people need to avoid like they are the plague. And is it not funny? Almost every one of them, when the Israelites did it, God sent a plaque. If you avoid them like the plague, there will not be a plague, but if you do them, there probably will be a plague.
For our purposes today, these five points, these five incidents, or five categories of sin should be seen as symptoms of the disease rather than the specific ailment. This is how, we might say, this is how the main sin manifests itself. In these five different attributes or ways of sinning. It will come out as complaining, or it will come out as sexual immorality, or it will come out as provoking God to do something that you want Him to do, or idolatry, or some sort of craving or lust for something that is not good. But we can take our cue from verse 5. They are attitudes and behaviors that do not please God in the least, and they incite His wrath very quickly. So we will look at them as symptoms of failure, symptoms of missing the mark, symptoms of going beyond the bounds. But not the main problem.
Specifically, as I have been hinting all along if not outright saying, these wicked acts are signs of idolatry, the first commandment. That we are putting some other god before Him. Because the idolatry that's mentioned in verse 7 was the kind where they made a physical object and worshipped it. The problem though, is that they had put something in place of the Almighty God. They had made an idol of something other than God. So these five categories of sin exposed the people who commit these sins as worshipping someone or something other than the true Almighty and Most High God. Each transgression points back to a choice or a decision to follow something or someone else's direction rather than God's direction.
These sins point out that we are following the instructions of something or someone other than God. They are symptoms or manifestations that the person or persons have done the will of someone or something other than God and His will.
Now the clear culprit in all of this, the idol that has been created, is the self, the individual's human nature and carnal flesh. That is what they worship. That is what they follow. That is the will that they do. The god that such people follow is the thing that each person is closest to: their own nature—themselves.
I Corinthians 10:12-15 Therefore [after thinking about this and these sins and who the real God of most people is]] let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you except such as a common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape that you may be able to bear it. Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak as to wise men; judge for yourselves what I say.
So he is telling them to think deeply about this and make a decision, make a judgment on what Paul has presented here.
Paul concludes this process of reasoning through the first 11 verses with a warning. Do not think you would never succumb to these things. Do not think that you are strong. He saying, thinking like this, thinking that you could pass God's bar of judgment on your own merits is a sure sign of lack of self-knowledge. You do not know yourself as well as you think you do.
That is what Paul is saying to this very carnal group of people in Corinth. You think of yourself way too highly! You are not far enough along on this process to really make such a statement—that you would stand before God and be counted righteous on your own merits. Because watch out! You are going to get grabbed by one of these sins, or more than one, and fall like the Israelites fell in the wilderness. That is what you do when you die. You fall, then you do not get up. Such a person thinks in his pride that he has no more to learn. He has nothing else to overcome. He feels secure in his righteousness. This is a self-righteous person. He has established his own standard of righteousness and he looks at himself versus his own standard of righteousness and he says, "Ha! I win. I am righteous. God has nothing that He could accuse me of." Of course, God is not going to accuse you of anything, but God will judge.
So Paul here is telling the Corinthian church, the whole church, not just specific ones with problems, he is telling the whole church as a warning from what he got out of mainly the book of Numbers, but the Pentateuch, and the journey of the Israelites across the wilderness. What he is suggesting, or saying out pretty outright, is that such a person who thinks like this, that thinks he stands, has not truly plumbed the depths of human wickedness, even his own. Other places he says stuff like, "Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren." Do not deceive yourself that these things cannot happen to you. Because once you do, you are on the road to falling, to making huge mistakes.
I was reminded by James [Beaubelle] mentioning Revelation 3:15, this is the Laodicean church, "I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish that you were cold or hot. [This is Jesus speaking.] So then, because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of My mouth." [Now, how did He get that?] Because you say, 'I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing'—and do not know [they had no clue] that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked."
Their self evaluation was that, "Hey, wow, I'm pretty good just the way I am." And Christ though said, "I see something totally different. When I look at you, I see someone who looks like a derelict. I see someone who needs a lot of help. I see someone who needs to look in a mirror and actually see what's going on and not like the man in James who goes away and quickly forgets what kind of man he is." There needs to be a self-evaluation here and it needs to be true and honest, and it needs to plumb the very depths of wickedness in the human heart and conclude that, "I am very poor. I am very weak. I am very evil."
What is the first Beatitude? "Blessed are the poor in spirit." That is the point that these Corinthians needed to reach because they were thinking they were okay. Paul told them they were carnal but they still thought they were wiser than he. So these people really needed a dose of self-evaluation and a dose of reality so they could see what they were really like and how easily they could succumb to some of these things that he had listed in verses 6 through 10.
Verse 13 now about "no temptation has overtaken you except that this is common to man." And then he says, "but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will make a way of escape." Now, verse 13 asserts 1) that church members are like other men with the same blindness, with the same faults, with the same urges, with the same cravings, with the same drives as other men. And also 2) that God does not test us beyond what we can overcome.
In other words, we are not especially good or righteous compared to other people. The only difference that we have now is the advantage that we have God's Spirit. We can look in the Bible and have God's knowledge and we can come before the throne of God through the righteousness of Jesus Christ. That is our advantages. But strip those away and we are just like normal men. We are not anything really special outside of God's calling and His gift of the Spirit. But God is not unfair in His testing. He does not test us more or less than He would test anyone else.
We have to understand that He is faithfully guiding our conversion to transform us into the new man and lead us into the Kingdom of God. He is not trying to trick us or give us something that we are not mature enough to handle. None of that. He is very fair and very faithful in the way that He is guiding us. He does not ever give us unresolvable tests. There is always a way to win the test, to beat the test, to overcome the sin, or whatever it is that is holding us back. He always provides a way of escape and I think He often provides many ways of escapes. There are many ways of escape. What He wants is us to choose the way of escape that requires the use of faith and thus growth and thus getting closer to Him.
For those of you who are Star Trek fans, there are no Kobayashi Maru tests in God's way of life. Some of you may know what that is. That is the unbeatable test that James T. Kirk beat by cheating because he changed the programming so he could win. But God does not do that. God always gives us problems to solve that we have the aptitude, and if we follow his instructions, we can overcome whatever the problem is. He is faithful that way.
Down to verse 14. "Therefore, my beloved brethren, flee from idolatry." So he finally gets to his main point here. This is his conclusion and it is a stir to action statement here. Flee, get out of there, do not meddle with any kind of idolatry. He says this is wisdom from God and wise members will reach the same conclusion with Paul. That is why he says there in verse 15, that the wise among you will understand that this is actually what needs to be done. He is saying the sins of God's people always begin with idolatry. They happen most of all when we trust ourselves rather than God. We, that is, our carnal human nature, are the idol.
That is why He says time and again throughout his epistles, kill the flesh, mortify the flesh, put on the new man, do whatever you can to get rid of those things, those sins that are within us. But we too often think we know better than God and so we trust ourselves and do what pleases ourselves rather than what God says will have the best end. That is, peace and prosperity and eternal life in His Kingdom. And oftentimes that requires us to sacrifice and human nature hates to sacrifice. And so it does what human nature says and gives in and does the easy thing. That is bowing down to an idol ourselves and our human nature.
The logical solution, Paul says here in verse 15, is to flee from it as if it were a venomous snake or a man-eating tiger or the gleaming swords and spears of 1,000 Egyptian charioteers that are chasing us into the sea. Flee, get out of there! And like the Israelites, we need to flee toward God and the way of escape that He has provided.
It comes down to a matter of trust. God, Paul says in verse 13, is faithful. He is never sly, never tricky. He never says one thing and does another. He is solid. I mean, we just saw in verse 4 that He is a rock. He does not change. And so we can always rely on Him. Why do we not? We just do not trust, we do not trust Him. God has been faithful to us all along the way. He has proven Himself time and again as trustworthy. And now it is our turn, our time, to show that same trust to Him or toward Him.
We have to trust His purpose that He and the Son devised in the ages past as the best way. We have to trust His truth, which He has so wonderfully provided in the pages of this Book. We have to trust His wisdom, of a God who has lived forever, who has even come down to this earth and lived as a man and knows the hardships, knows how hard it is, but He overcame it and He promises to provide the strength for us to do that too.
So do not worry, you can have peace because He has overcome the world.
We need to trust His promises, which are as long as your arm, and eternal. That you will be glorified if you just follow the plan, if you just show a little faith, if you just show a little trust and hold His hand until the end. We have to trust His eternal sovereignty. He has got everything under control for all time. We do not need to worry that things are going to go wrong. Things will go wrong in this life. But we have a God who makes sure that they do not go too wrong because He has given us the strength to overcome them.
And speaking of strength, we have to trust His strength, which is boundless. Remember, the gospel is the power of God to salvation. In the words and in God Himself and His guidance of us and upholding of us, we can make it. We just have to trust Him and not turn and trust something lesser, far lesser ourselves. And as he says, in verse 31, at the top of our minds must always be this idea: "Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." That puts your mind in the right frame to trust Him and not commit idolatry.
Let us finish in Psalm 146. It is appropriate for this day because this is the summary psalm for Book One of the Psalms. Book One of the Psalms is thematically linked to the Passover season. And so this should be on our minds during this time.
Psalm 146:1-10 [Hallelujah! That is what it says in the Hebrew] Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul! While I live I will praise the Lord; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being. Do not put your trust in princes, nor in a son of man, in whom there is no help. His spirit departs, he returns to his earth; in that very day his plants perish. Happy is he who has the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps truth forever, who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The Lord gives freedom to the prisoners. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind; the Lord raises those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the strangers; He relieves the fatherless and widow; but the way of the wicked He turns upside down. The Lord shall reign forever—your God O Zion, to all generations. [Hallelujah!] Praise the Lord!
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