Introduction

Good morning. As we proceed into this passage, I'd like to make an important brief detour. Just short of two weeks from today, on the 20th, we're having the Seminar and Workshop for Husbands. This is really important material. I used it with the men in Uganda just a couple of weeks ago. It was very well received there. They were very excited about it and I would propose to you that it is very exciting material. However, I have a concern. And that is the number of ladies who have told Nancy that they would like their husbands to come to that is a longer list than the number of people who have signed up for this. So just anyway, that's my concern. All right.

Today we're going up to the Bible bookshelf again, and we're selecting out 1st and 2nd Corinthians, obviously starting with 1st Corinthians, and today putting our primary introduction focus there, and then finally addressing the three verses that Courtney read for us. So these two books will be our area of study for the weeks and months to come here. And I'm really looking forward to it. There is some rich and even unique material in these books. But we have to ask the question, what are we getting ourselves into here?

This picture here kind of, yes, lopsided. It's okay. No. Yes, it is lopsided. It is the fortress at Corinth, only everybody is still sitting up straight in their pews. I don't know. Anyway, so what are we getting ourselves into? We're going to be starting these two letters. They're fairly lengthy letters. And what's interesting, and we'll cover it when we get there, there's also a third letter that we apparently don't have.

So we're reading what's actually probably 1st and 3rd Corinthians if we were to put the sequence to it. And as the Lord wills, we'll move on and study these books in the months to come here. Now both of these books are rich in spiritual truth and in clarification. I say clarification because A great deal, especially of 1 Corinthians, is a matter of Paul responding to questions that they have or clarifying things that they were confused about.

There'll be some very relevant questions and I would present to you some as sort of examples. How should we deal with conflict between fellow believers? That can get sometimes high order of magnitude, very public and serious. It can also be something that happens on a personal, smaller scale. But how do we deal with that? Here's another one. What does God think of divisions in the church? Churches don't have divisions, of course. But what does God think of divisions in the church? Not just what do people think, but what does God think?

How do we deal with today's sexual preference issues? They had them then, too. Are you at risk of dying when you take the Lord's table, like today? That'll be a question that comes up. These questions are really important, and we've only touched on a few, at a time when our own culture is drifting quickly towards being more Corinthian. That's true. First and Second Corinthians is going to be very important for parents, for those with very young children, for those who have children who are somewhere in the growth process. First and Second Corinthians deals with some really critical issues. We've got a world out there that wants to sell you and your children on all sorts of things. What do you tell your children? How do you protect them from what's out there? We've got some very strange things in our culture, and it's getting stranger. Let me give you a for instance.

There is the North American Man-Boy Love Association. This is not platonic love either. Basically, it's an association that looks for adult men to have relationships that are not platonic with young males. And it is tax deductible. It's actually an approved tax deduction.

We have very strange things like that going on. This set of books out of the Bible will help us address those issues. What do we teach our kids? Very important stuff. You have this on page one of your handout. It shows on a timeline Paul's first, second, and third missionary journeys.

It starts off with Christ's crucifixion. Obviously, we've got just the symbol there, but it includes his death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seating, happening around 30 AD. It was a few years after that that Paul himself became a believer, and he made his missionary journeys within that first century, the late 40s into the early and middle 50s of that century. And so we have here the chapters and acts and the years in which that took place.

Here is a map of his first journey. He did not make it as far as Corinth in that first journey. He essentially established the churches in what is called Galatia and then made it back to the sending church, which is at Antioch. His second missionary journey, that's where he made the first trip to Corinth. and established the church there.

That we see recorded in Acts. And then on his third journey, he also made it back to Corinth. Now, Paul went to Corinth then on his second and third missionary journeys. Those are shown there on your timeline. So he went to the church first on his second journey and then on his third journey again. Paul wrote 1 and 2 Corinthians while on his third missionary journey. He wrote one and then the next one, only about a year apart perhaps, while on his third missionary journey. He spent some time with them and then spent quite a bit of time writing to them.

I want to have us start off with four keys to understanding 1 and 2 Corinthians. These will be helpful as we step our way through these books in understanding why these issues, why these questions, why is this a problem? Let's look at the first of those keys, the social ladder key.

It comes about like this. Corinth was at a crossing point on land and a crossing point by sea, offering financial opportunities for some Corinthians, some in the church. Let me explain what I mean. If you were anywhere in the landmass, and this just shows a part of it that connects to all of Europe, and you wanted to get down to here, you had to cross this small piece of land and go by, guess where? Corinth, okay? And if you lived here and wanted to go up there, you're going to go through Corinth.

Now, here's the other thing. If you didn't want to take your ship around here but wanted to get up into this area, the way to do it that was more direct was to go up into this waterway, up into this harbor, and now here is a small stretch of land and then take your ship or your goods over into this harbor or you could go the other way. It was only a little over 100 years ago that they actually cut a canal in there. Back in New Testament times, you could come up with a small to medium-sized ship and they would pick up your ship and put it on a wagon, okay, and take it across to the other side, no matter which side you were at, for a fee. And so a small to medium-sized ship could be carried across this little landmass and save you that several days of travel by ship. Or, if the ship was large, you could go to Corinth and have them haul, with this nice-sized wagon, all your cargo. across to the other side onto another ship.

So either way, the people in Corinth got money, at least those who were well suited to collect the money. So there were some people who made good money in Corinth. Everybody else was poor, many of them very poor. So here's Corinth in this stretch here to take a kind of a closer look. Going by land, going by sea, it was a crossroads. It was a place for some people to make a lot of money. Every time you pass through, money, money, money.

Some were well off, most were poor, and many were, as Paul himself will say, very, very poor. And when we say very, very poor, it means on the very edge of survival. Those who were well off were in a constant battle for social status. Corinth was a socially unstable place where people who had money were constantly trying to climb the social ladder and it was unstable and there were various factions and followings.

Some of the ways you could climb the ladder was by trying to display and express human wisdom to get people's attention with that. Public displays of generosity. You're going to donate the money to build this. You're going to donate the money to help with that project. And have great pomp and fanfare as you gave the money. Or it might be through fancy oratory, flowery speech. Better than what I'm giving to you now. Flowery speech.

You might also do it, oh, here's another strategy, and some of the Corinthians in the church tried it, lawsuits. You could actually get ahead socially with lawsuits. Okay, I'm going to carry on this lawsuit and have more arguments and that sort of thing. And it was actually sort of recreational lawsuits that they had.

Another way to put yourself on top was to put down the poor. If you put down the poor, of course, you must be better than them, right? And what do we see? We see this showing up in the letter itself. Every single one of these issues shows up. Why? Because some of the more well-to-do people in Corinth were using these, I'll call them, human efforts and nasty tricks to try to put themselves ahead, climbing the social ladder, as all the other people were doing. Now there's the ethnic key to understanding the Church of Corinth.

Most of the people of Corinth were Romans. They established themselves as a Roman colony. How did that happen? About 200 years, 146 BC, the Romans and the Corinthians, the original Greek Corinthians, fought. You see there a Corinthian helmet and you see some Roman soldiers in the picture. They fought.

And the Romans actually came in with four legions of Roman soldiers, plus some other mercenaries they'd hired, two groups of mercenaries, and they wiped out the Greek Corinthians that were there. And by wiped out, I'm not speaking figuratively. They eliminated them and even took everything that was of value in the city and wiped out the buildings. They demolished Corinth. For about a hundred years, Corinth was just a ruin and a memory, if that.

Then in 44 BC, Corinth was made a Roman colony. That is, they took a bunch of people from Rome, the city of Rome, and said, we're transplanting you to this place that was once Greek Corinth, and you are now going to be the symbol of Rome in this area. You're going to be as Rome as Rome gets right here in this place called Corinth.

So the area around was Greek in background, but these Romans that came in oftentimes were more of a Roman or Latin background. And so it was a mixture of Latin and Greek spoken there. they actually built a new city and laid everything out including a nice fine theater and the Bema seat that's mentioned there, something we'll point out later, is something Paul himself writes about in his letter.

Now let's look at the other part of the ethnic key and that is while there was mostly Romans there, there was a significant minority and fairly high-profile group of Jews. And what's interesting about the Jews is they were rather missionary about it. And so they, even being a minority, would go about telling Bible stories to the Gentiles, the non-Jews who were among them. And so that's why when we get to chapter 10, Paul can even start recounting and reciting some of these Old Testament Bible stories, and even the Gentiles would know what he's talking about, because the Jews had already gone ahead and told these stories ahead of Paul. So you have the majority Roman culture, the minority Jewish culture, and most of the time they got along together okay.

Now here's the other part. We have the religious key. As with much of the Roman Empire in general, people were free to mix and match between a variety of the pagan religions. They had some pagan religions that were Roman, some Greek, even some Egyptian religions you could pick from. All that was fine.

You could have whatever you wanted among those as long as you included in that emperor worship. You have to worship the emperor. So here is, for example, the temple to Emperor Octavian, who was otherwise called Augustus Caesar. The one who was the Caesar when Christ was born.

And the pagans all carried out their religions in temple buildings. And that was one thing. If you had a religion in Corinth, it was in a temple building. It was always carried out in a temple building. But did the Christians have temple buildings? No. So what does Paul do? He tells the believers there, you're the temple. You don't have a temple building? Yes you do. You're the temple. Live like a temple. Do temple kind of living. You're the temple.

Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you together, corporately, all of us? Remember, we met this last Wednesday to talk about how we are the body of Christ. Paul makes this statement, we are the temple of God. Where does the Spirit of God dwell? Among us. Here. This isn't the temple. We are. He tells them only a few chapters later, each individual Christian is also a temple. Treat this thing as a temple building. You're the temple. There's also the immorality key to understanding the Church of Corinth. Now, the Roman Empire was a place of great immorality to begin with. Children could be bought and sold. and basically used for whatever purpose. It was perfectly legal for parents to actually take the life of their child at any age. Perfectly legal. All sorts of sexual activities were allowed and considered normal.

The believers there unfortunately took hold of this and figured that that's now a virtue. And so here is Paul, and he lists some of the things that they were. And we'll get to that passage. And it includes words for both a homosexual taking a female role, or homosexual taking a male role. The whole thing.

He says, such were some of you. In chapter 5 of 1 Corinthians, as we're going to see, he talks about, it is actually reported, there is immorality among you, and immorality of such a kind does not even exist among the Gentiles. You guys have immorality that the Gentiles, the other unbelievers, don't even accept. They were looking at that acceptance, that tolerance as a virtue.

Then there was the other extreme, and it pops up within the chapter here. The other extreme was to overreact. Oh, well, if it's bad to be sexually immoral, then let's make a new rule. If you're going to be a Christian, it's good for you to basically live asexually. As if there is no male and no female. It's good for a man not to touch a woman. That's what they taught. So there was that reaction.

And he clarifies that as well. Paul will tell the believers in Corinth that it is by God's doing that they are in Christ. And the Holy Spirit has immersed them, that is baptized them, so that they are in the body of Christ. One of the biggest words in the entire New Testament is IN. It's not big because it's a lot of letters. It's big because it's important. We'll talk about that when we get there. He'll tell them that those who are in the faith have Christ in them. So it's not just they are in Christ, but Christ is in them.

But there's a really big problem in this church. The problem is not that the believers are in Corinth, but the problem is that Corinth is in the believers. See the difference? The problem is not that the believers are in Corinth. He didn't tell them, get out. But the problem is that Corinth is in the believers. He says you need to get it out.

Here in 1 Corinthians, as Courtney read for us the first few verses. Here's Paul called as an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God. I've got several slides here that are on page 2 of your handout. I'm not going to go through the details of it. Here's Paul born a Jew steeped in the law.

He initially persecuted the church to the point of death. He even claimed it himself. He becomes born again as Paul the believer. He becomes a man who was steeped in the law, now the steward of grace. He founds these churches, including this one here in Corinth, in these Gentile lands. Here he is with all the best of the best in terms of Jewish background, and a Roman citizen. That would serve him well from time to time. a tent maker by trade, likely fluent in four languages at least, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic, an aggressive persecutor of the church. That's the one who founded this church here in Corinth. That's the one who's writing these letters. Paul had a special assignment as an apostle. He was the apostle to the Gentile lance, the one. Paul conveyed some teachings not disclosed by other apostles. Believers have the adoption of sons.

We won't see that in our study here. But the body of Christ, yes, we will see that in 1st and 2nd Corinthians. Sealed by the Holy Spirit, we'll see that as well. Believers have all been identified and united with Christ. We'll see that before we get out of the first chapter. Listing and explaining spiritual gifts, he does it more in 1 Corinthians 12-14 than any other place. Jews and Gentiles are both in Christ, that is those who believe, and dead to the law. The in Christ part, yeah, we're going to see that real soon. We have this slide on an apostle. I'm going to let that be for your review. It's on your handout.

And the same thing with the qualifications of an apostle. Sosthenes is someone we don't know too much else about. There is one other Sosthenes mentioned in the Book of Acts. It's possible, but not necessarily likely, that these two are the same guys. He's one who's privileged to be writing with Paul at this time, perhaps even serving as his scribe. And he writes to the church as Corinth, those who have been sanctified in Christ, saints by calling. This word sanctified is important. This means set apart for a special and holy purpose. Does this church have problems? Yep. But guess what? They're sanctified. Is this church very confused? Yeah. They're very confused. Are they squabbling? Yes. Okay. Do they have all sorts of moral issues and questions? Yes. But guess what?

They're sanctified. And not only that, that sanctified is in what we call the perfect tense. Now, don't get perfectly tense about that because what this means is it's a completed action, okay, with ongoing results on into the future implying permanence. Corinthians, he's going to tell them, have this problem, and that problem, and this problem, and you've got this other question, and you haven't resolved this, and you need to do this, and you've got that problem. But before I get started on that, let me tell you, you are completely set apart for God's holy purpose, and it's a done deal. In Christ, you're already sanctified, even if you're not living like it. Even though these people have lots of problems, they are indeed set apart for His holy purpose for eternity.

You have on your handout, and I won't go through it, expanded and explained. It's something we've done as we've studied through several of our New Testament letters, and we'll do it again through 1st and 2nd Corinthians. I won't always read through it, but I'll include it so that you'll be able to put it together. What we'll try to do is, as we have done with Philippians and Galatians, is at the end we'll compile them so that you'll have the entire book in an expanded and explained version. And a lot of people have said it makes it much easier to understand and to study. So I'll leave that to you.

What an honor and a privilege we have as we begin this book. to get the Apostle Paul's inspired insights into not just the church then, but the church now, into us, especially at a time like this, especially at a time when we need this kind of guidance.

And we also need, as these verses end up with, grace and peace. We need God's grace. And we certainly, most certainly, need His peace. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, as we look at this passage, as we begin to step our way through these books, we thank you for your grace spelled out from the very beginning. We thank you, though we know we're going to be looking at a church with lots of troubles, a boatload of problems, at the same time you begin by telling them what they have. And that God is faithful from the very start all the way to the end. We thank you, Lord, that you are faithful through today, through this week, for the rest of our lives until we see you face to face. Thank you for that faithfulness. In Jesus name, Amen.