Over the next few weeks I want to take a look at the three persons in the One True God.
Now, some people would at this point be talking about ‘preaching the Trinity’.
And I’m not.
Why?
Introduction ‘The Trinity’
Firstly, ‘the Trinity’ is shorthand for what the Bible teaches about God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit … but not only does the Bible not use that term … it doesn’t spend a lot of time on any of the stuff a lot of the historic treatments of this doctrine are so energetically involved in trying to define, declare and defend.
Secondly, so much of the historic treatment of this doctrine comes out of a rather different world to ours and a very different world from the first century context into which the New Testament was delivered.
Here’s my big, fresh realisation.
So much of the New Testament … not when addressing the Jewish context at Jerusalem but in the parts of the Graeco-Roman world addressed in the Gentile mission … teaches about the Godhead against the background of idolatry and the issues and questions the come out of that view of the world.
Thirdly, our world is now so much NOT a part of the Christendom in which the historic portrayals of the Trinity arise and out of which they come to us are not particularly relevant or helpful in a world that thinks and works like ours.
And that’s why, in dealing first with the doctrine of God the Father today, I’m turning to 1 Corinthians 8., via Ecclesiastes 3!
What 1 Cor 8 is NOT about
Now, everybody seems to think 1 Corinthians 8 is all about eating food sacrificed to idols … and the subtext that goes with that viewpoint is that this passage is not relevant to us.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Pick and mix deities
This passage is fundamentally for us as it is all to do with living as worshippers of the one true and living God in a world that is permeated by the idea that there are lots of different deities available as a ‘pick and mix’. And let’s face it, that describes
OUR culture post-Christendom where everyone has their own personal choice of deity to be devoted to and their own ‘personal truth’ to live by.
But there’s more.
In such societies, holding that there is One True Living God is viewed as making you (in the subtitle of Nijay K. Gupta’s ‘Strange Religion’) “weird, dangerous and compelling”.
As it was in Paul’s world, so it is in ours.
A Biblically radical faith in the One True Living God, Who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is seen here too as weird and dangerous … but when delicately rather than robustly held loses all of its compelling appeal.
Let’s look first at the here and now reality we are living with.
The reality of
The delivery of the doctrine of God the Father is clearly set here in in 1 Corinthians 8 in the context of the interaction of this theological concept with a distinctly primal approach to religion.
Let’s be absolutely clear here … primal is not primitive.
That’s not what we’re saying.
I owe a great deal to Dr. Mark Pickett’s excellent paper on this subject at last year’s The Call to the Hills Conference 2024 where he interacts with clever people who have led him in his own thinking to describe what’s happened as Wales has become much more secular and post-Christian in his new word ‘re-primalisation’.
You can access that here:
1) What are we up against preaching God THE Father in a primalised culture?
Personally, benefitting from Mark’s work, I see it like this …
Ecclesiastes 3:11 sees that wise teacher observing of God:
“He has made everything beautiful in its time.
He has also set eternity in the human heart;
yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end”
Here’s the thing:
Firstly Ecclesiastes says God points to His own existence in His work of Creation … so that as Paul points out in his letter to the Christians in very pagan, ‘primal’, Rome:
“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”
(So in Ecclesiastes 3: ‘He has made everything beautiful in its time’)
Secondly, it says He HAS set eternity in the human heart … it’s the idea attributed to Pascal in his Pensées that was apparently only in an earlier unpublished draft of that book that there is a ‘God-shaped hole’ in everybody that we LONG to find ways to fill.
It’s a phenomenon that the Lord (arguably) refers to at the Feast of Tabernacles in John 7:37-39
“On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.’
By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.”
Now the word for where those living waters are going to flow from is κοιλία (koilia) commonly translated 'belly/womb/stomach’ … but which fundamentally means ‘a void’ (which is how early medicine thought of the abdomen).
Jesus speaks about addressing the human sense of that inner void in us by prophesying that those who trust in Him will find living waters flowing not just into their inner void to address their sense of being built around a God-shaped hole … but out from there into the world around them that also suffered from the anguish of such inner emptiness.
Thirdly, Ecclesiastes is saying that although there’s enough in the world around to say there is a God, and although there is this (as it were) God-shaped hole in humanity that naturally reaches out for God (that’s the bit about God having set eternity in the heart of mankind) we simply can’t fathom out for ourselves on our own.
(That’s the bit in Ecclesiastes 3:11 that says: “yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”)
The upshot for a reprimalised faith context:
And THAT’s why we needed God to give us the Bible, because although we had this evidence of God before our eyes and this longing for God within our inner emptiness of soul, we couldn’t work out by ourselves the detail of what we needed to discover to restore our soul-satisfying relationship with God.
So when you take away revealed religion … as has happened in post-Christendom, secular Wales, what you get is primal religion which deep-down recognises there’s a Creator, longs to know Him, but has turned away from the revelation of how to fix this to attempt to fill the void with almost anything else.
It’s not that they believe nothing, but that they will believe almost anything.
THAT is what characterises a post-Christian society, not the absence of any form of faith but a resorting back to primal faith devoid of Divine revelation where you’re left trying to work it out for and through yourself.
Exactly what Ecclesiastes 3 and John 7 is saying you can’t do in any satisfying sort of way.
And it is into THAT context … with such parallels as that to our own context … that 1 Corinthians 8:1-13, but especially v. 6 speaks, about the love of the one true living God the Father.
2) The principle at issue in 1 Corinthians 8, vv. 1-3
1 Corinthians 8:1-3 “Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that “We all possess knowledge.” But knowledge puffs up while love builds up. 2 Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. 3 But whoever loves God is known by God.”
Paul is having to tackle a basic, every day question that arose for Christian believers in a primal society like first century Corinth, and the key to navigating it was the doctrine of God the Father.
And this problem arose for the Corinthians because of a feature of their religious culture that is very similar to where ours has headed, into …
a) The ‘democratisation’ of knowledge
Judaism and Christianity are revealed faiths.
So we’re working with facts that we’re given not facts we work our for ourselves.
Ecclesiastes was saying that what you can work out gets you only so far, and then …
Ecclesiastes 3:11 “ He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet[a] no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end”
Our reprimalised spiritual culture can’t cope with that.
It INSISTS on getting eerything all worked out on its own, but it’s worse than that.
We live in a world that says all opinions are equal and valid.
Well, obviously they are NOT!
Everyone’s entitled to their opinion … but that doesn’t mean everyone is, or everyone’s views are, CORRECT!
What this means is simply that there’s no law against being wrong!
But it’s worse than that again because whatever garbage anybody dreams up themselves we’re supposed to acknowledge accept and affirm in this weird pick-a-mix spiritual context of us.
It’s bizzare.
How do you deal with that as a believer when that unworkable set of assumptions and requirements our culture puts upon us is so prevalent, and you have put your trust in:
The One
(they won’t like that)
True (they won’t like the assertion of one truth instead of a whole bunch of unrelated and contradictory ones)
Living God ( a living God is felt to be WAY to dangerous in our culture, I mean, what are you meant to do with a God Who is NOT one you’ve dreamt up to suit yourself in the event that He ‘disagrees’ with you?!?
How do you deal with that when your culture is shot through with idolatry’s state of actual unknowing, Paul?
“Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that “We all possess knowledge.”
Well, says Paul, all you who hold to this arrogant presumption of the democratic, ‘have it your way’, characterisation of what is true … it is extremely arrogant and fosters in humans an overconfident and un-loving pride.
“But knowledge puffs up while love builds up.”
The basic assumption will lead you where you profess not to want to go, is what this verse is always going to say to our culture.
b) The response of ‘revealed religion’ , vv. 1b-3
“ … knowledge puffs up while love builds up.
2 Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know.
3 But whoever loves God is known by God
Three things here:
- This is taking you away from the super-value you resort to, away from the revealed values.
In this case that value seems to be ‘knowledge’ … the sort everyone creates for themselves that contradicts mine and certainly contradicts that of any Divine Being that has not been created by humanity in its own image
The democratisation of ‘truth’ as reprimalisation spreads its wings seems to lay hold of a ‘super-value’ that trumps all others, define it (or RE-define it) until we are comfortable with it and then assert that vigorously until it has clubbed all other values (and their received or revealed definitions) to death.
This assumed ‘knowledge’ PUFFS up
- But love builds up
This is what reprimalised religion in our context is looking for … positive, affirmative action towards others, which te democratisation of truth lays claim to but judging by what we observe in our society of the fruit of it certainly doesn’t seem to … take the rancour and bitterness that’s developed between the trans., gay and feminist asserters of the democratisation of truth for just one example of where it gets you.
- Paul’s conclusion is that those who think they know something on the basis of what they’ve dreamy up for themselves … gods cast in their OWN image … “do not yet know as they ought to know.”
What a kind and tactful way that is to expose the folly of what these guys have been up to!
So the response of revealed religion as recorded by Paul is to expose the fruit in human experience of the folly that it is to embrace this democratisation of truth … show it up by what it leads to, and the extent t which that contradicts its espoused objectives.
We looked firstly (in the mart footage in the video) at the reality of a reprimalised society and now we have looked at the underlying theory or the issue of principle here.
Now we’re going to look in 1 Corinthians 8:4-6 at the issue in ractice
3) The Issue in Practice, vv. 4-6
“So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that “An idol is nothing at all in the world” and that “There is no God but one.”
5 For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”),
6 yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live;
and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.”
a) The real life dilemma
1 Corinthians 8:4a “So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols …”
With Paul, theology is almost always ‘task theology’!
And the task in hand here is that given what Corinth was like, such an ordinary every day event as going to the butchers for meat put pressure on the Christian conscience.
Had this lovely joint you’re looking at been previously offered to idols before being sold?
Now, please notice that what follows here is predicated on the situation they are in.
Paul is showing he UNDERSTANDS what they are up against and the pressures to compromise:
The ESV has the very best translation of this in v. 5:
“For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”
γὰρ εἴπερ εἰσὶν λεγόμενοι θεοὶ εἴτε ἐν οὐραν
Notice here the two ‘proverbial sayings’ Paul drops into the minds of the Corinthians, both in the list prefaced by the words
‘We know that’, indicting prior knowledge of the aphorisms
- “an idol is nothing at all in the world”
- “There is no God but one”
But Paul adds to that two of his own … which doesn’t get picked up with quotation marks in the translations .. as he introduces fresh additional considerations taken DIRECT from the New Testament revelation about God.
This is important for us because in our culture there’s this idea floating about too … it goes: ‘there’s only one god and well, it’s all the same god isn’t it? We just worship it in different ways’.
That is typical of the polytheism of primal religion.
It seems to be what Paul and the Corinthians were up against and it is increasingly what we are up against in rural Wales … and Paul is going to be addressing that here usefully for us, because whilst those first two proverbial sayings seem to be known, the two that follow contain content being freshly brought to the matter:
- “for us there is but one God,the Father
Notice that what’s changed there from the previous comment about there only being one God is that the one God that there is gets named and His exclusivity thereby underlined in this pagan culture where Paul’s already referred to there being “many “gods” and many “lords”… that One true God is God the Father … but
- “and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ,
Please notice very carefully that the use of the word ‘God’ of God the Father and the word ‘Lord’ of the ‘one Lor Jesus Christ’ is emphatically NOT relegating Jesus to second division deity!
Paul is picking up the phrase in v. 5 that there are said to be many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’ in order to emphasise his point that what is said about that is actually nonsense.
We know that there is One God and One Lord that we can know and we can name: and so he does so.
And there’s then a head on reference to the pagan view of Zeus as creator, in Paul’s stated fact that of both the Father and the Son it is true to say (in identical words for both): “from whom all things came and for whom we live”.
There is SO much more to say about this carefully crafted verse
In a culture given over to primal – polytheistic – belief systems Paul is not afraid to directly challenge the prevailing viewpoint on the basis of Biblical revelation.
Appeasement of delusion is not a Biblical strategy in cultures like the one ours is becoming.
As Ecclesiastes knew so well, humanity can’t quite arrive at what it needs to know to get to God without the delivery of God’s revelation of the way.
4) The way to go : living out the revelation consistently, vv. 7-8
- 7-8 “7 But not everyone possesses this knowledge.
Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god,
and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled.
8 But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.”
Paul’s point here is that believers who have embraced the Gospel but haven’t work their theology of grace thoroughly through their thinking yet are eating but with a clouded conscience and tripping and stumbling as a result …
The Lord had to address this issue for the disciples in a very different context after an encounter with the Pharisees over non-observance of their food laws in Mark 7:18-19: “‘Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? 19 For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.’ (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)”
Fascinating to see again that the enemy of souls has no new tricks and uses the same old stuff wherever he can to blind non-believers to the light and cause young believers to stumble over conscience and doubt the sufficiency of the grace they have received.
But finally in this passage Paul then balances that with a word of caution about how we go about behaving boldly in this area of life, because we shouldn’t exacerbate the stumbling of the weak conscience …
5) A word of caution, vv. 9-13
1 Corinthians 8:9-13 “Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak. 10 For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? 11 So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. 12 When you sin against them in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. 13 Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause them to fall.”
Conclusion
The truth about God the Father for our primalising culture lies beyond the ability of humanity to work it out for themselves in the revelation He has given us by means of His Word.
There’s enough in humanity’s observation of the world outside and the human nature common to each one of us that was put there by our Creator to excite inquiry and a seeking after God, but not to find peace with Him unaided by His revelation of the truth that needs to be realised.
And for believers that brings about a lifestyle and a set of life choices, as well as a faith position that seems at least a bit mad, even bad, and possibly dangerous to know!
But appeasing that primal religion position is not the right move to make.
Jesus didn’t and sets us that example in the Jewish context teaching His disciples not to go there, and that example is equally applicable where revealed religion has been abandoned in our primal religious culture in Wales today.
That revelation we have received does say there is only one God and it name Him.
That revelation does call on us to embrace the lifestyle that goes with it.
And doctrine that He is the One True Living God is the doctrine of God the Father that needs to be to the fore in the way we hold to the truth about Him in the thought world we inhabit here today.
