Preventing Spiritual Identity Theft Series

It’s not often that the start of a New Year just happens to coincide with a new series. But it’s January 1, 2023, and as the Lord would have it, that is exactly what has happened. We recently finished our study in the Book of Romans, and we will proceed this morning right through the New Testament to the next New Testament book, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.

And as you have perhaps noticed, I have entitled the series “Christianity for Dummies.”

You might wonder why. The reason is that in contrast to the Church at Rome, we encounter a very troubled church in the city of Corinth, Greece, a church that from the contents of the two long letters which the Apostle Paul wrote to it, clearly gave Paul more grief than any of the other New Testament churches. When it came to Christianity, the believers in Corinth simply weren’t very good at it. If Murphy’s Law ever applies to churches, it certainly applied to the church at Corinth because it almost seems if something could go wrong in a church, it certainly did, and in the church at Corinth. We often talk about our desire to replicate the fellowship and devotion of the first century church, but the First Church of Corinth, Greece was not a first century church any of us would want to imitate. Our series could nearly be entitled, “How to Handle Any Church Problem that Might Come Up." Because that’s exactly what it seems the Apostle Paul was facing when he wrote I Corinthians—a list of questions and problems that needed to be resolved.

If you’ve read I Corinthians you know what some of those problems were. They are actually rather shocking in some cases. There were problems with dissensions and divisions in the church, certain cliques or groups regarding themselves as elite or superior in relationship to other cliques because of the particular spiritual leader or leaders that they followed. Members were defrauding other church members, and they were taking each other to court—to secular courts. There was even an on-going well-known case of incest that the church didn’t merely accept, but applauded, if you can believe that. And incredibly, when the church gathered to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, guess what happened—some people got drunk, and others feasted while some went hungry! The church was very gifted with supernatural gifts, but they managed to abuse even this—they used the spiritual gifts for selfish and egotistical purposes! The church also entertained, even welcomed teachers who brought them a false gospel and a false Jesus, and even denied the resurrection. Slander and gossip were so rampant that the authority and character of the Apostle Paul who had brought them the Gospel and founded the church in the first place, was severely questioned and in some cases, apparently rejected.

Now we might wonder why Christianity was so hard for these folks. Were they really dummies?

Well, in some ways, they were. It’s because many of them had come from a thoroughly, thoroughly pagan culture. Corinth was sin city in 50 A.D. Yes, it’s comparable to Reno, which bears that same name, but probably was much more like Las Vegas, where sin is everywhere and in your face. It was a cosmopolitan city of about 600,000 people in 50 A.D., a crossroads of culture and trade in that it was strategically located on the six-mile-wide isthmus that stretched between the Greek Peloponnesian Peninsula and what we know as mainland Greece, which was called Achaia back then. As a result, it had a port on either side of the city, a port to the west where ships coming from Rome and all points west would dock and a port to the east where ships coming from the east, Asia Minor and Ephesus and the Eastern Mediterranean would dock. The goods from these ships, or small ships themselves, would be transported from one side of the isthmus to the other to be shipped to the other side of the Mediterranean. In addition to this, it was located on the major land route north and south, so it was truly a center of trade and culture. And as you can imagine it was a sailor’s town, who would be looking for all kinds of excitement and mischief to get into once they got to land. And they found that in Corinth. For Corinth was the center of worship of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, the goddess of love. And every night, 1,000 sacred prostitutes would roam the city offering themselves as objects of worship to whomever might be interested. Corinth was so famous for prostitution and fornication that throughout the Mediterranean “to do the Corinthian thing” meant to be involved in fornication. On top of this, it functioned as the Roman provincial capital, yes, in spite of the presence of ancient Athens to the north, Corinth could pride itself on being the center of authority in Greece under the Romans. And so, there was a lot intellectual and civic pride, along with immorality that spilled over into the church. These pagans were so pagan that at times they clearly did not know their right hand from the left when it came to the Judeo-Christian moral values.