Opening illustration: Commercial aircraft carry two flight-data recorders called “black boxes.” One logs the performance and condition of the aircraft in flight, and the other records the conversation of the crew with air-traffic controllers on the ground. These boxes are insulated to protect against extreme temperatures and are fitted with underwater locator beacons that emit sounds to the surface. After an airplane crash, these boxes are retrieved and the data carefully analyzed to determine the cause of the crash. Air safety experts want to learn from past mistakes, among other things, so they won’t be repeated. If the secular world takes so much care in these matters, how more should we? As Christians, we too should look at mistakes from the past and learn from them.
Paul, for example, alluded to some of the mistakes the Israelites made in their journey from Egypt to Canaan. He wrote that because God was not pleased with them, many died in the wilderness (1 Corinthians 10:5). Paul went on to explain that “these things happened to them as examples for us. They were written down to warn us who live at the end of the age” (v.11 NLT).
Let us turn to 1 Corinthians and learn through some of the examples set by our forefathers.
Introduction: The blessings and privileges that believers have in Christ are bountiful, to say the least. Scripture declares, in fact, that we are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ (Ephesians 1:3), indeed, we are complete in Him (Colossians 2:10). The outworking of these blessings mean a number of wonderful things in a Christian’s life. However, with our privileges come two more vital concepts: ‘strength’ (ability) and ‘accountability’ (responsibility).
Though we do have liberty in Christ, and though God has given us all things freely to enjoy, and though we do have and can joy many things such as marriage, children, homes, recreation, and other forms of pleasure, such must never become our prime focus or goal.
By disqualification we must understand that the apostle was not concerned that he (or we) might lose his (our) salvation. His personal concern and the issues here are: (i) abusing privileges, (ii) exercising responsibilities, (iii) glorifying the Lord, (iv) failing or becoming disqualified in his work as an apostle so that he could not finish the race, and (v) the loss of rewards. This is a real threat for each of us as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, as it was for the Corinthians and even for the Apostle Paul.
How to learn through examples?
1. Awareness of the CIRCUMSTANCE of our Forefathers (vs. 1-5)
The expression “I do not want you to be unaware (or ignorant)” is the Apostle’s plea and what God wants us to grasp regarding the teaching and application of Israel’s history to our corporate and individual lives. I hope we do not miss an obvious general application here. This serves to emphasize that God does not want us to be living in a state of ignorance of the truth of Scripture because biblical truth is fundamental to spiritual health and running a good race. Because of our own sinfulness and because of the many deceptions of Satan, being ignorant or forgetting God’s truth is downright dangerous. God wants us to daily learn from and respond to the truth of Word of God. Hebrews 3:7 says, “Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts as in the provocation …”
The expression “Under the cloud,” according to the context and the Greek word used here, this signifies “under” not simply in the sense of location, but under in the sense of protection; it was like being under the shelter of the Almighty.
So, (i) today, believers in Christ have the promise of God’s guidance and direction by the Scriptures and by the Spirit of God. Likewise, (ii) being in Christ, all believers are hidden and protected in God, their Savior (Colossians 3:3). In Him believers are super-conquerors (Romans 8:32-32). In Him they are accepted and have access in the Beloved (Ephesians 1:6).
The expression “Passed through” is best viewed as there was nothing the Israelites could do in their power to be saved. They faced the Red Sea in front of them, had the armies of Pharaoh behind them, and the wilderness on either side. Yet God worked supernaturally: He parted the Red Sea, delivered Israel and destroyed Pharaoh’s armies. When it was all over they stood on the other side, delivered from the bondage of Egypt by the power and grace of God.
So today, men without Christ stand helpless, the bond slaves of sin and facing certain death. Yet, God has worked supernaturally through the person and work of His Son to provide a once-and-for-all salvation, a complete and perfect deliverance from the penalty and power of sin. As believers in Jesus Christ, Christians are a delivered people, a people who have passed out of death into life (see also Deuteronomy 6:23; 1:30f).
The word “baptized” signifies the truth of “identification.” It’s important to note here that the only people who got wet were the Egyptians. Though the fundamental idea of the Greek verb, baptizw, is “to dip, immerse, and plunge or to place into,” the outworking of this metaphorically is that of identification. So likewise today, when a person trusts in the Lord Jesus, they become united into Him by the baptizing, identifying work of the Spirit, and to one another in the body of Christ.
This, of course, was the manna which God provided daily to sustain His people. So likewise, Christians have the Lord Jesus, the ‘Bread’ from heaven who sustains our life and upon whom we are to daily feed by living in the Word and by abiding in Him: counting on Him as our source of life.
The Rock which gave water spoke of Christ who, as the preincarnate Christ, actually followed them, sustaining and meeting their needs in the wilderness, day after day. Likewise as believers today, Christ has given us the water of the Word and the refreshing water of the ministry of the Holy Spirit which sustains and ministers to those believers who will walk by the Spirit and drink from the fountains of the Word.
Now why this emphasis on the fact of Israel’s blessings? To stress the reality of the danger of disqualification to all of us. Privilege never guarantees success. We must exercise our responsibility to discipline our lives and to stay close to God. Thus in verse five we see how the nation became disqualified and was not able to enter the land of promise.
2. Do NOT IMITATE the SINFULNESS of our Forefathers (vs. 5-7)
Do we understand what verse 5 means? First, it means all but two were not only disciplined severely, but they were disqualified from their ministry and purpose as a special people of God (cf. Exodus 19:5,6; 33:14-16; Deuteronomy 4:6-8). They utterly failed to accomplish God’s purposes for their lives. Here we have a timeless warning: THE PEOPLE WITH THE MOST APPROPRIATED THE LEAST.
It also indicates that we too can be disqualified and fail in the ministry God has for us—and we have even more than they did (Ephesians 1:3). This was Paul’s concern and needs to become our concern as well. May we not presume upon God and simply rest in the fact we are Christians who are blessed with every spiritual blessing, nor in the fact that we are in a Christian environment surrounded by godly people, or that we are in a Bible teaching church, as great as those blessings and privileges are. Let us not trust in our privileged position and think we have it made for, though heaven is secured for us by the power of God as a free gift by grace, we are not exempt from failure, from disqualification in the race and from the loss of rewards. Again, we can never lose our salvation, but we can fail to use our salvation responsibly. And like Israel, we will have to face the consequences of our failure to live and use our privileges in Christ responsibly.
Since disqualification is always a real danger, the Corinthians’ complacency toward the Word, their emphasis on the showy gifts, their externalism in worship, and their strong tendencies toward self-indulgence, required immediate correction or they too would be disqualified. The Corinthian church did not have a long ministry. They failed to take heed.
This brings out the principles of (a) insatiability and (b) loss of control. Things never satisfy or fulfill as we expect or hope, and in our pursuit of them they can literally dominate us. When we crave something, it creates a mad and fruitless search for happiness and fulfillment in the thing desired which it can never provide.
(a) When we lust for things we are in essence worshipping and seeking our happiness, security, and meaning in those details regardless of their nature—position, power, prestige, possession, pleasure, etc.
(b) When we lust for things, we are at the same time operating under the demonic and human delusion that things have the god-like ability to bring happiness and security and significant, etc. The one who craves something treats that something as if it were God with the capacity to make him or her happy and secure. This is a form of idolatry.
What we must not fail to grasp is that craving things stems from a deeper root problem, from wrong perspectives, values, belief systems, and priorities. The root problem the Israelites faced was that their hearts were never truly fixed upon their spiritual blessings or upon the Lord. While some meant business with the Lord, the majority didn’t and things became their treasure. The result? Things also became their master (cf. Matt. 6: 24; 1 Peter 1:13-15).
3. Learn through the REPERCURSSIONS of their sins (vs. 8-11)
We go looking for excitement in the forbidden. Ours is a society that has become totally preoccupied with sex. It’s worshipped like a god. Sex seems almost to ooze from the pores of our American life. The moral erosion has been accurately captured by Sorokin who wrote about this over forty years ago and, of course, things have progressively grown worse.
Designed to excite the fading lust of readers, and thereby increase the sales of these literary sex-tonics, much of contemporary Western literature has become Freudian through and through. It is preoccupied with “dirt-painting” of genital, anal, oral, cutaneous, homosexual, and incestuous “loves.” It is absorbed in literary psychoanalysis of various complexes,—the castration, the Oedipus, the Tetanus, the Narcissus, and other pathological forms. It has degraded and denied the great, noble, and joyfully beautiful values of normal married love.
We live in a society of the ‘quick fix’ and in a time when almost everyone is bent on immediate gratification. This problem is not new; it was Israel’s problem, and it could also be ours. In fact it is a sure sign of immaturity and carnality. John T. Watkins suggests that three patterns underlie many of the impulse-control problems we see in our society today.
(i) Infantilely believing that one has to have what one wants, or infantilely demanding, dictating, or insisting that desires be satisfied at all costs;
(ii) Eegocentrically believing that circumstances must not be difficult and that life should be easy;
(iii) Believing that any difficulty, delay, or inhibition is too awful to stand.
Insolent unbelief is rebellion to authority and God’s established chains of command. People always want to do their own thing when they are controlled by a craving after evil things. When people are like this, they rebel against being accountable to anyone because it might hinder getting what they crave.
Again Paul repeats the principle of verse 6, but now he adds “were written for our instruction.” The word “instruction” is the Greek nouqhsia. It literally means “to put sense into the mind.” But in its use it connotes two concepts:
(i) It carries the idea of “blame or censure” and involves correcting something that is wrong in one’s life by the exposition and study of the Word through teaching/preaching, in a one-on-one situation, or through personal Bible study.
(ii) But it also includes the idea of an appeal to the volition. It looks for a response based upon the instruction and truth of Scripture (cf. 2 Timothy 3: 16).
Application: The inspired Word of God is written for our instruction for living (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Thank You, Lord, for the guidance of Your Word. God’s warnings are to protect us, not to punish us. Scripture warns us, and calls for a response.
