1 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.

4 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.

7 But not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificed 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 is answering mail. The church in Corinth had written to him with a practical problem, and this chapter is his reply.

Here was the problem. In Corinth, most of the meat sold in the market had first been offered in a temple. Sacrifice was ordinary civic life, not a fringe activity. A wedding, a guild dinner, a family celebration, much of it happened in temple dining rooms, and the meat on the table had been dedicated to a god. So a new Christian had to decide something concrete. Can I eat this?

It looks like a yes-or-no question. Paul does not answer it with a yes or a no. Not for a while. He starts somewhere else entirely.

"We know that 'We all possess knowledge.'"

He is quoting them back to themselves. That phrase in quotation marks is almost certainly a line from their own letter. They were confident. They had the theology right. And Paul agrees with the theology. What he questions is what the theology was doing to them.

"But knowledge puffs up while love builds up."

Two verbs, and they are not opposites in the way we expect. Puffing up is what air does to a bladder. It makes something bigger without making it stronger. Building up is masonry work. It is slow, it adds weight, and what it makes can hold something.

Paul is not against knowing things. He spends the next three verses laying out careful doctrine. He is against a kind of knowing that has nobody else in view. Knowledge that only ever inflates the person holding it.

And notice the direction. Knowledge puffs up me. Love builds up you. That is the tell. If what I know only ever makes me feel more solid, it is doing the first thing. If it makes someone else more solid, it is doing the second.

Verse 2 sharpens it further. "Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know." He does not say they know less than they think. He says something more uncomfortable. They do not yet know in the right way. The manner is wrong, not just the amount.

Then verse 3 turns the whole thing around.

"But whoever loves God is known by God."

Read that slowly, because Paul breaks his own sentence to say it. You expect the tidy parallel: whoever loves God knows God. He does not write that. He writes that the person who loves God is known by God.

The security is not in the strength of my grip. It is in his. What settles a person is not the size of what they have understood. It is the fact that they are held in view by God, who knows them completely and has not looked away.

That is also why knowledge puffs up. When my standing depends on how much I have grasped, I have to keep growing the pile, and every conversation becomes a place to defend it. When my standing is that I am known, there is nothing left to inflate. I can be wrong about something and still be safe.

Now Paul gives them the doctrine, and it is not soft.

"An idol is nothing at all in the world" and "There is no God but one."

He grants the Corinthians their point. The statue is wood. The meat is meat. There is no rival deity absorbing the offering.

Then verse 6 opens into what many scholars think is one of the earliest Christian confessions we have. There is one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live. There is one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.

Look at the shape of it. From the Father, through the Son. For the Father, through the Son. Paul takes the Shema, Israel's daily confession that the Lord our God is one, and he puts Jesus inside it. Not beside it. Inside it. That is an enormous claim, and he makes it in the middle of a discussion about dinner.

So the confident Corinthians were right. And being right did not settle the question.

"But not everyone possesses this knowledge."

Some people in that church had spent their whole lives around those temples. For them the meat was never neutral. Eating it pulled them back into something they had walked out of. Paul says their conscience is weak, and that when they eat against it, it is defiled.

He does not tell them to grow up. He does not say their conscience is badly calibrated and should be ignored. He treats a weak conscience as a real thing that can be really damaged.

That is worth sitting with. We tend to assume the fix for a wrong belief is better information. Paul knows that a person can be told the truth and still be wounded by acting against what they feel. The wound is real even when the doctrine was correct.

"But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do."

This is Paul letting the air out of both sides. The permissive ones thought eating proved their freedom. The cautious ones thought abstaining proved their devotion. Neither was true. The plate is not where nearness to God gets decided.

And once the thing itself does not matter, the only question left is what it does to the person beside you. That is exactly where Paul goes next. He has quietly moved the whole conversation off the menu and onto the brother.

Most of us are not deciding about temple meat. But we all carry some version of "I know I'm allowed." A freedom we are sure about, and technically right about, that we exercise in front of someone it costs.

Two questions to carry today.

Where has being right recently made me bigger, rather than made someone else stronger? Not where was I wrong. Where was I right, and what did being right do to the room?

And who around me is quietly paying for a freedom I am enjoying? Not because they are fragile, but because their history with it is not my history.

Paul's answer to both is the same, and it is the line that keeps pulling at me. Whoever loves God is known by God. When that is where I stand, I do not need to win the point. I can let it go, because nothing about me is riding on it.

All glory to God — forever and ever. Amen. 🤍

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