1 Corinthians 10:1-8
10 I don’t want you to forget, dear brothers and sisters,[a] about our ancestors in the wilderness long ago. All of them were guided by a cloud that moved ahead of them, and all of them walked through the sea on dry ground. 2 In the cloud and in the sea, all of them were baptized as followers of Moses. 3 All of them ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all of them drank the same spiritual water. For they drank from the spiritual rock that traveled with them, and that rock was Christ. 5 Yet God was not pleased with most of them, and their bodies were scattered in the wilderness.
6 These things happened as a warning to us, so that we would not crave evil things as they did, 7 or worship idols as some of them did. As the Scriptures say, “The people celebrated with feasting and drinking, and they indulged in pagan revelry.”[b] 8 And we must not engage in sexual immorality as some of them did, causing 23,000 of them to die in one day.
There have been countless times that I have heard someone say, I like the God I find in the New Testament but I do not like the God of the Old Testament. He was angry, violent and judgmental but God in the New Testament is forgiving and full of grace. This was a question that the early church also wrestled with as people were reached from different faiths and backgrounds. How do we reconcile the differences that appear to be in the two contrasting images of God that we find?
Paul makes it clear that the God that he is leading people to is the same God as from the Old Testament. He hasn’t changed his character but is the same then as he is now. This is important to him because he wants us to know that God has not suddenly stopped caring about sin and immorality. Paul says that the stories that we find in the Old Testament serve as a warning to show us how serious and offensive sin is to God. We should read them and wake up to how seriously God takes our sins.
I used to smoke 20 cigarettes a day. When I became a Christian I decided that I had to quit and doing so was one of the hardest things in my life. I had to realise that cigarettes were not bringing me anything good and would rob and kill me if I did not defeat them. There could be no compromise, no half-victory. Addiction doesn’t work like that. I had to wage war. I am no longer impartial about cigarettes.
When we think about the grace of God, it is easy to see his forgiveness as license for some sin. Not the really bad ones like murder. But the everyday ones like self-indulgence, jealousy, apathy, or self-centredness are ok. We say that God is far more interested in rescuing people than fixating on our lifestyle choices. However, this is not what the Bible says. The Bible says that sin brought death into the world (Rom 6:23) and separates us from God (Isa 59:1-2) and ruins our relationships (Gen 3:7-11). Sin is at its heart rebellion from God’s Kingdom and the desire to live in a Kingdom of our own creation. God wants to remove every bit of rot from our souls. So, salvation is reconciling to God and from sin. There is grace on the journey but Paul wants them to know that to follow Jesus is to step away from immorality and to enjoy the fruits and joy of life as he created us to live.
How does understanding sin as rebellion from the kingdom of God affect how you see sin?
