I do not know of any book of the New Testament that is more practical than 1 Corinthians, at least in terms of the range of subjects that it addresses. Through the first nine chapters Paul has dealt with pride, sexual immorality, marriage, divorce, lawsuits, and how Christian freedom functions in the context of love. But of all those practical matters that are handled in this letter, I suppose the most practical and far-reaching of all is this matter of temptation, which Paul discusses in chapter 10. That is because it affects everybody in a way that the specific issues mentioned above may not. Temptation is an all-inclusive category, and therefore concerns absolutely every person in the human race. Temptation is a struggle for everyone who is spiritually alive because we still carry with us our sinful nature. Oscar Wilde made light of the seriousness of temptation when he said in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “The only way to escape temptation is to yield to it.” Likewise, in Lady Windermere’s Fan, he had the character say, “I can resist anything except temptation.”
That is the sort of thing an unbeliever can say glibly, but anyone who is a Christian, and is therefore indwelled by the Spirit of Christ, knows what it is to struggle against temptation. Temptation is not something to be yielded to, but, rather, it is to be resisted at every turn. Being born again does not free you from temptation. In fact, being born again makes you aware of spiritual dangers you did not regard as temptations before your salvation. And how you achieve the victory is a very important matter.
This tenth chapter of 1 Corinthians in a certain sense has within it all of the bad news about temptation and, at the same time, аll of the good news. The outline of this chapter is a very simple one. The first point is that anybody can fall, including us. The second point is the good news, which is that nobody has to.
When Paul begins to talk about anybody being able to fall, he brings forward the Israelites as an example. Paul always writes with a great knowledge of the Old Testament in his mind. As he thinks back, it occurred to him that there is no greater example than the things that happened to the people of Israel during the years of their desert wandering. This is one of the most difficult passages of the letter, and anybody who has read it and tried to wrestle through the imagery he is using knows how difficult it is to sort out. He begins the chapter this way:
For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert (vv. 1-5).
Paul is saying that all the Israelites went out of Egypt, and they all accompanied Moses during those years of the wilderness wandering. So far as you could tell, all of those people were counted as among God’s covenant people. They all had a certain kind of spiritual baptism. They all ate a certain kind of spiritual food. And yet many of them perished in the way he is going to describe in the next paragraph. If that was true of Israel, then it is quite possible for somebody today to be within the visible church of Jesus Christ, to participate in the sacraments, and to do all the right things and, nevertheless, fall as they did.
