When we talk about knowing God’s will in doubtful situations, that involves a couple of key ideas. It involves, first, the idea of knowledge. What does it really mean to know something? Is it simply a matter of intellectual awareness, or does true knowing involve more? Second, knowing God’s will involves the idea of the situation. What is really going on? What is the background to the issue, and what are the factors involved?
Before going on to answer their question, which he begins to do in verse 4, Paul first talks about knowledge. Why does he start out like this? It is because they were so proud of their knowledge. The Corinthians thought they had keen analytical minds. We can imagine that the church was divided on this issue of eating meat that had been first sacrificed to an idol, and that there were good arguments put out on both sides. So Paul begins with knowledge, and he says a number of very significant things about it. The key idea is that knowledge and love go together.
Those two might not seem to fit together because we tend not to think that way. They appear to be two rather different concepts that operate in two very different spheres. Paul counters that wrong way of thinking by saying that if knowledge is divorced from love, knowledge becomes self-righteous and self-elevating. That is not knowledge in the deepest biblical sense. To know God is to love God, and, likewise, you cannot really love God without knowing Him.
Then Paul says something else that is very profound. He indicates in an indirect way that there are two kinds of knowledge and love. There is the knowledge and 1ove of God, on the one hand, and the knowledge and love of our fellow Christians, on the other. In verse 1 he writes: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” Here he is not talking about our love of God because we do not in any way build up God. He is instead talking about how we act toward other people.
Then, in verse 3 he goes on to talk about being known by and loving God. In other words, the two go together. You cannot have a right vertical relationship with God without a right horizontal relationship with other people. This is Christianity. There is a direct relationship between how well you know and love God and how well you know and love others. Having laid that groundwork for how Christians ought to relate to one another on the basis of their vertical relationship with God, Paul then plunges into the question itself, starting in verse 4.
