1 Corinthians 8

Today’s Passage: 1 Corinthians 8

Paul now takes up a question the Corinthians had put to him in writing, and it is a question about dinner. Meat that had been slaughtered in a pagan temple was everywhere in that city, on the market stalls, on the tables of friends, in the dining halls attached to the shrines, and the believers were divided over whether a Christian could eat it. Paul answers, but not in the way they expected. He does not begin with the meat. He begins with the men eating it. “We know that we all have knowledge,” he says, and then he turns their confidence on its head: knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Only after that does he give them the doctrine they were so proud of, and it is magnificent doctrine, the great confession that an idol is nothing at all and that there is one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ. Then comes the turn that costs something. Not everyone in the church has this knowledge yet. Some of them, only lately out of the temples, cannot swallow a piece of that meat without their whole past rising up in them. And so the chapter ends not with a ruling about food but with a man laying down a liberty he genuinely has: if what I eat causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again.

As you read, hold this: Knowledge that has not learned to love is not yet knowledge, for a freedom that wounds the brother Christ died for is a freedom used against Christ Himself.

1 Corinthians 8:1–3 (BSB)

¹ Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. ² The one who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. ³ But the one who loves God is known by God.

Notice what Paul does before he says a single word about the meat. He picks up the very phrase the Corinthians had been using, “we all have knowledge,” and holds it up to the light. He does not deny it. He grants it. Yes, we know. And then, in the space of six words, he tells them what their knowing has been doing to them. Knowledge (γνῶσις) gnōsis, pronounced NO-sis. Strong's G1108, knowledge, insight, understanding. The Greek word here was one of the proudest words in Corinth. Gnōsis meant insight, the grasp of how things really are behind the appearances, and in a Greek city that word carried the shine of the philosopher’s lecture hall and the mystery religion’s inner circle. To have gnōsis was to be one of the people who understood, while the crowd outside went on in ignorance. Paul uses the word all through this letter, and he never once says the knowledge is false. What he says is that it is not enough, and that by itself it does a particular kind of damage: it inflates. He will say it again in the great chapter still ahead of him, that if he could fathom all mysteries and all knowledge but had not love, he would be nothing. That is a stunning admission from a man whose mind was one of the finest God ever gave to the church. Real Christian knowing is never merely information about God stacked up in the head. It is a knowing that bends the knee and then bends toward the brother. Where your understanding of Scripture has made you gentler with the weak, it is the true article. Where it has made you impatient with them, something has gone wrong in the handling of it, however sound the doctrine is. puffs up, but love builds up (οἰκοδομέω) oikodomeō, pronounced oy-ko-do-MEH-oh. Strong's G3618, to build a house, to build up, to edify. The verb Paul sets against that inflation is a builder’s word. Oikodomeō comes from the words for a house and for building, and it means to construct, to raise a structure course by course. Puffing up is what happens to bread dough or to a bladder filled with air: it gets bigger and it holds nothing. Building up is what happens to a wall: it gets higher and it bears weight. Paul is fond of this word because he thinks of the church as a house God is putting up, and he keeps asking of every practice, every gift, every liberty, one plain question: does it lay a stone, or does it only swell the man who does it? Love is what lays stones. It looks past its own rights to the person standing next to it and asks what that person needs in order to stand. And here is the mercy in it for the ordinary Christian: you may never be the one in the room with the most learning, but there is not a believer alive who cannot build. Every kindness done to a weaker brother is one more course laid in a house that God Himself is raising, and He is the one who will finish it. . There is the whole chapter in one line. Something can be perfectly true and still be handled in a way that makes a man swell rather than makes a church stand. The Corinthians had taken a genuine insight, that an idol is nothing, and used it the way a boy uses a new fact at the dinner table: to be right, and to be seen to be right, and to be a little above those who have not caught up yet. Paul does not take the truth away from them. He tells them that truth held without love is not yet held rightly at all. “The one who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know.” That sentence is a door shutting quietly on every proud thought any of us has ever had about our own understanding. And then, having taken away the ground under their confidence, Paul gives them something infinitely better to stand on. He does not say, “the one who loves God knows God.” He says the one who loves God is known by God. The whole security is shifted off our grasp of Him and onto His grasp of us. Sit with that for a moment. You may be a plain believer who could not argue theology for five minutes, and you are known by God, and that is a greater thing than knowing.

1 Corinthians 8:4–6 (BSB)

⁴ So 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 there are many so-called gods and lords), ⁶ yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we exist. And there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we exist.

Now Paul gives them their doctrine back, and he gives it back in full. He does not water it down to keep the peace. An idol is nothing at all in the world. The statue of gold or marble is a piece of the creation shaped by human hands, and the god it claims to represent has no existence whatever. There is no God but one. Every Jewish child in the empire had said those words from the time he could speak, the great confession of Israel: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One.” Paul knows perfectly well that the city around him is thick with so-called gods, on the mountaintops and in the temples and in the emperor’s own titles, and he grants that people call them gods and lords by the hundred. But then comes that lovely little phrase, yet for us. Whatever the world says, this is what we hold.

And what he then says is one of the most breathtaking sentences in all his letters, and it is worth reading slowly. He takes the Shema, the one confession no Jew would ever tamper with, and he opens it up to make room for Jesus Christ without breaking it. One God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we exist. One Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we exist. The origin of everything is the Father; the agency through which everything came into being is the Son; and our very existence runs back through Christ to the Father as its goal. This is written to settle a squabble about dinner, and Paul cannot open his mouth on the subject without the glory of God spilling out. Praise Him for it. The Lord Jesus, who was nailed up outside a city wall, is the one through whom the stars were made. If that is who He is, then no lump of temple beef and no carved image on the Acrocorinth has any claim on a believer at all. The knowledge was right, which is exactly what makes what Paul says next so searching.

1 Corinthians 8:7–8 (BSB)

⁷ But not everyone has this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that they eat such food as if it were sacrificed to an idol. And since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. ⁸ But food does not bring us closer to God: We are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.

“But not everyone has this knowledge.” There is the sentence that turns the chapter, and it is a sentence about people rather than about principles. Doctrine travels through a congregation at different speeds. A man may confess with his lips that an idol is nothing and still carry in his body the memory of twenty years of kneeling in that temple, and when the meat is set before him his whole past comes up with it. He is “still so accustomed to idols,” Paul says, which is a tender way of putting it, and when he eats he is not eating beef; in his own soul he is going back. And so his conscience (συνείδησις) syneidēsis, pronounced soon-ay-DAY-sis. Strong's G4893, conscience, the inner witness of right and wrong. Syneidēsis is built from two pieces: the word for with and the word for to know. It is knowing-along-with, the faculty by which a person witnesses against himself, the inner voice that says of an act, that was right, or that was foul. The Greeks used the word, but the New Testament fills it out, and Paul uses it more than anyone. What this chapter shows us is something we do not always want to admit: a conscience can be wrong and still must be treated with the greatest care. The weak brother’s conscience has bad information in it. It is telling him the meat is dangerous when the meat is nothing. But a conscience is not a rule book to be corrected at speed; it is closer to a nerve, and to override it is to teach a man to act against his own deepest sense of right, which is a habit that will not stay confined to dinner. Once he has learned to do what he believes is wrong, he has learned something that will ruin him elsewhere. The remedy for a weak conscience is patient teaching until it grows strong, and never pressure that forces it. Handle your own conscience honestly before God, and handle your brother’s as you would handle something living. , being weak, is defiled. Notice carefully what Paul does and does not say here. He does not say the man is right; the meat is only meat, and Paul has just proved it. He says the man is wounded, and that the wounding is real even though the fear behind it is mistaken. That is a distinction the strong in every generation are slow to learn. To be theologically correct and pastorally careless is to be, in Paul’s judgment, not yet knowing as one ought to know.

Then in verse eight he takes the meat itself and sets it in its proper place, which is a very small place. Food does not bring us closer to God. Both parties in Corinth needed that sentence. The scrupulous man needed to hear that his abstaining earns him nothing, that there is no holiness stored up in a plain diet. The confident man needed to hear that his eating proves nothing either, that his freedom is not a badge of spiritual advancement and buys him no standing before God at all. The whole thing they were quarreling over is, in itself, weightless. And that is precisely why it is such a poor reason to injure a brother. If the matter mattered infinitely, a man might have to hold his ground. Because it does not matter at all, giving way costs him nothing he can afford to keep.

1 Corinthians 8:9–11 (BSB)

⁹ Be careful, however, that your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak. ¹⁰ For if someone with a weak conscience sees you who are well informed eating in an idol’s temple, will he not be encouraged to eat food sacrificed to idols? ¹¹ So this weak brother, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge.

Here is the command the whole chapter has been walking toward, and it is aimed at the man who is in the right. Be careful that your freedom does not become a stumbling block (πρόσκομμα) proskomma, pronounced PROSS-kom-mah. Strong's G4348, a stumbling block, an obstacle struck by the foot. Proskomma is a homely, physical word: the thing your foot strikes in the road, the loose stone in the dark that pitches a traveler onto his face. There is no suggestion in it of anything grand or malicious. Nobody sets out to be a stone. The stone is simply lying there, doing what it has every right to do, being a stone, and a man walking in the dusk goes down over it. That is the sober picture Paul hands to the mature believer. You may do nothing wrong in itself and still be the thing your brother trips on, and the fact that you were within your rights will not lift him back up off the road. Paul uses the same word writing to Rome, where he tells that church to make up its mind not to put any stumbling block in a brother’s way. The one thing Scripture will not permit us is to say, that is his problem, not mine. In the family of God the strong are accountable for where they leave their stones. And the Lord takes that seriously, for it was He who warned what it means to cause one of these little ones who believe in Him to stumble. to the weak. Paul does not tell him his liberty is imaginary. He tells him it is dangerous in the wrong hands, which is to say in unloving hands. And then he paints the scene so we cannot miss it. A younger believer, still shaky, still half-afraid of the old gods, walks past the temple and sees a man he respects, one of the well informed, reclining at the table inside. What does he conclude? Not the idol is nothing; he is not there yet. He concludes that a Christian may go back in, and so he goes back in, against everything his own conscience is screaming at him, and he eats. He has not been taught. He has been emboldened, and emboldened into ruin.

And Paul weighs what has happened with two phrases laid side by side, and no sentence in the letter cuts deeper. On the one side: your knowledge. On the other: this weak brother, for whom Christ died. Set them next to each other and look at them. Your knowledge is correct, and it cost you an hour’s thinking. This brother, whom your correctness has just leveled, cost the Son of God His life. The Lord of glory, through whom all things came, went to the cross for the trembling man in the back row who cannot eat what you eat. Is your right to a dinner really worth so much? Paul has taken the argument out of the realm of who is technically permitted to do what and set it down at the foot of the cross, and there is nowhere else in the world where a Christian can see the true value of another person so clearly. The strong were measuring the meat. Paul makes them measure the man, and the price tag on the man is the blood of Christ.

1 Corinthians 8:12–13 (BSB)

¹² By sinning against your brothers in this way and wounding their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. ¹³ Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to stumble.

Now the last turn, and it is the one nobody in Corinth saw coming. Everyone in that argument assumed the dispute was horizontal, brother against brother, a difference of opinion among equals to be settled by whoever had the better reasoning. Paul lifts it straight up. Wound the weak conscience of a brother, and you have not merely been thoughtless with a fellow member of the congregation. You sin against Christ. He is that closely joined to His people. Every insensitive word, every display of superior liberty that leaves a weaker believer bleeding, lands on the Lord Himself, the way a blow to a man’s hand is felt in the man. The same voice that would one day stop Saul on the Damascus road with why do you persecute Me is speaking here. There is no such thing as a private injury inside the body of Christ.

And so Paul ends where all his teaching ends, with himself standing under his own instruction. He does not lecture the strong and then quietly go on eating. “If what I eat causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again.” Consider what he is actually surrendering. He has established, on the highest theological ground, that the food is clean and that he is entirely free to eat it. He never takes that back. And then he says he will hand the liberty over for good, permanently, for the sake of one man who cannot bear it, and he says it without a trace of grievance, as though it were the plainest arithmetic in the world. Which, once you have seen the cross, it is. The one through whom all things came laid down infinitely more than a dinner. A believer who has understood that will not clutch his rights so tightly. He will hold them the way a strong man holds a small child’s hand, loosely enough not to hurt, firmly enough to lead, and he will let go of anything at all rather than be the stone in his brother’s road.