1 Corinthians 8

1. Now as touching things offered unto idols, we know that we all have knowledge. Knowl- 2 edge puffeth up, but charity edifieth. And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, 3 he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know. But if any man love God, the same is 4 known of him. As concerning therefore the eating of those things that are offered in 5 sacrifice unto idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none 6 other God but one. For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in 7 earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) but to us there is but one God, the Father, 8 of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, 9 and we by him. Howbeit there is not in every man that knowledge: for some with con- 10 science of the idol unto this hour eat it as a thing offered unto an idol; and their conscience 11 being weak is defiled. But meat commendeth us not to God: for neither, if we eat, are we 12 the better; neither, if we eat not, are we the worse. But take heed lest by any means this 13 liberty of your’s become a stumblingblock to them that are weak. For if any man see thee which hast knowledge sit at meat in the idol’s temple, shall not the conscience of him 14 which is weak be emboldened to eat those things which are offered to idols; and through 15 thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ died? But when ye sin so 16 against the brethren, and wound their weak conscience, ye sin against Christ. Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.—

RELIGION is the devotion of the soul to God. Then everything besides is not religion, but at most a means to it. That is true about all Christian ordinances. It is true about all acts and forms of Christian worship. These are not religion, but means to it. Their only value and their only test is, Do they help men to know and feel Christ and his truth? It is true about laws of life and many points of conventional morality. Remember the grand freedom with which the apostle dealt with the question about meats offered to idols. The same principle guided him when he said, “Meat commendeth us not to God; for neither if we eat are we the better, neither if we eat not are we the worse.” The separation is broad and deep. On one side are all externals, rites, ceremonies, politics, church arrangements, forms of worship, modes of life, practices of morality, doctrines, and creeds—all which are externals to the soul; on the other is faith working through love, the inmost attitude and deepest emotion of the soul. The great heap is fuel; the flame is loving faith. The only worth of the fuel is to feed the flame; otherwise it is of no avail. We are joined to God by faith. Whatever strengthens that is precious as a help, but is worthless as a substitute. A. M.

1. Knowledge puffeth up. It does not say mistaken knowledge, or error, but knowledge in general, and, consequently, truth as well as error. Love edifieth. To edify is to construct, to build, to erect a solid monument or habitable abode; in two words, to produce a positive result. This is the true meaning of the word edify. Thus, then, in truth (if it is only thought) there is inflation, wind, nothing; in love is the positive and the real. Such is the doctrine of Paul. It is also evidently that of John, when he says that he who loves God knows him. A. V.—The understanding does not redeem the heart, for then were the learned the converted. Reason can not give man regeneration, though it can make him proud, and lead him into wrong paths. Reason is not the redeemer of men, but Jesus Christ the Crucified One. A. C.

4. The idol is nothing as a god, and has no share in the government of the world. The heathen had three classes of deities: the celestial gods, supposed to reside generally in the heavens; the terrestrial, called demons (see ch. 10 : 20), and the infernal. M.

5,6. There is much of the spirit of these Corinthians existing now. Men throw off what they call the trammels of education, false systems, and superstitions, and then call themselves free: they think it a grand thing to reverence nothing. The true freedom from superstition is free service to religion; the real emancipation from false gods is reverence for the true God. For high knowledge is to be freed from the fear of the many in order to adore and love the one. And not merely is this the only real knowledge, but no other knowledge “buildeth up” the soul. Separate from love, the more we know the profounder the mystery of life becomes; the more dreary and horrible becomes existence. F. W. R.

6. I gratefully adore that incomprehensible existence, the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father. It is the life, the power, the spiritual grandeur, the one distinguishing fact and transcendent glory of the Christian faith. A God without unfathomable realities in the contents of his nature would be no God, just as a religion without mystery would be no religion. In the one case we should be orphans, as in the other we should be skeptics, faithless and forlorn. F. D. H.

But one Lord Jesus Christ. Some want a Christ who is not God; others a Christ who is not a sacrifice; a Christ without a cross, and without blood; a Christ who will teach but not expiate sin; a Christ whose life and death are an example of self-surrender to the utmost, but not an atonement; a Christ who is not a judge, nor a lawgiver, nor a priest, and only a prophet in the sense of teacher. Thus in the present day there are many Christs. It has been so all along; only the apostle John calls them not Christs but Antichrists—“many Antichrists.” To us there is but one Christ. He who was announced as the woman’s seed; he of whom Abel’s sacrifice spoke; he of whom Enoch prophesied as the Avenger; he who was revealed to Abraham as his seed; he of whom Job spoke as the Redeemer; he of whom Moses spoke as the Prophet; of whose work the whole book of Leviticus is full; he of whom David sang as the sufferer yet the King; he of whom Isaiah and all the prophets sang; he who proclaimed himself as come to seek the lost; to whom John the Baptist pointed as the Lamb of God; who hung on the cross, and died in anguish, yet rose again and ascended on high; he is the one Christ whom we recognize. Bonar.

7. Their conscience, being weak, is defiled. There could be no harm in eating the flesh of an animal that had been offered to an idol or false god, for a false god is nothing. And yet if any man thought it wrong to eat such flesh, to him it was wrong; for in that act there would be a deliberate act of transgression—a deliberate preference of that which was mere enjoyment to that which was apparently, though it may be only apparently, sanctioned by the law of God. And so that act would carry with it all the disobedience, all the guilt, and all the misery which belongs to the doing of an act altogether wrong; or, as Paul expresses it, the conscience would become defiled.

Do what seems to you to be right: it is only so that you will at last learn by the grace of God to see clearly what is right. A man thinks within himself that it is God’s law and God’s will that he should act thus and thus. He is responsible for the opinions he holds, and still more for the way in which he arrived at them—whether in a slothful and selfish or in an honest and truth-seeking manner; but being now his soul’s convictions, you can give no other law than this: “You must obey your conscience.”

12. It was to him a prerogative far more precious to assert the rights of Christian conscience than to magnify the privileges of Christian liberty. The scruple may be small and foolish, but it may be impossible to uproot the scruple without tearing up the feeling of the sanctity of conscience, and of reverence to the law of God associated with this scruple. And therefore the apostle counsels these men to abridge their Christian liberty, and not to eat of those things which had been sacrificed to idols, but to have compassion upon the scruples of their weaker brethren. And this for two reasons. It might cause exquisite pain to sensitive minds to see those things which appeared to them to be wrong done by Christian brethren; and it might even lead their brethren into sin. F. W. R.

13. The word offend signifies to cause any one to fall from his faith, to renounce his belief in Christ by any means whatever; and against every one that makes use either of violence or artifice to terrify or seduce the believer in Christ from his faith and obedience to his divine master, the severest woes and the heaviest punishments are denounced. The several modes of making our brother to offend are persecution, sophistry, ridicule, immoral examples, and immoral publications. Immoral publications have the same tendency with bad examples, both in propagating vice and promoting infidelity; but they are still more pernicious, because the sphere of their influence is more extensive. A bad example operates comparatively within a small circumference. But the contagion of a licentious publication, especially if it be (as it too frequently is) in a popular and captivating shape, knows no bounds; it flies to the remotest corners of the earth; it penetrates the obscure and retired habitations of simplicity and innocence; it falls into the hands of all ages, ranks, and conditions, but it is peculiarly fatal to the unsuspecting and unguarded minds of the youth of both sexes, and to them its “breath is poison, and its touch is death.” P.

How possible it is to mix together the vigor of a masculine and manly intellect with the tenderness and charity which is taught by the gospel of Christ! No man ever breathed so freely when on earth the air and atmosphere of heaven as the apostle Paul; no man ever soared so high above all prejudices, narrowness, littlenesses, scruples as he; and yet no man ever bound himself as Paul bound himself to the ignorance, the scruples, the prejudices of his brethren. So that what in other cases was infirmity, imbecility, and superstition, gathered round it in

his case the pure, high spirit of Christian charity and Christian delicacy. Match us if you can with one sentence so sublime, so noble, as this single, glorious sentence of his, in which he asserts the rights of