Paul moves from ritual matters to spiritual matters. There are lots of spirits in this world. Prior to Paul bringing the gospel to Corinth, some of the church members were idolaters, following whatever spiritual influences that got their attention. It was important that they be able to discern those spirits from the Holy Spirit of God. If someone at any time said words indicating that Jesus was anything less than the Son of God, the full and final manifestation of divine truth, then that did not come from God. On the other hand, no one could submit to Jesus as Lord without the power of God. It's not a mere question of words; the Greek term for "say" (lego) means an organized teaching backed up by conduct.

We should learn to recognize the boundaries of Christ and the covenant in His blood. He endows His people with all sorts of richness: samples of eternal powers, ministry callings, and sometimes just the results of His work in them. All of them are gifts He bestows, and all of them are marked by the changes His lordship demands from us.

Not one of those gifts are for the private benefit of the one bearing the gift. All of them manifest for the sake of the faith community. He lists a handful of Holy Spirit manifestations: moral wisdom, discrete knowledge, the power to withstand testing, healings, miracles, prophecies, recognition of various spirits, foreign languages or the translation of languages. When the Body of Christ has a need for something the people do not bring with them, the Father provides through His divine Presence on the spot. It always aims at promoting His reputation as our Master.

Paul uses the parable of the human body. We have various parts with different functions. Just so, the Body of Christ of is composed of many parts with different appearances and functions. What a monstrosity it would be if human bodies were just detached ears or eyes or some other part! Is it too subtle to grasp that the Corinthians suffered from self-promotion and envy over gifts God didn't give them? With their different miraculous endowments, some were strutting around as if they were really something special, somehow the very center of God's Presence in that body.

What happens when spiritual adults get involved? Spiritual maturity has no need for applause. Instead, spiritually mature people are somewhat indulgent toward those who are struggling, as a way of encouraging them. They give extra attention to those suffering any sorrow, because they understand the necessity of the body uniting in bearing the load of divine glory.

A church body is not built by human design. It cannot serve divine glory to plan out who needs to show up to fill organizational roles. God doesn't work that way. Instead, He moves hearts to show up and serve Him, so the game plan is to find a use for everyone with whatever gifts they bring. Organizational plans should grow out of the people you have.

Granted, the Lord has been known to give certain roles to people He chooses to serve Him: apostles, prophets, teachers, miracle workers, healers, those who solve problems, elders, people who deal with human languages, etc. What He does not supply, you pray for, but waiting on Him and His timing. You can't just assign a task to whomever walks in the door. You seek to know what God has made of them already, and what He plans to do with them. Stop recruiting skill sets.

Use the people He gives you. Do the Corinthians understand the whole point of all this?

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Keep track of how Paul's teachings lead naturally from one thing to another. The previous chapter was about self-restraint for the sake of the gospel. We are feudal servants of Christ by covenant; His reputation is our first consideration in all things. The Covenant of Christ has boundaries, the same as any other covenant. But this New Covenant is different from the Old, in that it is not a covenant that creates a national identity.

Paul refers to feudal headship as an ancient tradition essential to Christians. The symbolism of headgear has not changed much, even in the post-modern West. Men under military orders today wear headgear to symbolize this headship, a national military authority. Whereas the Hebrew national covenant required men to wear headgear during worship, as if under a mobilization for war, the follower of Christ recognizes no human national authority. It disgraces Christ's feudal claims for men to wear a head covering indoors, particularly during worship.

For women, a covering was never a matter of national identity; it has always been about how women are under the feudal moral covering of either father or husband. Equality of the sexes is anathema in Christ; male and female are not interchangeable. Just about the only females who were uncovered in public were either minors or prostitutes who had no moral covering. Paul uses ritual terminology to ensure there is no mistaking this. The human fact of birth through mothers does not change it. In Christian worship, women cover their heads and men do not, in order to portray the divine order of things.

That Paul also mentions hair has caused a lot of debate over the past two millennia. His point is that the two are related, at least in the context of what would be proper in his world. Not only did prostitutes avoid headgear, but they wore their hair short like men. In Corinth this saved time and confusion when sailors visiting town didn't speak Greek or Latin; a woman with short hair was for rent. Women with long hair or coverings were off-limits. Men with long hair were gay prostitutes. Sailors passing a large building with people gathered in worship should not confuse a Christian church meeting with a pagan temple hosting sacred prostitutes of either flavor.

Christians who wanted to protest about these boundaries on the basis of "freedom in Christ" were out of bounds. Their self-indulgent streak made them a threat to the gospel witness. It's that self-restraint principle again. The Corinthians struggled with that concept in everything.

The next example of that was in celebrating the Lord's Supper, the Christian version of the Seder. It celebrates our deliverance from slavery. Instead of making us a human nation, we are part of an eternal family. How did the Corinthians manage to turn it into an individualized thing? What happened to being one in Christ?

Granted, there should be some degree of distinction. Some in the body are quite mature in their faith. The rest of the church needs to see their witness. But that's not what happened in the Lord's Supper there. They would gather together, but it was like little family picnics. Some families brought a large pile of food, and some brought enough wine to get themselves drunk, but nobody shared with anybody else. Some church members were compelled to watch others eat and drink but had nothing themselves. That might be a supper, but it was not the Christ's Supper.

Eat your meals at home. This is a ritual celebration in which everyone shares as one, and it's just a token amount of food and drink. Everyone gets an equal share or no one gets any at all. Pass around the bread and the cup to everyone. Christ implemented this ritual after the main meal was already consumed. The Bread of Promise became His Body, and the Kiddush Cup became His blood. It is a memorial of His sacrifice for us all. It's as somber as a funeral until He returns, when it will become a wedding feast.

If you don't get this right, you defile yourselves. Humility before the Lord is the best way to avoid His wrath. Too many Corinthian Christians suffered to the point their lives countered the testimony of Christ -- weak, sickly and some died because the defilement kept them from the miracles of Christ. Do you not understand that if you embarrass Him, He will remove you from His Body, one way or another?

Flaunting your wealth during a church meeting is obscene. Serving each other is glorious. Other ritual matters they had asked about could wait until Paul showed up in person.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

The fleshly nature is an inveterate enemy of the Spirit. The flesh must be captured, humbled and kept enslaved. Once we are spiritually born, it must be made to surrender sight unseen to whatever the Spirit will direct through the heart.

The process of humbling the flesh is repentance by Biblical Law. The Law of Moses was how the Israeli people's fleshly natures were introduced to their new spiritual Master. They knew the drill; they understood what was required. Their culture included an awareness of the symbolism in the flesh pointing to eternal things in the Spirit Realm. They had no excuse. Even more so, since they watched miracles with their very fleshly eyes -- following and being guarded by the Pillar of Fire and Cloud, the waters standing aside when they crossed, the miraculous provision of manna and water.

They remained dry when crossing the Reed Sea, but they understood how it represented cleansing from the old way of life, and embracing a new identity in the Covenant as an adoption treaty as God's own family household. Nobody imagined the written code could cover every possible situation. As I wrote elsewhere, "Laws but paint an image of godly living on the surface of the human conscience." Israel knew that; there was no problem with legalism in ancient times. That was how silly children saw things. This written Covenant was meant to inform the flesh, to prepare it for how the heart would operate under Jehovah's reign.

Obviously, a large number of Israelis just refused to take it seriously. Despite having seen the mighty powers of their God, they kept violating the code. They died for that. We are supposed to look back on that and learn something about following Christ. Symbolically, He followed them through the wilderness; He was there in Spirit, and He enforces the same lessons today. We cannot afford to make the same mistakes. It wasn't the code that killed them, though obeying it could have kept them alive long enough to understand. Rather, it was the hand of God who became very disappointed with their truculent insistence on idolatry and self-indulgence.

They partied because they rejected their Lord's boundaries. So they died by the thousands on that day, and plenty more died in the testing with fiery serpents. They complained and fussed to have their fleshly desires met, and the Angel of the Lord slew them. It wasn't the law; it was the rejection of what the law indicated about God and His ways.

Paul says that we are here in the Last Days, a phrase meaning no new revelations are coming from God. We have all we need in Christ. There is no temptation we will face that hasn't already been dealt with adequately. Change the commitments of your heart; the Lord has promised to carry us through everything we might face.

It's a simple law: flee idolatry. The Corinthians should have understood what this is really all about. It's not the code, but what the code indicates to our fleshly nature about a spiritual nature. We use a ritual called the Lord's Supper, abstracted from the Seder Ritual. The ritual bread is all about feeding the fleshly nature the new restrictions, with plenty of examples. We all refer to the living law code of Christ's life on earth in order to understand. That's what a law code does. We also have the ritual wine, to remind us of the sacrifice of the flesh to empower the Spirit in us.

This is what we learn from Israel; we have inherited their calling. It's one calling that binds us all together, just like that single loaf of bread we tear apart to share as one body in Christ. It's all of us sipping from one cup to share in how His sacrifice set us all free. Sure, we realize that similar rituals taken in the name of pagan deities (the opposition elohim in disguise) has no spiritual reality behind it. It's all about the flesh. Don't make peace (what a ritual meal represents) with those demons as they keep the flesh away from the Spirit of God. You will serve one or the other.

Paul keeps quoting their doctrine that "everything is lawful". True enough as a matter of law code, but not everything is spiritual. Some of those lawful things can actually hinder peace with God. It's not about the code, but the commitment of faith. If hedonism and self-indulgence is what killed all those disobedient Israelis, don't use the law code as an excuse to let those things creep in and rule your lives.

What would it look like? Sure, eat what you find in the open market. Give our Lord thanks for all things. If you are invited by an outsider to a private meal, by all means, go and eat so you can testify of your Lord. Don't pick over the food; just eat what they offer. If someone tells you a dish came from the pagan temple stall, then don't eat it. Not because of your own conscience, but because of theirs. They don't know the Spirit and His wisdom; they are creatures of flesh bound under laws. What will they think if you eat something you know was offered at a pagan temple? What kind of testimony is that?

No, it's not possible to meet everyone's silly expectations, but some things are pretty obvious and not burdensome to observe. Be mindful of Jewish sensitivities as well as Gentile ones. You are a testimony of faith. Give your brothers and sisters a chance to grow in the same faith by not provoking them on those obvious issues of lingering human conscience.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

In the previous chapter, Paul ends by saying he would voluntarily set aside freedoms and privileges granted by the gospel message in order to promote that message. This chapter expands on the idea.

Paul was not a slave under human law, but an acknowledged religious leader. He was one of the select few who had actually been with Jesus and had seen Him after His resurrection. This was a high privilege, indeed. Should anyone doubt that Christ called him as an apostle, the Corinthians could not do so. The mere existence of a church in a morally corrupt place like Corinth was quite the testimony of his calling.

So, when churches welcome the surviving members of the Twelve and Jesus' younger brothers as the Christian equivalent of royalty, rolling out the red carpet and sparing no expense in hosting them, would the Corinthians deny Paul a simple meal? Would they give him a hard time if he brought along a Christian wife when he came to visit, the way others did? For doing precisely the same work, would Paul and Barnabas be required to pay their own way?

Paul cites ancient traditions that everyone understood. Common troops could not soldier if they had to pay their own way. Agricultural workers always got a share of the food they produced; it was the law. Besides, without that share, they wouldn't be very diligent. Then Paul points out how some parts of Mosaic Law still applied in terms of the underlying principles. It's not that God cared so much about oxen that He demanded they be unmuzzled when treading grain, but it demonstrates His priorities, His divine moral character. On the basis of the law about not muzzling an ox, we justly deduce that those who minister the gospel get paid for their ministry.

God Himself said that spiritual work is productive for the community, too. It was that way under Moses when priests shared in the offerings they presented to the Lord on behalf of others. Those Christian royalty were not involved in planting the gospel in Corinth, and it was fine that they be supported on their travels. Still, Paul was not angling for the church to start paying him anything.

Apparently some were suggesting that Paul was the same as some religious hucksters, trying to make people feel like they owed him something, or that he bragged about his accomplishments. Were that the case, there'd be more to boast of if he had volunteered for this ministry. However, he denied serving voluntarily; he admitted that Jesus Himself had coerced Paul into the gospel ministry. Paul had always felt wholly inadequate for this work, but someone far above him had entrusted Paul with this unspeakable treasure. That privilege was more than enough reward for Paul.

Thus, Paul accommodated all kinds of weirdness and weakness from every sort of people. They put all kinds of claims on him that he knew were not his burdens to bear, but he did so voluntarily so he could be in a position to share the gospel with them, to demonstrate the character of his Lord.

Corinth hosted the Isthmian Games every two years. The city had a strong athletic heritage. Like athletes, the believers should train the way Paul did, subjecting himself to unnecessary burdens to overcome his moral weaknesses. That wilting piece of greenery the winning athletes wore couldn't compare to the eternal glory of the gospel. You must enslave your flesh to the Spirit in order to join the victors in Eternity.

Substack is not allowing logins this morning; apparently the server that is supposed to provide some of the scripting support is not responding. For the time being, I am forwarding today's post here.


Peace Not Possible

If you can grasp the big picture, then you stand in the place to understand some of the variables we face in our context.

On the one hand, world peace is not going to happen. We know that; it’s stated in Scripture too often. On the other hand, a mitigation of sorrow is certainly possible. I’ve stated this before on this blog (in its pervious incarnation) that human violence is a necessity. The Books of Enoch got this very wrong, in portraying violence as the nasty thing the elohim sneaked around to teach humans. War among fallen humans is a direct result of the Fall, but not in the sense most people assume. Violence is an integral part of mortality. It is not a corruption of anything; it is built in. The mitigation is not stopping violence, but insuring that violence serves God’s justice.

The doctrine of non-violence is a human lie, a blasphemous insult to God. It’s more than just acts of war between nations. He decreed in Genesis 9 that there must be a human authority to bear the sword on His behalf. The problem we have is the dispute with God over who is supposed to wield that sword. The narratives regarding Noah assume that the one who wields the sword will be a close relative of the one who is executed. The family head of household is the first line of authority that bears the duty to execute their own kin who commit murder.

There is something peculiar to our western heritage that is a blasphemous insult to God: the Germanic Tribes and their abuse of feudalism. Their idea of feudalism was all about property, not people. What they believed, due to their pagan religious background, is that they can gain the right to disrupt the feudalism God commanded through Noah. If a Germanic lord conquers the land, he gains feudal rights to the people on the land. He has no familial obligation to them, but he owns them. That is not how the Bible says we should do things.

Over the time and distance from those days of ancient Germanic tribal idolaters, we end up with a civil government that insists it has economic property rights in the individual that happens to reside within the jurisdictional boundaries. In the Bible, such a claim was strictly limited, but in our American government, the claim is absolute. Our American legal system says the government has zero duty to care, but the individual has unlimited duty to obey and contribute. When government decides to offer some kind of support, it is a privilege, not a right. Thus, your government has no obligation to care for you at all, but has every right to extract from you all your economic value.

According to God’s Word, no one has permit from God to rule your life unless they are related to you by blood or covenant. That’s part of the Covenant of Noah. It’s also part of the Covenant of Moses.

Jesus spoke often about saving life and caring for your “neighbor”, but that word “neighbor” meant covenant family. The assumption behind the Law of Moses was that you bore a familial obligation to everyone under the same covenant. So, Jesus would heal His own fellow Israelis, but He was quite reluctant to heal the Syro-Phonecian girl. Only when the girl’s mother declared herself under the feudal authority of Israel did Jesus relent and deliver the girl from demonic power.

The same thing happened with the healing of Naaman, the Syrian warlord. He had to present himself to the prophet as submitting to the feudal covering of Moses via the Code of Noah (which covenant Naaman already understood, apparently).

You have no duty to strangers other than the very limited care commanded by Moses and demonstrated by Jesus. Those strangers could not be hostile, but knew they were obliged to be submissive to the terms of Noah. I’ve emphasized this several times: You cannot bless anyone who does not submit to your personal dominion in terms of the covenant law code. You can also merge dominion between members of the same faith family. No longer having a national covenant identity has changed things a bit. If you have a covenant community of faith, it expands the authority you hold from God. Without such a community, the scale and depth of authority is limited. However, the business of feudal submission remains.

You should learn to reject all the manipulative pleas for charity that do not assume a priori your feudal authority in the Lord. The sense of false guilt is a lie from Hell. Random Americans have no claim on you, much less foreigners. The only question is what response will most clearly glorify the Lord, given that they have no clue about covenants. The point is that you should learn to discount any false sense of moral obligation. There is none outside the Covenant.

You cannot extend your covenant covering over anyone outside your tribe who does not at least temporarily submit to your authority from God. That the vast majority of the world rejects this is the primary reason there can be no peace.

There’s more.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

I reckon I'm supposed to announce that the iPad fund is accepting donations. The first donor has already notified me that "it's in the mail". In case you are wondering, the target is an iPad Pro 11"; this will come with a SIM card slot. If there's enough, I'll also get the keyboard folio. I'm aiming to make this thing my "computer" for most uses. No, I don't have PayPal any more because they started locking accounts of people who publish the kind of stuff I do. Unless you know how to do a bank transfer, you'll just have to send a check. Take your time; this is a long term project. What I really need right now is for you to pray with me, because I need to do some preparatory work to make sure I am ready to use it.