Michigan Camp Meeting 2024: As For Me and My House

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Studies in 1 Corinthians

Diego Silva

01 God’s People in Corinth

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2024 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

All right, so we're going to start with, as I said, the city of Corinth.

And as we go through this week together, I'd like to just mention helpful tools for this type of study.

This is not a topical study, this is a expository study and there are certain tools if you want to do expository studies.

Let's say you want to study the book of Habakkuk or you want to study the book of Luke, you want to do a study of a book of the Bible, there are tools that will be helpful.

So we're going to start by talking about the city of Corinth.

And so a natural question would be, well, what sources are there to tell me about the city of Corinth if I wanted to study this on my own?

A good Bible dictionary, a good Bible encyclopedia, or a good Bible commentary for that matter will give you all the knowledge that has been gathered by scholars who have dedicated their lives to studying the city of Corinth, studying Paul's letter to the Corinthians, and so there usually isn't a whole lot of controversy.

We have very limited knowledge about the ancient city of Corinth, But the knowledge that we do have, most scholars agree.

So this is 1 of those things where you don't really need to limit yourself to a Adventist scholar to understand something about the ancient city of Corinth.

We have archeologists, We have New Testament scholars who have dedicated their lives to giving us information that we can gather to piece together the details to help make sense of Paul's letter to the Corinthians.

So does it matter to understand a little bit about the city of Corinth when we're studying 1st Corinthians?

It's an ancient document written 2, 000 years ago.

Yes, inspired by God, but there's a whole lot of information we don't have.

For example, before Paul wrote this letter to the Corinthians, they wrote him a letter.

And so do you think we're at a disadvantage?

And prior to Paul writing this letter and prior to Paul receiving a letter from the Corinthians, Paul had written to them a previous letter that we don't have.

So really this is at least that we know of Paul's second letter to the Corinthians.

And 2nd Corinthians is Paul's at least third letter to the Corinthians.

So there's, we're at a disadvantage, there's a lot we don't know but we're gonna just learn a little bit.

There's something we can learn from the ancient city of Corinth.

If you look at a modern map, you will find Corinth.

You see the arrow there, the black arrow is pointing...

I wasn't expecting the screen to be so low.

Some of you may not be able to see, you may want to position your chair so you can't.

So the city of Athens, if any of you, how many of you have ever been to this part of the world?

So if you go to Athens, 48 miles to the southwest of Athens, you have the ancient city of Corinth, and there are still ruins of the ancient city of Corinth.

There's an isthmus here, and now there's a canal that will allow ships to pass through these waters so that they don't have to go around the peninsula.

And by the way, when you read the book of Acts, Acts chapter 17, Paul was preaching in Athens and when he left Athens, that's when he landed in Corinth.

And he spent 18 months in Corinth, and that's when he founded this community of believers in Jesus in the ancient city of Corinth.

So Here we'll look at a map of the world of Paul, the world of the apostles, as best as we can gather.

And so you have Corinth here, and then you have the city of Rome, and of course you have Jerusalem and Antioch.

Those are some major cities for Christians to understand and learn about.

Antioch was a major city in the first century Roman world, as was the city of Alexandria.

And Antioch was the base for Paul's missionary journeys.

Jerusalem was the base for, of course, the early church and the early apostles of Jesus.

And Paul, he was converted and became a follower of Jesus.

And he was sent from Antioch to his mission to Gentile land.

But for the moment, we're talking about Corinth, and 1 of the things that we need to talk about is Corinth being a city that was very multicultural.

You have obviously the Romans and the Egyptians and Greeks.

We know that there were Jews in Corinth because we read about a Jewish synagogue in the city of Corinth.

So in the mid first century AD, which was around the time that Paul arrives in Corinth, Corinth was a very multicultural cosmopolitan city.

It was an important city because of its location.

And the estimates, this is just estimates based on historians and archeologists studying the ruins and the makeup of the city, the estimate is 50 to 100, 000 residents.

So today that doesn't sound like a big city, but that was a big city.

It wasn't the biggest city in the ancient world, but that was a big city.

And it was crowded because it wasn't a huge territory.

And you had a big bulk of the population was retired Roman soldiers and freed men from Rome.

They could make a better life in Corinth than in Rome.

And of course, Jewish merchants, Greeks, Egyptians, Parthians, Syrians, Asians, Ethiopians, It was a city that attracted people from all over because there was just an opportunity for somewhat of a better life.

The truth is nobody had a good life in the first century except for a very, very, very small percentage of the population that was the elite.

People that were connected to the Roman emperor and were somehow connected to politics or important families in the empire.

And other than that, you have a scale, a hierarchy of social and economic status.

And most people were at the bottom of the pyramid.

And at the very, very bottom of the pyramid you have slaves, but then you had freed slaves whose lives were not that much better than the slaves themselves depending on how good of a owner they belonged to, and then you had merchants who really barely, you know, scraped by.

But Corinth was a city that attracted people because there was more opportunity than the average city.

If you go to the ancient city of Corinth today, you will find some ruins and at a distance from the city, you'll have what is referred to as Acro-Corinth, that mountain up on the top.

It's a rock overlooking the city of Corinth.

It was a major religious center in the first century.

So 1 thing that's important for us to know about the city of Corinth, it was a religious city, okay?

As a matter of fact, the Roman Empire, the Roman world, the world of the first century was a religious world.

Atheists were not a thing back in the first century.

As a matter of fact, Jews and Christians were sometimes regarded as atheists because they were non-believers in the gods.

Everybody believed in some form of deities that needed to be placated and appeased.

And there was a major religious center on Akrokor and overlooking the city.

It was home to a temple to Aphrodite, 1 of the most important goddesses in the Greek gods, the pantheon of the Greeks.

And so the temple was a popular pilgrimage site for Greeks from all over the world and so when we get to 1st Corinthians chapters 8, 9, and 10 we're going to be talking about the temples in Corinth and we're going to learn that in the temples there were no restaurants.

You know how you go to a major city like New York, there are many restaurants.

If you want to go out to eat, you go to the restaurants.

Well if somebody wanted to eat in a public space in Corinth, where did they go?

They went to the temples, the temples of the gods.

02 Conflicts and Divisions in Corinth

When you're reading a letter like 1 Corinthians, we're at a disadvantage because we have this letter, but it's like listening to 1 end of a phone conversation.

We would love to know more about the church, more about the city, more about the problems in the Corinthian church, but as we try to piece things back together, we have 2 main sources.

We have extra biblical sources, meaning the things that we know about the ancient city of Corinth and the Greco-Roman world of the first century through various sources available through archaeology.

And then we have the inner or intra-biblical sources.

We have what we have in Scripture, in the New Testament, that tell us something about Paul's ministry in Corinth and the founding of the church.

That's the part of Acts that tells us about Paul's ministry in Corinth and the founding of the church.

And we're gonna get some insights into some of the issues that Paul is writing about by reading this story that Luke thankfully preserved for us about the beginning of God's work through Paul in Corinth.

We read yesterday in chapter 18, verse 4, and you're welcome to follow in your Bibles.

Acts 18, 4, Paul reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks.

This was just the natural default way of doing ministry when Paul arrived in a new city.

He would go to the synagogue to worship with the people that used the same scriptures and believed in the same God and he would try to persuade them that God had done something amazing by raising Jesus from the dead, that Jesus was the Messiah that they had been longing for.

In verse 6, we read that there was opposition.

There were some that believed in Paul's message, and then there were some who opposed and reviled him.

The Bible says he shook out his garments and said to them, your blood be on your own heads.

From now on I will go to the Gentiles." And as was often the case in Paul's ministry, he would worship in the synagogue and he would share his faith as long as he was able to, and then he would have to leave.

It became impossible for him to continue.

If we read in Acts chapter 18, Paul continued his ministry in Corinth after he could no longer worship in the synagogue, if we go to Acts chapter 18 and verse 6, the Bible says, We just read verse 6, verse 7, and he left there and went to the house of a man named Tidius Justus, a worshiper of God.

You see that phrase, worshiper of God, in verse 7?

That phrase comes up often in the book of Acts.

It's referring to a Gentile like Cornelius who was attracted to the Jewish faith.

So Tidius Justus was probably 1 of these Greeks who were attending the Jewish synagogue at the time when Paul began attending in Corinth and that when Paul began to face the opposition and ridicule among the leaders of the synagogue, he went with Paul and he opened space for Paul to do ministry and continue his work in Corinth.

His house, it says, was next door to the synagogue.

So you can imagine, and of course, you know, the space was small, the territory of the Corinthian city was small, and so it's not like it was a vast territory, but they were right next to each other.

And many of the Corinthians, hearing Paul, believed and were baptized.

And I believe what that is saying there in the latter part of verse 8, says Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord together with his entire household.

You have Jews who believed, you have the God-fearers, the Gentiles who are already familiar with the Jewish faith who believed, and then you had people in Corinth who up to that point perhaps had no knowledge of the God of Abraham who also came to believe in Jesus and we read in verses 9 and 10 you know Paul is facing opposition He's actually going to be taken to court and be accused of being a troublemaker, a disturber of the peace in the city of Corinth.

And the Lord in a night vision appeared to Paul while he was in Corinth and said, Do not be afraid, but go on speaking, and do not be silent, for I am with you, and No 1 will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.

Now, if you read the book of Acts, you'll find that often Paul would stay a very short time in a city.

By now there's already a group of believers.

Normally Paul would leave at this juncture because the opposition is becoming so intense.

You keep reading in Acts 18, he's taken to court.

But Jesus gives him a message that he needs to stay because there are many more of God's people in Corinth that need to also come to faith, and it wasn't time for Paul to leave.

As a result, Paul ends up staying, if we read verse 11, he stays a total of 18 months, a year and 6 months, teaching the Word of God among them.

That was actually unusual, unique to Paul's ministry.

Normally he did not stay a prolonged period of time in a city.

Ephesus later was even longer than the time he stayed in Corinth.

He stayed 3 years in Ephesus, but normally his period was short.

But it appeared it was heading in that direction here because if we read in chapter 18 verse 17, it says that, you know, it became violent.

You know, Paul was taken before Galileo, verse 14.

The Jews were the ones that were instigating the accusations and so they brought it to the open, you know, court, and then eventually the Jews themselves who were accusing Paul were targets of the violence because there was a sentiment of anti-Judaism throughout the Mediterranean world.

Many were not Jewish sympathizers, and so it became a very, very tumultuous moment.

And After 18 months, Paul eventually did leave.

If you read verse 18, he did eventually leave, but he was there for a whole year and a half.

And we read in 1 Corinthians 12, verse 2, just something about the Corinthians.

He says, this is in past tense, so this is years later when he's writing the letter, when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols.

It gives us a picture of the people that Paul brought to faith in Jesus.

It was also a largely, a church largely made up of the poor class in society.

Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards.

As we mentioned yesterday, there was diversity in the Corinthian church, rich and poor, men and women, young and old, free and slave, Jew and Gentile.

And we read, many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptized.

We come to verses 18 and 19, and after the 18 months, after the year and a half, that Paul and his associates Aquila and Priscilla organized this church.

Eventually they left and went to Ephesus.

So just kind of getting some geography here.

Remember, Aquila and Priscilla came from Rome to Corinth.

And after 18 months, they come to the city of Ephesus.

This was another important city in the ancient Roman world, and God called Paul to do ministry there.

And so Paul arrives in Ephesus and doesn't stay long at all, but leaves Aquila and Priscilla in Ephesus, and they stay there.

Paul returns to Jerusalem and back to Antioch.

And then Paul leaves Antioch and goes back for the third time to this region, the Galatian region, and strengthens the churches there.

And then from Antioch, Paul is going to go back to Ephesus and he's going to spend 3 years in Ephesus.

And that is where he's going to write his first 2 letters to the Corinthians.

So, we're just kind of getting some context.

Paul is going to be in Ephesus when he's going to start hearing about the problems going on among the Corinthian believers which required the letter we're going to study.

When Paul and Aquila and Priscilla arrive in Ephesus, they begin the work in Ephesus.

He goes back to Jerusalem and comes and it takes probably a year or more to make that whole journey.

In that period, a Jew from Alexandria arrives in Ephesus and learns about Jesus through the ministry of Aquila and Priscilla.

Paul was not there at the time and that Jew's name is?

03 Sexual Immorality in Corinth

All right, 1 Corinthians chapter 5, we're going to just study the whole chapter.

There's a lot here and we'll do a verse by verse study and we'll begin with verse 1.

So we're in 1 Corinthians chapter 5 and I'm reading from the English standard version and Paul says, it is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you.

Now where this report comes from, members of Chloe's family, Fortunatus and his associates, perhaps Apollos may have had something to say about this, But there is sexual immorality, fornication, porneia among you.

And it says, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans.

So this is where you get the sense that there was a lot of sexual immorality that was tolerated among the Corinthians, among Corinthian people in the Corinthian society.

But this kind was 1 that even the Corinthians did not tolerate.

Now they tolerated some types of sexual immorality that based on our morals today were a lot worse than the kind that Paul was going to describe here.

It was totally okay for a 12 year old girl to be abused or used for recreational sex, but for a young man to have sex with his father's wife was a form of incest that was intolerable.

I think in our society today, I think it would be a whole lot more acceptable for there to be that kind of immorality than a 12 year old boy or girl to be taken advantage of.

It wasn't so much that the woman was being taken advantage of because really children and women had very little rights in the first century Greco-Roman world.

But the patriarch, his rights, And so we have here a violation of the patriarch.

And so, but Paul's still using the argument that this type of porneia, even the pagans don't tolerate.

So if the pagans don't tolerate it, then the Christians really should not be tolerating it.

So I mentioned to you, this word appears often in Paul's letters, porneia.

This was the Jewish way, among the Jews living in the Diaspora that spoke Greek, this was their way of describing the sexual immorality because the Jews did have a high sexual standard compared to the rest of the pagan world.

The King James translates it as fornication and other more modern translations including the New King James will have sexual immorality.

And you can see that we have in this Greek word the root for our word, our English word, pornography.

And then the root word of porneia is porneia.

And porneia, a porneia was a harlot, a whore, a prostitute, a woman who sold herself sexually.

So in the, in the King James, you're going to have the word harlot or whore as the English translation of porne.

The English standard version is going to translate that as prostitute.

So in the King James, sometimes that's translated as fornicator or whoremonger.

The old English word monger means a dealer or trader.

And it was commonly used in combination with other words to specify the type of goods being traded.

And a cheese monger was a man who sold cheese.

So a pornos, so we have a, we have that word in chapter 6 when Paul says that, You know, you have a pornos, a man who is hiring a woman to have sex recreationally.

In chapter 5, Paul is going to refer to this young man who is a part of the church in Corinth, apparently a member in good and regular standing and Paul says, you have to do something about this pornos.

And Paul describes his behavior as pornea, sexual immorality.

The English standard version translates pornos as the sexually immoral person.

So this statement here from Demosthenes, 4th century BC, kind of gives you a window into the sexual ethics of the Greeks.

Mistresses, we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of the body, but wives to bear us legitimate children.

So this is the world of Paul and the Apostles and the Christians in the first century.

And so like I said, the Jews had a high sexual standard.

Christians coming from the Jewish tradition also had a high sexual ethic.

What happened to all the illegitimate children?

Did they have a slave status or did they run into the family?

It depended on the family, but what we find from the first century is that children had very few rights.

And sometimes, you know, children could be Abandoned, killed, abortion of various types were practiced without people thinking twice about it.

Even with the legitimate children early on in the Roman, when the child was born, the midwife would place the child on the floor.

If the father picked it up, then they were allowed to keep.

If the father didn't pick it up, then the child would be left, usually on a keel or left on a trash pile, where often they were picked up to become slaves.

So even the legitimate children didn't all stay as legitimate children.

And in the Jewish culture, children were viewed as a blessing from God.

Yeah, Jews had a high view of life compared to society at large.

When Paul's ministry was under scrutiny because he was not imposing circumcision on his Gentile converts and this led to the Jerusalem Council and James and Peter and the other apostles sided with Paul and said that he was right and not requiring them to adopt the Jewish custom of circumcision.

James, in his words in Acts chapter 15, does say that we should require some things.

In other words, there are tests for Christian fellowship.

So James says, we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God.

In other words, we should not trouble them with circumcision, if you read that contextually.

We should not impose on them unnecessary tests for fellowship, for admission into the church.

But James says, we should write to them, the Gentile Christians, to abstain from porneia.

So you can see here that Paul was a minimalist when it came to tests, but he did not teach unconditional inclusion.

Okay, Now I've made the point earlier this week on Monday that I believe that we have gone to the other extreme and we have become maximalists when it comes to tests.

Series

Studies in 1 Corinthians

03 Sexual Immorality in Corinth

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