First Corinthians 10:14-22 All idolatry is a manifestation of demonism
1 Corinthians 10:14-22 · Mike Doyle · Feb 28, 2021
Letters to the Corinthians, No. 47
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261921591607

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Holly Hills Bible Church. Thank you for tuning in. No music today. We'll have music next week, but no music today. We've worked ourselves through 1 Corinthians chapter 10, and I'm going to start in verse 14, but to give you a little background and bring it up to speed, we are Everything we're going to talk about today is really based on way back up in verse 7 That says do not be idlers as some of them were the them being the Jews in the desert before before the When Moses went up to the mountain to get the Ten Commandments when they came down the Word of God says that people sat down to eat and drink and stood up to play and it's because they were You know, the golden calf. Roger has shown you that slide with the golden calf in it. He says it's really a bull, not a calf. So, anyway.

So, we are going to work off of that because today we're going to talk about basically these six ideas. idolatry, or five ideas, the blood of Christ, the body of Christ, and demons. We get to talk about demons today. So verse 14 and 15 are where we will start. And verse 14 says, therefore, my beloved flee from idolatry. And I speak to wise men, you judge what I say. The second slide has to do with talking about a verse that Roger talked about last week, which was verse 13.

No temptation has overtaken you, but which is common to man and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you're able, but with the temptation will provide a way out of escape also so that you will be able to endure it. So it tells us that we have a way out of, this verse tells us we have a way out of the temptation. And the way out of the temptation is to flee to Christ.

I put in a Roger called me yesterday and we had a great 40 minute discussion because originally my paragraph that had to do with fleeing wasn't what he taught the week before. So we talked about how are we going to meld them together, what my thoughts were and what his thoughts were. And it's a really cool thing to have somebody who's in your, working with you, who you can just talk through stuff and work through stuff so that you come to the same mind. And the real issue here was fleeing is not the answer to escaping temptation. because it is with Christ who shows you the way out.

And as we go along, I think we'll see that. So I found this quote from Miles Stanford. He says that there's no way of true deliverance from the reign of sin, except we believe we have died to it. Having died with Christ, our connection to sin being thus broken.

So therefore, the apostle can say in this, Beloved, flee from idolatry. The New Testament is pretty specific about this word fleeing certain things. We're supposed to flee anything, which means to run away, that competes with the Lordship of Christ. Secondly, we should flee desires whose intent is merely sensual satisfaction. And Roger talked a lot last week about part of idolatry has to do with sensual satisfaction.

In 1 Corinthians 6.18, which is a verse we've already covered weeks ago, Paul says, flee immorality, run away from it. Flee those desires. Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside of his body. but the immoral man sins against his own body.

But flee from those things, in 1 Timothy 6.11, flee from those things, you men of God, and pursue, so we flee and we pursue, righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, gentleness, those sorts of things. 2 Timothy says, now flee from youthful desires. and pursue righteousness and faith and love and peace with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. So the fleeing, I had this thought this week, if I'm in a burning building, what do I do? I just, I wanna flee, but where do I go? Do I run outside? Do I run in another room? Do I go in the house next door?

It's interesting that the word of God gives you specifically where you flee to, and it's you flee to Christ. That's where you go. Flee means to run away, or it means to escape. And what goes into the operation of fleeing? Where do you flee from? Anything that competes with the Lord Jesus Christ as his lordship, sensual desires, testing the Lord, anything like that, is one of the things that you flee from. Where do you flee to? You flee to the person of Christ and his cross, cross death, and we'll talk a lot more about death in a minute. So we have nowhere else to flee. We have no sanctuary, Lord, but thee.

Now, I was taking a look this morning, and I was looking through the Hungry Hearts again, And in terms of this fleeing business, it's really interesting. In The Hungry Heart, John Darby says, you therefore be confident in every circumstance of life, however baffling that it has been permitted in your own best interest by the wisest and most loving of fathers who knows our load limit.

First Corinthians 10.13, God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you're able, but with the temptation provide a way to escape. And he sums it up by this saying, if external plannings of men or Satan further God's plans, they'll succeed.

If not, they'll come to nothing. So the fleeing really is to understand that you have a sovereign God who's in charge of every one of these circumstances and you just flee into him and who he is and what he tells us. We flee to Christ by faith and we rest in this provision. Psalm 37, 24 says, when he falls, talking about man, he will not be hurled headlong because the Lord is the one who holds his hand. So our fleeing, our running away is not just looking for, well, I'm gonna sit here, God, until you show me the door.

No, I know where I'm supposed to go. I know where I'm supposed to be. And I don't have to put myself in a position where it's like growing up, well, growing up as a Catholic in Catholic schools, you know, when you got to puberty, there was always this deal about sexual immorality. And the mindset of all young Catholic men is, how far can I go before it's a sin, right? Well, that's not fleeing. If I put myself in a position to see how far I can go and see how fast I can flee if I get that close, I've missed the whole idea. The whole idea is I abide in Christ at any given time, at any given circumstance.

So let's talk a little bit about idolatry. Idolatry is a really interesting term because we think, well, it means that I'm worshiping a statue. Well, it's a lot more than that. Idolatry, first of all, alienates me or alienates a man from God. It's plain if you take a look in Romans chapter one. and is thus separated in affection from God, he becomes engulfed in moral darkness and every form of idolatry. We've all been through Romans chapter one a jillion times. Idolatry is the sin of the mind against God. And here's how, follow it down how it goes.

Professing to be wise, they became fools. And these are men that turned away from God when God revealed himself to them. I look at the Congress of the United States and this verse fits them perfectly. Professing to be wise, they became fools. And here's the thing about idolatry. They exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man. and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. And therefore, what was God's response to their idolatry? He gave them over to the desires of their heart, to impurities so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

When you look at Ephesians 2.3, you look at immorality, sins of the flesh are associated with idolatry and are traced to the lack of acknowledgement of God and gratitude towards him.

Ephesians 2.3 says, among whom we too were all formerly lived in the desires of the flesh. indulging in the desires of the flesh and of the mind and were by nature children of wrath even as the rest. An idolater is one who is a slave to the depraved ideas that his idol represents. Galatians 4, 8 and 9 say, however, at that time when you did not know God, You were slaves to those which by nature were no gods.

But now that you've come to know God, and rather be known by God, how is it that you turn back to the weak and worthless elemental things to which you desire to be enslaved all over again? It's really interesting that we have these desires to let somebody control us. and it's the desires of the flesh, and they enslave us. The big lie is that we're controlling them. No, that's not who we are.

Titus 3.3 says, for we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various desires and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy and hateful hating one another.

Those definitions all come out of the Vines Dictionary. So you could say that idolatry of some kind or others, something has been allowed to usurp Christ's proper place in the heart. That's what idolatry really is. It can be a jillion things. It can be love of money. It could be just simple love of pleasure. It could be worldly friends and associations. It may be something as simple as not praying. It may be something even more simpler, not being alone with Christ in his word. Any conscious unfaithfulness to him is idolatry. It may be through yielding to a worldly tendency or a desire to appear maybe brainy before others.

My intellect is my idol. The causes may be many, but the disease is fearfully common amongst all men. I've loved always talking about idleship, to pull out bills and say, hey, there's pictures of presidents on these bills. Those are your idles. That's who I idolize. Who's this one? Lincoln. So however many differences are arising from the climate or country or character, they all have one thing in common about idolatry. They all contain the idea of propitiation. You know what the word propitiation means. It means satisfaction. I, whether they're fruits of the earth or by blood animals or human sacrifice.

In other words, my mentality is I did something to make my God and my idol angry with me. I'm not living up to what he or she or it expects of me. And I've got to appease God about that. So both the idol and the deference given are products of the fallen nature. We read out of Romans 1, where do you get this mentality that comes from turning away from God? And we saw the slide. And now we're engrossed into sinful behavior.

And if the offering of human blood was the ultimate, it's probably the most acceptable. If you know anything about cultures, I remember when the Aztec thing came up here decades ago and we went down to see it, and they were all, the Aztecs were all about blood sacrifices. And they would sacrifice, oh, well, if it's a blood sacrifice, maybe a virgin is more holy than just a human. So we'll sacrifice these virgins. Where did they get that idea? It comes from idolatry. I've got to thinking, well, how did they know about a blood sacrifice? They didn't get an email from Jerusalem.

The Jews were sacrificing animals. Well, these guys went one step further. They sacrificed human beings. And then if you study, when we were studying Exodus on Wednesday nights, we found out that the Canaanites were the worst. They would throw babies into bonfires, thinking that they were appeasing a God who was angry with them. It's just amazing when you think about, how could they get there?

The thing about this is, is the more serious evil about idolatry is there's something going on behind the idol. And the thing behind the idol is Satan and his demons. And the demons work on man's imagination. And the Gentiles who worship Satan, Idols don't really recognize, in most cases, that behind that demon, or behind that idol, is a demon. They're really good at hiding what they're really doing.

The one last thing I would say about this verse, which I really like, is that there's a little phrase right in the middle of it that he says, therefore, my beloved, flee from my idolatry. Who's he talking to? He's talking to his beloved. These are the believers in Corinth, and he refers to them as his beloved. They are the ones that he loves, and he really cares about them. And so he's gonna lay this whole thing out about idolatry with them.

Now, verse 15 says, I speak as to wise men, You judge what I say. This word wiseness means prudent. He could have said, I speak to prudent men. You judge what I say. The prudency here or the wisdom here is that, well, is idolatry impossible for a Christian? If you think so, you're dreaming. That's exactly what the Corinthians were doing. Back up in verse six, he says, now these things happen for examples to us so that we believers would not crave evil things as they did. He says, don't be an idolater as some of them were. We've already covered that verse.

He's telling them to stop doing something they're already doing, idol worship. They knew that the idol wasn't anything. and therefore it was nothing to like go to and eat meat offered to an idol. And they could go a step further and sit and eat at the heathen temples. All of these temples that sacrificed animals all had restaurants and sold the beef that wasn't sacrificed. So is not a Christian redeemed from bondage to the enemy? Absolutely he is. Is he not bought with a price by the glory of Christ? Yes, he is. But at once Paul makes these Corinthians to judge themselves by putting them in the presence of the central and standing institution of the church. They stand in the church and he says to them, I speak to you as wise men. Listen to what I say.

Chester McCauley said that the degree to which we agree with Paul in the issue of fleeing is a measure of our wisdom. I thought that was good. Paul maintains the principle of participating in evil, which you may not yourself do, but in especially things that are sacred. True wisdom is to just stay wholly away from it.

But I think it's a little difficult if you don't recognize that what I'm doing is idol worship. We used to have a neighbor that had a Porsche and that was his idol. He was out there every Saturday morning for three hours buffing and polishing this thing every week. That was his idol.

The misuse of knowledge to participate or even give the appearance of participating in what may be or is religiously false, it's pointless. for us as believers to plead that my heart is not involved in what I'm doing. Not only on a moral ground, but because it slights Christ and ignores the wiles of the enemy. What I'm doing outwardly means that my heart's in it. So where was the practical understanding now?

So he says in the next verse, and this is a really important way that he takes this to the cross, is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ? These are really solemn and blessed things. Communion with the blood of Christ. Communion with the body of Christ.

Now, in the normal Lord's Table, the bread comes first and then there's the blood. Well, in this case, he mentions the blood first. And the reason he does is because he's associating believers, what's the blood represent in a cup? If you separate the blood from the animal or from the human being, what do you have? You got a dead human being because you got to have the blood to live. So he's associating death with the cup of blood of Christ. That's what he's trying to do. And the first characteristic of the Lord's table is death. The cup of blessing is communion or association with the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.

What it does is it connects us directly with his death and puts us in a place where we ought to be here on the earth. The cup which we bless is not merely that we have blessings, but we're the ones that are doing the blessing. We must have had the blessing, but it is not which occupies us. We just are the blessers. Now, Christ's death places me in a position towards the earth in which he is, even that of separation.

When the Lord Jesus died on the cross, what's the word death mean? It means separation. When he died on the cross, he separated from the old creation. He rose again to a new creation. We didn't know it at the time in the Word, but later we find out he won't even let Mary identify with him standing next to the grave. He said, don't identify with me now.

Identify with me when I'm glorified. But what it does is if I'm united to Christ, it puts me in the same position that Christ is with the world. It places me towards the earth in which He is, even that of separation. We're separated from the world. Christ having died, I'm out of this scene in spirit, in position in Him.

Colossians 3.1 is a perfect verse for this. Therefore, if you have been raised with Christ, and that word if should be since, Every believer has been raised with Christ. What do you do? You keep on seeking things above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. He says, set your mind, set your affection on things above and not on the things of the earth.

And here's why. Because you've died and your life is hid with Christ and God. Well, if you don't understand what he's talking about, you think this is crazy. Did I really die? Am I really separated like Christ is? Study Romans 6, Galatians 2.20. All over Paul's epistles, there's this position of truth. that when I believed and you believed in a person and work of Christ, some of the things that happened to you was you got included in the cross of Christ. Why? To separate us from the entire condemned old creation. So when a believer leaves the planet, that's why Paul never says that a believer dies. He says they go to sleep. All they do is change address. They go home. We already are in Christ. We already did separate from the world.

I am to be really the continuation. of that blessed one on earth in the power of his life, but declaring him as a result of his death until he comes. That's what the Lord's table is all about. Taking the Lord's table in 1 Corinthians 11, he said, we show the Lord's death until he comes. That's what we do.

So with Christ above in spirit, I'm positioned above in him. When I come down on the earth, I'm here for him and him alone. I must represent him on the earth. And this is the wondrous place the cup of blessing presents. It is the communion of his blood or his death and of his body. And who gets to do this? His beloved. You and me, we're the beloved. What a place we're in.

That of identity with Christ's death. It is his death. If his death had not believed us from the consequences of our sins, guess what? We'd still be chargeable by them. But having been comforted through his death, we are now identified with his death here.

And this is one of those arguments within Christian circles. They don't like to talk about, I was crucified with Christ. But this verse clearly says, the cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? He's asking him a question.

We're identified with his death here. The effect that the Lord's table has on us is that our hearts are drawn out, in the sense of his love for dying for me. And the more it is, the more my heart can say, I belong to him. There's no other path that would suit a believer here or me on the earth, but to be identified with his death. And you know, for us as believers, it's the responsible side. But Paul realizes that realizes it from that we cannot have any other place with that.

And so I put, I just stuck in here this morning, Galatians 2.20. I have been crucified with Christ. Is that true? Word of God says it's true.

And it's no longer I who live. You and I, the old man, the man from Adam, the sinful man. But now Christ lives in me. And this life that I now live in the flesh, in my body, How does it go? How does it work? I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. So for me to live for Christ isn't something I must do. To be separated from the earth is something that I have to do. It's part of my life now, to live to Him. If you think about it, you can't have two things going on at the same time. You can't have light existing where darkness is or darkness existing where light is at the same time. It's impossible for light to be in darkness at the same time.

What are we now that we are united as death? The point is that we don't seek anything here. There's nothing here for us. Many a saint has accumulated sorrow to themselves by looking for something on the earth where Christ died. We are right when we are truly showing forth his death until he comes. There's nothing between his death and his return. We're here to serve him and that's the only reason we're here for.

In the church's case, it's the blood and body of Christ. The blood of Christ awakens the soberest thought in the believer. When you start thinking about this, you start thinking about, wow, this really makes things different for me as a believer, my viewpoint changes. And along with that, I'm identified with the body of Christ in the most intimate unity that's possible.

For all of us share the same life. And Sue and I were talking about those DNA tests before. Imagine if you tried to do a DNA test on your new life in Christ. They'd all go back to the same source, him. So he says in verse 17, because we, the many, are one bread, one body, for we all partake of the one loaf. So we've spoken about so far about ourselves, and now we turn to the Lord and the church on the earth.

If you take a look at Hebrews 2.11 and 12, the writer of Hebrews, which most people think it's Paul, for both he who sanctifies or sets apart and those who are set apart are all from one, for which reason we're not ashamed to call them brethren. singing, I will proclaim your name to my brethren in the midst of the congregation while I sing your praise.

We have to realize that the Lord Jesus delights to be here in us and with us. His treasure is not in heaven, it's here because we're his body. We are in spirit with him in the heavenlies, and the more we're with him there, the more we will be occupied with his interests here. It is the only consolation and it is the greatest to every true heart in the midst of all the destruction that Christ's treasure is right here, right in this building, right on this earth.

This Hebrew passage, we don't find anything about the Lord's table. What we find is the great object in Hebrews, the whole book of Hebrews, which we're studying on Wednesday night, is to detach us from the earth, though we are still on the earth. Representatively, it is the one body of Christ, and if they're bred to be the body just so, we are many. and that one bread also. So it's like a loaf of bread. Each one of us is a grain in that bread, but we're one loaf.

John 6.51 says, the Lord Jesus says, I am the living bread that comes down out of heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread also which I give for life of the world is my flesh. Individually, every one of us has already consumed the flesh of the Son of God and drank His blood in that sense, knowing that He has eternal life in Him, because otherwise there wouldn't be any life in Him.

It shows you the union. So together we bless the cup, together we break the bread, and thanksgiving before Him, and Him who has blessed us beyond all thought And that's really what communion is. And notice something in the next verse. He's gonna give an example now.

He says, observe Israel after the flesh and not those who eat of the sacrifices, are not those who eat of the sacrifices, don't they partake in the sacrifice? I want you to notice that when Paul uses this term Israel according to the flesh, he's talking about the nation of Israel before Christ came, when the nation of Israel was in play and Israel was after the flesh at that point. So he's contrasting all the physical Israelites with those who come from Judaism into Christianity now that belong in Christ. This description lends no support, of course, to the idea that the church replaces Israel in the program of God. Israel always refers to Jewish people in the New Testament.

We are not an extension of Judaism. We're an entirely new thing, an entirely new thing. Even the Israelites after the flesh who ate the sacrifices as a partaker with the altar of Jehovah, severed us in principle, in fact, from the vanity of the heathen. They weren't part of the heathen culture.

How much more did it become the Christian to judge and walk according to God? If they lived in the Spirit, let them walk in the Spirit. So his line of reasoning, and I got this from a constable, I thought it was really good. Christians who eat the bread of the Lord's table thereby express their solidarity with one another and with Christ. Likewise, the Jews who ate meat of animals offered in the sacrifices of Judaism expressed their solidarity with one another and with God back then. Therefore, Christians who eat the meat offered to pagan gods as part of the pagan worship, what do they do? They express their solidarity with the pagans and with the pagan deities.

It's a syllogism. It goes together really nicely. The wise man in Corinthians 15 could have replied to Paul's conclusion as follows. Yes, but you agreed before that the idols have no real existence and there is only one true God. You've argued that, so Paul says, okay. Verse 19, in verse 19, Paul says, well, what do I mean then?

The things being sacrificed as idols, are they anything? And is the idol anything? Again, I took out a constable, He's not saying that sacrifices to idols are idols themselves or anything. He's not saying that they are. That is, the sacrifice to idols are not in themselves sinful, nor were idols genuine entities, because they're not.

On this point, he and the Corinthians agreed. Idols were only pieces of wood or stone. and they weren't gods with supernatural powers. Nevertheless, these idols represented the supernatural powers, which we'll see in the next verse. And so eating cultic meals had a genuine significance.

Chester McCauley says about this, false worship involves three things, one of which the Corinthians were unaware. The first thing was that there was the idol, which was nothing in itself. There were the things offered to idols, which were nothing, and themselves. Here's what they didn't get or were unaware of. There were the unseen and unrecognizable demons that lies behind the idol and do represent something significant. At this point, Paul was about to make. So now I'm to this slide.

No, but I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God. And I don't want you to become sharers with demons. So what he's saying is that the power behind a pagan religion is a demon. And I have two quotes for that, Deuteronomy 32, 17. Moses writes, they sacrificed the demons who were not gods, to gods whom they had not known, new gods who came lately, whom your fathers did not fear.

Or in Psalm 106, they even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons. So consequently, People who sacrificed to idols expressed solidarity with the demonic powers. Eating the food sacrificed to idols means that the people who participated shared in what they had been sacrificed to, in what had been sacrificed to the demons, just as the Israelites shared in what had been sacrificed to God. The cultic feasts were really sacrifices to demons, and so they involved the worship of demons.

So he says, look, you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of the demons. It's inconsistent for a believer, for a Christian to partake of the Lord's table, communion, and take part in a pagan religious feast.

This pagan religious feast You know, I was thinking about that. And again, having to do with the denomination I came out of, there's so much that goes on in there that's pagan. It's just amazing to me. And until you kind of get going, you don't really realize that it is, but it's pagan.

In the former, he eats and drinks in union with Christ. And then the latter, he is in union with demons who direct and devote his worship of idols. What the Lord promotes and what the demons promote are opposite. This inconsistency had to be obvious to the, in verse 15, wise men. Christians have a unique relationship with the Lord and with fellow believers. which the Lord's table or communion symbolizes. It is therefore inappropriate for us to have a similar association with demons or unbelievers which participate in cultic events.

You know, we've mentioned at the beginning, that idol worship can be lots and lots of things. It can idolize friends and money and power and status and all kinds of things. And we don't realize, especially in our society in 2021, that that is really idol worship, but it is. Because there's something behind that. And the thing behind that are the creatures, let me give you a good example.

And this has nothing to do with my political view. But if you take a look at the legislation that the country has been trying to pass in the last three months, look at the contents of it, and look how it is totally opposite to what God lays out in his word. It's totally opposite. Someone I saw back in October, somebody said that the one party's platform had every sin that was mentioned in Romans chapter one.

So you think about that. Well, who's behind all of that? Who's really controlling the strings? Why would these people do what they're doing? And some of the stuff that they come up with is just total insanity. How does that make any sense? That's where the demons come in. You don't see them. You don't know they're there, but they're the ones pulling the strings.

And it's because something has replaced in the mind of man the glory of the Lord Jesus. What happens? You're given over to foolishness. Thinking yourself wise, you became a fool. Oh boy. That's a really dangerous place to be in. What's the saying that if you don't believe in something, you'll fall for anything? Or do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? We are not stronger than he, are we?

What a way to sum this up. The Israelites, they provoked the Lord to jealousy by doing just such things when they joined in the worship of the Moabites in Numbers 25 and Deuteronomy 32. When we were studying Exodus last year, what just over and over and over again, Jehovah kept telling the Jews, I am the only God. That term, ego me, I am who I am. And I won't have any other gods before me. Put it another way.

When Moses comes down from the mountain with the 10 commandments, what's the first one? I am the Lord thy God. and I will not have false gods before me, right? And here he's got two or three million Jews standing in front of him, and they all got these little cool things called sin natures. What's a sin nature? A sin nature says, it's all about me, isn't it? I'm my own God. I don't need you. What did God just do? He made sin natures illegal, and he won't have them standing before him. Isn't that something?

The very first commandment shows you how jealous God is about His creatures that they worship only Him. because you have a sin nature. And oh, where did we get that? Oh, we got it from the ultimate self-centered sinner, Satan. That's where it came from. We have this sin nature. Why was it important that we were crucified with Christ? So we could get separated from that sin nature. And now, because we're in Christ, we have to worry about Commandment number one, because I'm no longer the idol standing before God. So the Israelites who had these sin natures, they'd provoke God.

I mean, you think about Moses goes up in the mountains for 40 days to get the law. How long did the Jews stay faithful? About 38 days. Moses comes down on the 40th day, what are they doing? I read the verse to you. They had a golden calf going and they were having a party. So that the most you get to live without God is 39 days. On the 40th day, you're gonna be worshiping the idol. We ought to learn from the Jews' experience.

It would be folly to provoke the Lord unless we were stronger than he is. Well, that sort of cuts it right there, doesn't it? If we provoke him, and are not, and if we provoke him and are not, we can count on his jasoning since he is a jealous God. That's the thing about believers. If you provoke him, you know, hang onto your chair, because he's gonna cause you to grow spiritually through some tough times. The purpose of 1 Corinthians chapter 10, verses 14 through 22, is to make application of the command of chapter 10, verse seven. I do not be idolaters as some of them were. So the message that's given in those verses is to teach that all idolatry is a manifestation of demonism. And we're not a charismatic group. We really do look at idols as they're nothing.

And Satan is a defeated foe, and because he is a defeated foe, what does a victor do with a defeated foe? He uses them. So if there's any kind of working with, or any type of experience with demons, it's because God is causing you to grow. One last story and then we'll close. I had a good friend that was in our Tuesday men's Bible study for years, and the Lord took him home. But he came into the Bible study one day, and I said, how's it going?

And he said, oh, Satan has been on my case today. It's just the worst thing. And before I could get it out of my mouth, somebody else said, you know, Satan doesn't know your name, and he doesn't know your address, and he doesn't care about you. He said, well, what's the problem then? He said, you're the problem. You're the problem, it isn't Satan.

You're no threat to him. Number one, he's not omnipresent, so what is he doing in Denver? He's in Washington, D.C. And number two, you've got a sin nature, which is all the problem you'll ever need. And number three, if you understand who you are in Christ, he'll leave you alone.

But Satan, or any type of thing that comes at you, like I read early on, He belongs to, put it this way, because we're in Christ, everything that God does is purposeful to cause us to grow in Christ, everything. So no matter what it looks like to you at the beginning, you will see as you go through it, that this was from my father who loves me and wants to conform me to the image of his son, the Lord Jesus.

So let's close. Our dear father, how we thank you. We thank you for all that you've done We thank you that you constantly are causing us to grow in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus that we can understand and we can rest by faith in all the provision that you have already made and continue to make on our behalf. We thank you. We pray in your Son's precious name. Amen.