I Corinthians 10:1-13
“Overconfidence”
March 20, 2022 – Third Sunday of Lent
Are the citizens of Mariupol, Ukraine worse people than anyone else, as men, women and children are being shelled with bombs day and night? Vladimir Putin and those deceived by him might think so, but the rest of the world knows it is not true.
In our Gospel reading, Jesus raised a similar rhetorical question about victims of terrorism and disaster in His own time. Were those killed at the orders of the Roman governor Pilate or those who died in the collapse of a tower bigger sinners than other people? No, says Jesus, you all know that’s not the case. God did not create the world to work like that. It is not a place where bad things only happen to really bad people.
However, in our text from I Corinthians 10 Paul seems to suggest otherwise. Many of God’s own people Israel suffered because of their sinfulness as they wandered in the desert. “God was not pleased with most of them,” says verse 5, “and they were struck down in the wilderness.” Yet both Jesus and Paul come down in the same place, a warning about overconfidence in noting the sins of others but failing to address one’s own sins.
Up to this point in I Corinthians, Paul has been dealing with failings of the Corinthians: divisions in the church; sexual immorality; and confusion regarding the pagan practice of eating food offered first to idols. One of the challenges he faces is that the Corinthians were really confident about their spiritual position, about their relationship with Jesus Christ. One foundation of their confidence was in what we call the Christian sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
Further on, in chapter 11, Paul has something to say about just how poorly the Corinthians were observing the Lord’s Supper. But for now he simply wants to challenge their confidence in its spiritual “protection.”
Chapter 10 begins with a somewhat complicated spiritual analogy. Paul points to the story of Israel during the Exodus in verses 1-4. He suggests that the Hebrew people had something like the Christian sacraments. Being “under the cloud” and passing “through the sea” was a kind of “baptism,” a going under the water, like Christian baptism. Likewise, eating manna in the wilderness and drinking water which Moses produced from a rock was like eating and drinking of the bread and the cup at the Lord’s Table for Christians.
Paul justifies and tightens up his analogy about Holy Communion even further in verse 4 when he says, “For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” He may be drawing on a Jewish legend which imagined that it was literally the same rock from which they drank both at the beginning and the end of their wilderness journey. So the legend says there was a rock which actually followed them in their wanderings and which constantly provided water. As F. F. Bruce says, Paul does not endorse that fantasy, he simply uses it to make the point that even then God’s people were being nourished by Jesus, just as Christians are now.[1]
The warning then in verse 5 is that, regardless of their “sacraments,” their genuine connection with divine provision and care, God was still not pleased with Israel because of their sins. Their “sacraments” did most of the people at that time no lasting good. Most of them died in various ways in the wilderness without ever entering the promised land. Paul details some of those deaths in the next few verses.
First, though, in verse 6 Paul makes sure that we understand he is not just offering a lesson in Jewish history. “Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did.” Jesus did the same in regard to current disaster stories in Luke 13, “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will perish just as they did.”
Paul and Jesus are telling us that God’s people can get overconfident, even in things as good as Christians sacraments or manna or miracle water from a rock. Which makes me think of rock climbing. Nathan in our Confirmation class enjoys visits to Elevation, a “bouldering gym” in downtown Eugene. There he learns to climb indoor, artificial rock walls, all the while safely “belayed” by a rope which will hold him up if he falls.
The trick, I think, in learning to climb like that, would be to trust that belay, and perhaps the person holding it, while not becoming foolishly overconfident in that safety line. You’re not going to become a good rock climber if the constant presence of a belay makes you take foolhardy risks, attempting dangerous moves because you know there is something to catch you if you fall. That would be a mistake, because the dangers out on actual rock faces and mountains are very real.
In fact, I am personally acquainted with two people who lost loved ones, a son for one and a brother for the other, in rock climbing accidents. The last thing you want to be, as you hang by fingers and toes from tiny handholds or steps, is overconfident, in your equipment, in the rock, and especially in your own abilities.
The Corinthians’ overconfidence in their spiritual status and worse, in their own spiritual competence, led them into risky, dangerous sins. Paul addressed food offered to idols and said they had freedom in Christ not to worry about eating it, because idols are false, non-existent gods. But such freedom shouldn’t be overconfidence. Verse 7 warned them, “Do not become idolaters,” when enjoying such food. He quotes Exodus 32:6 about the Israelites idolatry with the golden calf, “the people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.” Any contact with idols remained a genuine, constant danger of not taking idols seriously enough, of submitting to false gods.
I’ll leave it to you to fill in more of the possible idols which can tempt Christians even now, things like money or power or nationalism. But I’ll move with Paul on to verse 8 when he takes up another Corinthian sin of which Israel was also guilty, sexual immorality. The consequence for Israel was, he says, twenty-three thousand deaths in a single day.
It might feel worse in these times of so much tempting and salacious material on-line and in entertainment, but the danger of sexual immorality has been and remains constant for God’s people. It was there in Israel, in Corinth, and it is present in our own lives. I was dismayed last week to open a news article from Christianity Today and read about sexual harassment by two highly placed people in their own organization. One of them I had met personally and highly admired. Now I saw he had been overconfident in his own status, in his freedom to do things which are simply wrong.
Verse 9 talks about the people of Israel putting “Christ” to the test, again importing the presence of Jesus the Messiah back into the Old Testament story. He’s referring to Israel’s complaint against God and Moses when food and water ran low in Numbers 21. They tested God and thus also Christ the second person of God, their redeemer, by trying to force Him to take care of them. They were overconfident in what their relationship with the Lord meant in terms of everyday life. We do the same whenever we imagine that God owes us things like a successful career, or a peaceful marriage, or good health. We put Him to the test when we get angry at Him for not giving us such things.
Along the same lines in verse 10, Paul tells us not to “complain” like people of Israel did “and were destroyed by the destroyer.” About 16 times in the story of the Exodus we read about them “grumbling,” against Moses, against God. It’s hard to pin down the specific incident Paul has in mind when he talks about those who “were destroyed by the destroyer.” But it could point to their great complaint in Numbers 14 that their situation was hopeless after hearing the report of their spies into the promised land. That’s when God condemned them all to perish in the wilderness. I don’t need to say much about how often you and I are tempted to give up hope and just complain.
So Paul gave the overconfident, presumptuous Corinthians four examples of Israel’s overconfidence and presumption. Then in verse 11 he says it again, “These things happened to them to serve as an example…” He goes on, “and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come.” Those Old Testament people are examples to people who live now at “the ends of the ages” when Jesus has come. If they were held accountable for overconfident sinfulness then, how much more will people who have received the full grace of God in Christ be held accountable? It’s the same warning you can read in Hebrews 10:26-30. I’ll leave you to look that up.
It’s a harsh, dire warning against presumptuous sin, but it contains the seed of grace. That word “example,” used both in verse 6 and verse 11 to frame those cautionary tales from Hebrew history, offers not just warning but hope. If God gives us examples, even negative examples, then it means we can learn from them. We don’t have to go the way the people of Israel did. We don’t have to repeat their sins. It was all written down to instruct us, to show us how to take a better road than Israel took in the wilderness.
In this season of Lent we use the symbolism of 40 days not just to remember how Jesus was tempted by 40 days in the wilderness but how Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness. We take these 40 days to reflect on our own sins so that we don’t wind up destroyed like they did. Instead of overconfidently continuing to do whatever we please, we answer Jesus’ call to repent so that we will not perish like they did.
I urge you, then, to take verse 12 to heart, “So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.” If you need to take note of someone else’s sins—and sometimes we must, in order to tell the truth—don’t overconfidently assume that you are or will always be free of such failings or even of such temptations. Talking about a different matter in his book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton wrote, “It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.” Like a rock climber again, we should never imagine that we are so good, so skilled, so connected to the rock that it can never happen to us.
Yet we were given examples. We can be instructed. There is our hope, if we only listen, only learn from Paul, from Jesus, from all those who came before us and left us their examples, whether good or bad. We tend to imagine that what we’re going through is unique. I wonder if others of you are as tired as I am of hearing the word “unprecedented” over the last few years, as if what we’re going through in the world now is not like anything that has ever happened before. But, as strange as it may sound, part of the hope Paul holds out to us, starting in verse 13, our last verse here, is that it has pretty much all happened before. “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone.”
How often have you and I thought, “No one else really knows what I’m going through. No other person really understands what it’s like to be me and face this. Everyone else has it so easy; I’ve got more to handle than anyone should have to bear.” Of course, right now, it would be easy to simply point a finger east to the other side of the world and the devastated country of Ukraine or south to Latin America where people still take terrible risks to make a horrible journey to where you and I are in the hope of something better. I could simply say that our testing isn’t anything compared to theirs.
But I don’t want to deny your struggles or my own. When you are lying awake at night in pain or weeping because of a family conflict or just trying to pay bills for which there is not enough money in the bank, those difficulties, that heartbreak, that testing is real. The point in remembering that such testing is “common to everyone” is not to minimize how hard it is for you. It is to remember what Paul went on to say next: “God is faithful…”
Just stop there for a moment and dwell on that in relation to all the testing and temptation through which you go. “God is faithful.” Think about what that really means. We’ve already seen that it does not mean that He will always keep you from falling, like a divine belay line always ready to take up the slack in your performance. What it does mean is that whatever test or temptation we face on the climb through life, God is there and, Paul says, “he will not let you be tested beyond your strength.”
Now there is a place you don’t want to stop. If you just count on not being tested beyond your strength, then you may, like the Corinthians, like the Israelites, be overconfident in your own strength to get you through whatever comes. You probably know that is only going to lead to a fall down the rock, to disaster. Instead, read on, read on to “but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”
The point is not your or my strength. The point is God’s grace, God’s provision of a way out, a way through whatever we’re called to endure. When we are far out on some cliff that seems impossible to climb, God doesn’t promise to belay us against every possible fall. But He does promise that there will be a way forward, another little handhold, another tiny place to brace a foot, if we will only look for it, only accept what He offers us.
As dire and judgmental as this text sounds, with its negative examples and warning that we all can and probably will fall like everyone before us has, it ends with grace, the message that, in Jesus Christ, God gives us a way out. Jesus in fact led the way through the trials, up the wall of the Cross, with the pitons holding Him there nailed through His own body. In Lent we remember that we are to make that same climb with Him. Paul reminds us that God will provide the way out, just as He did for Jesus.
Jesus in our Gospel reading showed us that grace too, after His own strong warning to repent or perish like so many have in this world. He told that strange little parable of the fruitless fig tree and its owner’s desire to chop it down and be done with it. I talked to the children about how God is more like that gardener who wished to nurture and care for the tree, to offer it more time to do what fruit trees are supposed to do.
I didn’t tell the kids about the little blueberry bush in the corner by the fence in our backyard. It hasn’t borne any fruit since we planted it several years ago. Other bushes there are doing well, lots of luscious, sweet berries each season. But that pitiful excuse for a blueberry bush just sits there, doing nothing. If it had been left to me, I would have ripped it out a couple of years ago. Lucky for it, my wife is the gardener of the family. She keeps giving it another chance, another year, another round of coffee grounds to make the soil around it more acidic, another spray of water from the hose. “Just let it be,” she tells me, “it could still produce.”
Fortunately for us all, God is more like my wife, more like the gardener in Jesus’ story. You or I would have lost patience with our own selves long ago. Maybe you have given up. But God is not like us. His patience and grace goes on and on. This text and the Gospel focused on moments of judgment, but the grace is still there there, the grace we heard in Psalm 63:8, “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me,” and in Isaiah 55:7 that if the wicked repent and forsake their evil ways, God has mercy, and “he will abundantly pardon.”
Life is hard. The mountain ahead may look unclimbable. There are an infinity of ways to fall and many of us already have. The testing and trials are common to everyone. Yet God is faithful, says Paul. He will provide a way. Jesus Christ said, “I am the way.” Turn, repent, and head once again in His direction. This is the way.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2022 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] The New Century Bible Commentary: I & II Corinthians (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1971), p. 91.