According to the Scriptures

Guest (Male): We are learning how to live the Christian life in a pagan world. Today, on According to the Scriptures.

Whether as a kid in school or an adult in the workplace, do you ever feel like you just don't fit in? Maybe it's because you don't see things the same way, or you're just plain different. Well, today on According to the Scriptures, we begin a helpful new series in 1 Corinthians. As the world around us is becoming more wicked by the minute, how can we be different and honor God with our lives?

Pastor Damian Kyle believes 1 Corinthians contains just what we need to hear for times like these. He'll begin with an introduction to the city of Corinth.

Damian Kyle: I want to do a brief introduction related to 1 Corinthians. It is needed and warranted in the sense that it is an introduction for both 1st and 2nd Corinthians. The city of Corinth for the Apostle Paul—really for anyone, but if it could be hard for the Apostle Paul, it would certainly be hard for anybody else—it was a very difficult city for him to plant a church in. It was no small thing. We see Corinth as a name on the printed page, and oftentimes it doesn't quite pull up in Technicolor for us in understanding the miracle that occurred in the establishing of the church, the heartbreak this church brought to the Apostle Paul, and how many things they were doing wrong and why they were doing them wrong.

A lot of times we can learn, as we do from Paul's letters to certain churches, which are filled with commendation of what they're doing right. We learn from that, but we also learn an awful lot in life by watching people who are doing something very wrong and handling things very badly and seeing where it ends up, and then determining for the rest of our lives to avoid becoming a Christian like that. So the church planted in Corinth was one of those. When Paul went into the city in Acts chapter 18, it brings all of this out. It was his custom as usual. He did the same thing there. When there was a Jewish synagogue within the city, he went into it and he began to preach Jesus as the promised Messiah on the basis of the witness of the Old Testament Scriptures.

He did exactly that because there was a synagogue in Corinth and he went into the synagogue and he began to preach Jesus as the Christ. Many Jews and many Gentiles who were attending the synagogue were persuaded by the truth that Paul spoke. They became Christians. This same message that brought some people into salvation provoked jealousy in others, and they began in opposition to what it was that Paul was preaching. They started to oppose him, including blasphemy being directed against him. After which, as was his pattern, if he was not welcome to continue to preach within the synagogue, then he would move out into the Gentile population of the city and he would begin to preach there.

Following the pattern of to the Jew first and then to the Greek, that exact same thing happened there in Corinth. As he's being blasphemed and the gospel's being blasphemed, he makes a home of a man by the name of Justus, who coincidentally lived right next door to the synagogue. He made that the base of his operation. After which, the ruler of the synagogue by the name of Crispus, as well as his entire family, put their faith in Jesus as Messiah. They were born again, and many Corinthians were told upon hearing the gospel believed and then were baptized.

Paul had seen on this second missionary journey of his—interesting we are in two cities Sunday morning and Sunday night that he established on his second missionary journey—he had seen this movie play over and over again. Go into a synagogue, begin to preach the gospel. It's powerfully received by people whose lives are changed in an instant. They become a miracle of the Holy Spirit. Opposition immediately arises and persecution, and the way this movie usually unfolded is that somewhere he took a beating and maybe would end up imprisoned.

When this happened once again now in the city of Corinth, he realized that this might end up with great physical harm to him. So you might remember that the Lord encouraged him in a night vision. In Acts chapter 18, the Lord spoke to Paul in a night vision and said, "Do not be afraid, but speak, and do not keep silent; for I am with you, and no one will attack you to hurt you; for I have many people in this city." And the Lord protected the Apostle Paul going forward in his ministry there in Corinth.

I don't know the last time that you were beaten with rods and then put in chains and then chained into stocks in the middle of a dungeon and then stayed there overnight. Just roll through the Rolodex and see if you can pull up that time that happened in your life. It's one thing to read about it, and then it's another thing to have experienced that or something close to that over and over again. Paul is a human being just like us, and God knew he needed some encouragement here. No, this is not going to happen to you here. I've got a lot of people and I'm going to have you hunker down here for a while.

The Apostle Paul would end up spending 18 months of his very finite and precious public ministry time in establishing the church in Corinth. It was an incredible investment of his life and the Lord's investment of it there. The only church that he would spend more time in establishing was the city of Ephesus, which happened after the church was established in Corinth. He would spend a complete total of about three years in that city. So God lets him know, I've got a lot going on, you're going to be here for a while, and I'm going to take care of you.

The second thing that made it difficult to plant a church in Corinth was just the degree to which sin and idolatry and paganism completely dominated the city. Think about the worst city in the United States of America in terms of idolatry, in terms of paganism, and in terms of sin being practiced. It does not approach what was going on in those three areas in the city of Corinth. There would be no words for it. If you tried to explain the practices associated with the Greek and Roman gods that were worshipped in the ancient world and the sin involved in that, it would not be right for any audience at all.

Geographically, Corinth is located in Greece, in the southern section known as the Peloponnesus. At the time of his writing of this letter, that area of Greece in the south was connected to the northern part of Greece by a single isthmus, a narrow neck of land about four miles wide. So you had Corinth, you had north, you had south, and you had this land bridge between the two. Corinth was located and dominated both sides of that land bridge.

Why is that significant? Because most of the east-west traffic on the Mediterranean Sea associated with the Roman Empire, which was an awful lot of commercial traffic, passed through Greece. The ships would sail sometimes around the southern part of Greece going to and from Rome, but the Cape of Malea there at the south of Greece was considered the most dangerous cape in the Mediterranean Sea. To avoid it altogether and the risk of losing their valuable cargo, they established two ports on either side of that four-mile-wide isthmus.

They would bring the ships in on one side and then there would be these couriers or these people that would bring wagons up, unload the ship, and then cart it across the four miles, load it up upon another ship, and then send it on its way. If the ship was light enough, they'd put the ship on rollers and roll it the four miles and reintroduce it into the water and it would go on its journey. Very nearly in between these two ports sat Corinth. Due to its location, a fabulous amount of the world's wealth passed through that city.

Not only because of trade, but because of the fees that they would then charge in order to use what was essentially the Panama Canal in those days. It became very, very wealthy. Ultimately in the late 1800s, they built a canal and it's just solid stone. A picture of it is amazing, but to see it with your own eyes is really something. They cut a canal all the way through that isthmus and there is now no need to bring the cargo up onto the land. Any Footsteps of Paul trip to Greece is going to involve stopping and taking a look at that. It really is a wonder.

Corinth became a great business center. It was also a great center for political power. It was one of the capitals of the Roman Empire in Achaia. It never hurts those who live in any kind of a capital city in terms of the prosperity of that city. Governments tend to keep those cities very well funded. That's why when recessions hit the United States and we are trying to get Washington, D.C. to understand what is happening on the street, it's really hard for them to understand. Some of the most wealthy counties in the entire United States are the counties that surround Washington, D.C. because of the money that gets pulled off. Corinth was a beneficiary of that kind of swamp.

It was also a center for learning. As we go through the book, we'll see they were fascinated by orators and by learned people speaking. It was famous for its art and its architecture. You might have heard about Corinthian columns; they are one of the most magnificent columns ever created in architecture in the ancient world. It was also a sports-crazed city. They would have followed the NFL draft and seen how the Niners and the Raiders did.

All kidding aside, they loved their sports. They were the home of the Isthmian Games, which occurred every two years and were second only to the Olympic Games in the ancient world. You've got that kind of money and you want entertainment, and sports was a great way for that. They liked their entertainment very extreme and very violent. They had an outdoor arena that could accommodate 20,000 people for the purpose of watching gladiators fight to the death or watching gladiators fight with wild animals.

They loved their Greek gods, and they loved to worship their Greek gods. Why wouldn't they love to worship their Greek gods, being a Greek city? The Greek gods were essentially the deification of the fallen nature of man. You had all of these gods: the god of nature, the god of war, the gods of violence, the gods of beauty and sex and fertility and vengeance, and so forth. They made up gods that were characterized by these things. It was simply the worship of the flesh while giving the appearance of worshipping something or someone greater. These things were deified in Greek culture, just as they are in our culture, except we don't feel the need to put a little statue on the mantle. We just simply engage in them guilt-free within our culture.

If you're going to deify human desires, then you're going to have to deify one of the greatest of human desires, and that is the desire for sex. How did they do it? By not only making sexual immorality not wrong or acceptable, they declared it to be commendable. They declared through their gods that it was something that was holy. They further declared that sexual immorality could be engaged in as an act of worship toward some of the Greek gods that they worshipped.

That brings us to the two things that Corinth was most famous for: drunkenness and sexual immorality. Corinth was well known within the Roman Empire as being the most wicked city within the empire. It's said that when a Corinthian was portrayed on stage in Greece, he was always portrayed as drunk. The Greeks also had a saying, "to play a Corinthian." If you said, "Where's Alex?" and they said, "He's playing the Corinthian," it meant a person was living a life of drunkenness and gross sexual immorality.

Because Corinth was at this place where the East met the West, there were temples erected to honor virtually every Greek god that existed. There was the temple to Venus, or Aphrodite. Being the goddess of beauty and love and procreation, the priests of the temple of Venus owned more than 10,000 male and female prostitutes. It takes a long time to count to 10,000. They had 10,000 human beings who engaged in ceremonial prostitution at just one of the temples there in the city of Corinth.

They would be rented out day by day to the thousands of sailors from the ships that were coming in and going out, and it wasn't just the sailors. This sexual immorality and the practice of engaging in this kind of prostitution fairly permeated the entire city. The prostitutes considered themselves to be sacred prostitutes and gave the proceeds back to the temple. To go and hire a prostitute had no negative stigma associated with it at all; that was considered to be a legitimate way of donating money to Aphrodite or to Venus.

In a nutshell, that was Corinth at the time that Paul wrote this letter. It's interesting that when Paul wrote his letter to the church at Rome, in Romans chapter 1, there's a very graphic denunciation of sin where he talks about the sins of the flesh. Paul didn't have to resort to a colorful imagination to come up with that list. All he had to do was open the front door of his house in Corinth and it was all going on, or open the shutter to an upper window of wherever he was living. All of this was part and parcel of what Corinth was.

Yet here in this place, God decided and the Holy Spirit let Paul know, "I'm going to use you to establish one of the largest and most famous churches in the first century." It was a church that was so sizeable that in a very short period of time, it had enough people within its congregation to develop church factions following Paul or Apollos or Peter.

Another thing is that it wasn't an easy place for Paul to plant a church because of the determined carnality of those who became Christian there. Not every Christian, but an awful lot of them. These Christians in Corinth were a handful, and they were a heartbreak to the Apostle Paul. There's no church in the early church that even remotely comes close to the disrespect that they showed to the Apostle Paul, the one that they owed so much to. It broke the apostle's heart, as we'll see most especially in 2nd Corinthians.

Here for the most part, the Christians within the church at Corinth seemed to be unwilling to make a clean break with sin and the influences of their pagan past. They were not determined in the way that they should have been for their lives to be fashioned by the Word of God and by Christianity. They were determined to take Christianity where it was inconvenient and conform it to Corinth. They're going to bring Corinth into the church. They want to be saved, but they don't want to give up the aspects of the good life that pagan Corinth offered to them.

The upside to all of this was that the Holy Spirit used the Apostle Paul to instruct them on how to live a truly Christian life in an absolutely pagan and debauched and anti-God and anti-Christian environment. That's what Corinth teaches us. I remember years ago listening to Ray Stedman, and he pastored Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California. He's in heaven now, but listening to his Bible studies is a very good idea. I remember him teaching on 1st Corinthians and describing it as 1st Californians, because it's so close and yet it was worse. Yet God planted a church there and people received the gospel.

Guest (Male): Want to be sure the city of Corinth resembles California in many ways. That's why this letter of 1st Corinthians is so valuable to us and why we've chosen to study it now on According to the Scriptures. Pastor Damian Kyle will take us through each chapter and verse in the months ahead of us.

If you'd like to get the CD that contains today's message from 1st Corinthians, give us a call at 209-545-5530. That's 209-545-5530. I should also mention Pastor Damian's messages are found at AccordingtotheScriptures.com as well as OnePlace.com and on most of the major podcast apps. So if you missed one or two messages on the radio, there are many ways to catch up.

It'd be our honor to pray for you, so keep those prayer requests coming. Leave a comment or prayer request at AccordingtotheScriptures.com or you can email us at ATTS@CCModesto.com. Again, that's ATTS@CCModesto.com. Your financial support is greatly appreciated and it helps us bring Pastor Damian's messages to the radio on stations like this all across the nation. If you would like to make a donation to the ministry, please visit AccordingtotheScriptures.com. Then join us next time for According to the Scriptures with Damian Kyle when we'll return to our series in 1st Corinthians. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Modesto and made possible through the support of you, our listeners.