Communion Table and
Counterfeit; Blood of Christ; 1 Cor
Having given those examples
Paul comes back to the main issue in verse 14. The main issue in verse 14 seems
to suggest that by now he recognizes that the underlying issue isn’t eating the
meat down at the temple. It isn’t the fact that they couldn’t get meat anywhere
else, it was that they were going to the temple and
getting the meat but they were still attached to all of the practices
associated with idolatry. What often happens in the life of the believer is
that whenever he is challenged to give up something that is a legitimate right
in life and he goes into some sort of reaction, and he complains and gripes and
grumbles about it, often what out is being pointed out by the Lord through the
Holy Spirit is that there is some area of the sin nature that has not been
dealt with and has some sort of habit pattern that is being challenged by
giving up a legitimate right. The trouble with this is ti often becomes a
staging area for later sin nature revolt, reversionism,
and as Paul is going to point out in this section from verses 14-22, it can
become a staging area for demon influence in the life of the believer. Whenever
we have an area of sin nature that the Holy Spirit is dealing with and we refuse
to acknowledge it, refuse to face it, refuse to deal with it, and we continue
to rationalize it, and in fact try to justify its existence, then that can
become a toe-hold in our life for doctrines of demons and demon influence where
the believer is shipwrecked in his spiritual growth and he actually becomes a
disciple of the devil. This is the warning that Paul is giving in verse 14.
What he recognizes is that the Corinthians have such a reaction to his telling
them to be willing to give up the meat that has been offered down at the temple
that he realizes that there is something behind this, it is not simply a matter
of the meat, it a matter of the fact that they are still attracted to the
idolatry.
This is the problem of
syncretism and it continues to be a problem for believers throughout the church
age. That is, that we are born in a system dominated by human viewpoint which
the Bible calls worldliness. Worldliness is a translation of the Greek word KOSMOS [kosmoj] which we often refer to as simply comic thinking
because we are thinking like the devil. The key characteristic of Lucifer’s
thinking at the time of his fall is arrogance, and arrogance always pushes its
focus on self. Self is the orientation of arrogance. We get into
self-absorption where we focus on our own rights, our own abilities or whatever
is going on in our own lives, and as we get into self-absorption we always move
from there to into self-indulgence where we start justifying giving in to
whatever the self craves. Then we move from self-indulgence to
self-justification and we convince ourselves that our behaviour is totally
justified. Then we get into self-deception and we get into this terrible cycle
of arrogance skills, moving from self-deception. Self-indulgence, self-justification,
and the cycle continues.
Human viewpoint is always in
contrast to divine viewpoint which is the thinking of Christ. The thinking of
Christ is given to us in the Scriptures, and the role and purpose of the
believer in spiritual growth is to have his thinking renovated (Romans 12:2).
We are to be completely transformed. We are not to be conformed to this world
but we are to be transformed by the renewing of our thinking, so we have to
overhaul our thinking from the ground up. Human viewpoint characterizes the
thinking of most of us in ways that we don’t even imagine because this almost
like the air we breathe in the culture around us. We are brainwashed with human
viewpoint thinking from the moment we are born, and we are each born with a sin
nature which is like a radio that is tuned to the wave-length of human
viewpoint thinking. So that receptor in our sin nature just sucks up human
viewpoint from day one and continues dominate, and worldliness provides the
rationales and the justification for sin nature behaviour, whether it is
operating in the area of weakness or in the area of strength. The tendency of
the sin nature and the tendency of carnality is to
resist the renovation of our thinking. The tendency of the sin nature is to
continuously resist Bible doctrine, and so what happens is people try to take a
human viewpoint and accommodate it to divine viewpoint and merge the two
together, and this is what is called syncretism. It is trying to have your cake
and eat it too. This was the problem in
1 Corinthians
1 Corinthians
Then he starts to get into
the principle: 1 Corinthians 10:16 NASB “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?” Here he is going to draw an analogy
between the Lord’s table and a counterfeit communion
table which is the devil’s communions table, and that is the communion with the
demons involved in idolatrous worship. He is going to say that there is no
partnership between the believer who through positional truth participated in
the death of Christ on the cross and the idolater who goes down to the temple.
In chapter 11 Paul is going to come back to this subject of the Lord’s table. Remember that the one thing that runs through
all this section has to do with eating. The reason he mentions the cup first
here is that in the sanctification of the meat in the temple they would lift up
the wine and lift up the meat and they would offer it to the gods. So this is a
part of the ceremony that would take place in the temple where the cup would
come first. So here he takes the cup and he looks at it as the cup of blessing.
This is a figure of speech. The cup here is used as a symbol or a metaphor of
that which it contains, and what it contains is blessing. The cup is blessing
to the believer even though it was judgment to the Lord. The Lord said to
Peter, “You cannot take this cup which I am going to drink.” The cup that He
was going to drink was the judgment for our sins, and metaphorically speaking
the cup contained all the sins of the world. So His judgment is blessing to us
because He bore the penalty for our sins on the cross we, then, can be blessed
freely and graciously and have eternal life because of all that he did for us
on the cross. So the cup of blessing is the cup that contains blessing for the
believer, and we bless it, not in the sense that we are the source of blessing
but blessing has to do with praise and we praise the work of Jesus Christ on
the cross.
Then Paul says of the cup,
“Is it not the communion of the blood of Christ?” The word translated
“communion” here is the Greek word KOINONIA [koinwnia],
and this is a key word in this section. KOINONIA has to do with fellowship, with sharing something, with
partnership. So, “Is it not the sharing of the blood of Christ?” We have to
understand what it is to share the blood of Christ, and to do that we have to
understand something about what the Scripture teaches about the blood of
Christ. But first we need to understand a few things about the background of
the Eucharist table—which is probably the best term to use because it focuses
on giving thanks—and the whole concept of what takes place at communion.
There are basically three
views on communion. The Roman Catholic view is called transubstantiation. This
really goes back to the whole problem of syncretism once again. What happened
in the early church is that when people were saved out of a Greek culture and
came into the church they brought all of this Greek philosophical baggage with
them in terms of their thinking, and rather than exchanging their old forms of
thinking for divine viewpoint they tried to interpret the Bible in terms of
their previously established human viewpoint categories. They used the
categories of Greek philosophy to interpret the Bible. This is how the whole
concept of transubstantiation came into practice. On one hand you have the cup
and on the other hand the bread. The cup was filled with wine, and in the early
church it was wine. Some people try to make an argument that wine involved
fermentation, fermentation involves yeast, and leaven in the Scriptures is a
picture of sin, and so the cup could not be alcoholic. Well there is a false
reasoning there. That is, the bread could not have leaven because the bread
represents the body of Christ or the person of Christ. It could not be leaven
because the bread was to picture the sinlessness or the impeccability
of Jesus Christ. The cup represents His death, the payment for sin, and from
the time of the Exodus it was always celebrated with an alcoholic wine. The
fermentation of the wine was never considered to be an issue, and never
considered to be yeast or leaven by the Jews. There are certain characteristics
of the wine. First of all colour; they would use a good red wine. Then there
was the fact that they would use a certain quantity, a cupful. It was a liquid.
So there are various attributes to that wine. But in Greek thought what
underlies all the attributes of something, something you can’t see, is what was
called the basic substance of the wine. It is the same thing with the bread. It
might be white ion colour. There would be a certain quantity or amount of the
bread. It would have a certain size, dimensions. All of this you could say were the attributes of that piece of bread. But underneath
all of that was a substance that you don’t see; all you see is the various
attributes that would go along with it. In transubstantiation [tran = Latin for change;
substantiation = substance] there was a change of the substance, so that the
qualities, the attributes, didn’t change but that underlying substance has been
changed into the literal blood and body of Christ. That is a mystical concept
with various theological problems, because of that there developed what became
know as the Mass where you have the sacrifice again and again and again of
Christ, and there is a rejection by Roman Catholics of the all-sufficient work
of Christ on the cross.
In the Reformation Luther rejected
that but he didn’t do much better. He came up with a view called
consubstantiation. Con is a preposition meaning with, and the substance doesn’t
change, but the body and the blood of Christ is still there. The problem with
both of these views is that the humanity of Jesus Christ must be localized
today; it is in one place. He ascended in His human body, which he still has
(His resurrection body), into haven and is currently seated at the right hand
of God the Father. You do not have His human body showing up at every communion
service across the world every time communion is performed.
Then among the reformers,
i.e. the followers of John Calvin, there were two views that were set forth.
The first was the view of Calvin himself which was a view that the purpose of
the Lord’s table was spiritual; there was a spiritual
presence of the Lord there. This is how doctrine developed, or how in history
our understanding of doctrine developed, and it is so important to understand
that concept. Luther made a huge step when he separated from the Roman Catholic
church and understood the principle of justification
by faith alone in Christ alone, but in many other areas of doctrine Luther
didn’t do so well. This was primarily because he was spending 99% of his time
just trying to stay alive and fight for this one doctrine of justification by
faith. He made a big step towards a literal interpretation of Scripture but he
didn’t go very far, he didn’t have time in his life to apply that to every area
of theology. We have to remember that they didn’t have the framework, the
terminology that we have available to us.
The next person came along
and said, no, consubstantiation is not it, and Calvin comes along and says
there is still too much mysticism there and he articulated that there is a
spiritual presence there. There is still a problem with Calvin’s view and Zwingli, a reformer in
When we look at what Paul is
saying here we now have to understand what the term “blood of Christ” means.
This is a term that creates a knee-jerk reaction among a lot of fundamentalists
because they have sung a lot of hymns about the blood of Christ and they see
the terminology throughout the Scriptures, and yet they have failed to do their
homework on just what this term means. Not only that, there
is also a failure to deal with the fact that an emphasis on the literal blood
of Christ is a sort of a hold-over problem from Catholicism. There was
an early Roman Catholic heresy that took a literalistic view of the atonement,
that said that Jesus shed His blood on the cross and the angel came down and
took His blood, gathered it up in a sacred bowl, took it to the heavenly temple
and put it on a heavenly altar in order to placate God’s wrath. This was a Medieval heresy based on a literalistic interpretation of
the term “blood of Christ” and the phrase in the Scripture called “shedding of
blood.” We must understand that the term “shedding of blood” throughout the
Scripture was a figure of speech. That means it is a non-literal term that is
used to stand for violent death. This goes back to Genesis chapter nine, verse six,
where we have the first authorisation of capital punishment; that whoever sheds
man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed. If we were to take the position
that if murder is committed by strangulation, by poison, or by beating, then it
doesn’t deserve capital punishment because there is no blood shed. Furthermore,
capital punishment would have to be the kind of death that would involve
bleeding to death, it couldn’t be electrocution, hanging, lethal injection,
simply because those deaths are not shed blood. We almost intuitively reject
that because we know the English language and that when we read that phrase we
know that shedding of blood means a violent death of murder and it doesn’t
necessitate the actual, literal shedding of physical blood or bleeding to
death. The term “shedding of blood” is classically understood as simply a
metaphor for violent physical death.
E.W. Bullinger: “We lose
nothing of the facts but gain immensely as to their meaning when we understand
that by metalepsis blood is put for death, and death
for the atonement made by it and its infinite merit.” What he is going to say
is that metalepsis is a form of a figure of speech called metonymy. For
example, we have already seen one metonymy when we talk about the cup. Jesus
said: “Let this cup pass from me.” The cup is put for the contents, and the
contents would be judgment. So in this case what Bullinger
is saying is that blood represents physical death and that physical death in
turn represents something else, i.e. the spiritual payment for sin. Metalepsis is nothing more than a double metonymy where
there is blood put for death and that in turn stands for something else. So he
says: “In metalepsis blood is put for death and death
for the atonement made by it in all its infinite merit. In like manner the
cross is put first for the crucifixion as an act, or for Him who was crucified
thereon, and then this is put for the resulting merits of His atonement
procured thereby.” We are not saved by the cross,
those two beams don’t do anything. By the cross we mean what happened on the
cross, i.e. Jesus Christ was crucified for our sins. But, once again, it is not
His physical death, it is the payment for sin.
Furthermore, Bullinger concludes: “ So that such
expressions are to be avoided such as washed in the blood of the Lamb, and the
sentiment contained in the verse, ‘There is a fountain filled with blood, Drawn
from Emanuel’s veins, And sinners plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their
guilty stains.’ All such expressions are contrary to physiology and common
sense. In the New Testament the expression “the blood of Christ” is the figure
metalepsis because first the blood is put for bloodshed, i.e. the death of
Christ is distinct from His life and then His death is put for the perfect
satisfaction made by it.”
The point is, “the blood of Christ” is a figure of speech. It is not His
literal blood that saves, it is the fact that Jesus
Christ had to suffer a violent death on the cross. Does
that violent death and that idea of violence indicate a judgment, just as it
does in Genesis 9:6? There had to be a judgment on Jesus Christ but what kind
of judgment was it? This was a death where most evangelicals fall apart simply
due to a lack of clarity in understanding the penalty for sin. In Genesis 2:17
God told Adam that in the day that he ate from the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil he would die. However, in that day he did not die
physically. He did not die physically for 930 years. What happens in Genesis
chapter three is that there is a clear separation. When God
came to walk in the garden with Adam and Isha after
they ate the fruit. As a result of their eating the fruit, their
disobedience to God, God outlined for them the consequences of that act in
Genesis 3:14ff. The last thing He mentioned was that since they came from dust
they would return to dust, and this is the first mention of physical death. If
physical death is the penalty for sin then labor
pains are the penalty for sin, the serpent crawling on its scuts is the penalty
for sin, thorns and thistles is the penalty for sin. The penalty for sin was
spiritual death, i.e. the image bearer, the human race, mankind created in the
image and likeness of God, were separated from God, marred by son, and as a
consequence of that death which entered into human history the entire creation
shifted and changed. The outline of those consequences is what we read in
Genesis 3:14ff but there must be a distinction made between the judicial
penalty for sin and the consequences for sin. Therefore if physical death is a
consequence but the judicial penalty is spiritual death then the penalty that
was paid for that sin must also be spiritual death. If what Jesus Christ was
doing on the cross was paying the penalty for our sin then He was paying the
price of spiritual death on the cross. So the death that is efficacious for our
salvation is not His physical death but His spiritual death.
Jesus Christ had to die
physically on the cross and that is to show that God validated His payment for
our sins. His physical death was for several reasons.
1)
He had to die
physically in order to demonstrate that He had victory over physical death.
2)
He had to have
victory over physical death to demonstrate that God had accepted and validated
His sacrifice on the cross.
3)
He had to die
physically in order to get a resurrection body.
4)
He had to die
physically on the cross in order to be resurrected in order to once again
demonstrate that He was who He claimed to be and that the penalty for sin had
been paid for on the cross.
So we are not saying that the
physical death of Christ on the cross was not important but it is not the key
element in the efficacious payment for our sins. The atoning work on the cross
was a spiritual, substitutionary atonement. So let’s paraphrase verse 16: “The
cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the sharing of the substitutionary
spiritual death of Christ on the cross? Yes.” But what does Paul mean by the
sharing of the substitutionary death of Christ on the cross? This is another way
of looking at what is called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. That is, at the
very instant of salvation we are identified with Christ in His death, burial
and resurrection. So we are identified with His death on the cross, so that His
death is our death, His payment for sin is our payment for sin, and it is an
indication that now that we have accepted His payment for sin on our behalf we
now have eternal life, the greatest spiritual blessing possible.