Two Tables, One Option
There is a particular kind of spiritual danger that is easy to overlook precisely because it looks so much like health. It is not the danger of obvious rebellion or outright unbelief. It is the danger of presumption — of assuming that because you have received so much grace, you are somehow beyond the reach of serious failure. The apostle Paul writes 1 Corinthians 10 directly into that blind spot, and he does it by taking his readers somewhere most of us would rather not go: into the wilderness with Israel, where the graves tell a story no one wants to hear.
Paul opens the chapter with a word he uses only when he needs to make sure nothing gets missed: "I don't want you to be unaware." What follows is one of the most carefully constructed warnings in his letters. Five times in four verses he uses the word "all" — all were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all ate the spiritual food, all drank the spiritual drink, all were, in some sense, baptized into Moses. He stacks the privileges deliberately, the way a prosecutor builds a case. And then the verdict lands in verse 5, cold and precise: "Nevertheless God was not pleased with most of them, since they were struck down in the wilderness." Most of them. Of the entire adult generation that left Egypt, only Joshua and Caleb ever saw the promised land. The wilderness was strewn with the graves of the privileged.
Paul catalogues five specific sins that brought the nation down — craving evil things, idolatry, sexual immorality, testing Christ, and grumbling — and then he says something that is both a warning and a promise in the same breath. "Whoever thinks he stands must be careful not to fall." The most dangerous place in the spiritual life is not the edge of obvious temptation. It is the plateau of self-assurance, where we have quietly begun to trust our own track record more than God's faithfulness. But the promise comes immediately after: "God is faithful. He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to bear it." The escape is not around the temptation. It is through it, on the other side — and the One who opens that door can be counted on completely.
From the warning, Paul moves to a command, and the command is strikingly direct: "Flee from idolatry." He doesn't say "be cautious about" or "think carefully regarding." He says run. And then he explains why the command is so urgent by pointing to the Lord's Table. When we take the cup and the bread at Communion, we are not merely performing a ritual or recalling a distant historical event. We are entering into a living participation — the New Testament word is koinonia, fellowship — with the body and blood of Christ. The meal is a declaration. It announces whose you are. It binds you, publicly and spiritually, to the One who broke the bread and poured out the cup. And that bond, Paul says, is not compatible with sitting at another table.
This is the sentence that anchors the entire chapter: "You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot share in the Lord's table and the table of demons." The Corinthians who were eating in pagan temples thought they had it figured out — after all, idols are nothing, they reasoned, so what is the harm? Paul agrees that idols are nothing. But he insists that behind every altar where sacrifices are made to false gods, a real spiritual power is at work. The idols are empty. The demons behind them are not. And when you sit at a table, you are declaring fellowship with whatever that table represents. You cannot declare two allegiances at once. There is no neutral spiritual territory. Every table belongs to someone.
The modern application of this rarely looks like a literal idol feast. But the question Paul is pressing is not hard to translate. Where are you going for the things only God can give — for significance, for comfort, for belonging, for the quiet filling of whatever is empty inside you? The Lord's Table says there is One who is sufficient for all of it, who gave his body and blood so that you would never have to look somewhere else. The danger is treating that table as one option on a menu of many, pulling up a chair at the Lord's Table on Sunday morning and then spending the rest of the week at tables that are quietly competing for the same hunger.
Paul closes the chapter not with a longer list of prohibitions but with a single, luminous sentence: "So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God." He picks the most ordinary activities imaginable — eating, drinking, the unremarkable rhythms of daily life — and says that even these are included. Nothing falls outside the scope of that command. And nothing requires a complicated decision-making process once that command has genuinely taken hold of you. The question that settles almost every grey area in the Christian life is simply this: will this glorify God? Not "is it technically allowed?" Not "will anyone find out?" But will it make much of the One who made you and bought you back? That question, applied with honesty, changes everything.
This Sunday, we will be in 1 Corinthians 10 together as we continue our series, Building on the Foundation. The wilderness is a warning. The table is an allegiance. The life you live between Sundays is a doxology — or it is not. Paul's invitation is to bring all three of those realities together under the lordship of Christ, so that the ordinary moments of your week become what they were always meant to be: an act of worship to the One who is worth it. We hope you will join us.
Join us at Union Avenue Baptist Church — 2181 Union Avenue — Sundays at 10:45am, or online at unionavenue.org.