AP

1 Corinthians 10:1-5    For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea.  They were all baptised into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.  They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.  Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert.
The apostle Paul’s warning to the Christian believers in Corinth two millennia ago is equally applicable to us here today.  Even at that stage in the Early Church, nominalism was becoming a problem.

In the last four verses of Chapter 9 we see him using the example of the rigorous training discipline required of athletes in the Games to point out the need for professing followers of Jesus to be serious about the commitment of their whole lifestyle to their outward profession.  Lip-service is dangerous because it can give us a false feeling of belonging when our lives actually prove the opposite.

He follows this up in Chapter 10 by pointing out that the fugitive Israelites in the wilderness under Moses all had the necessary hallmarks of those who would enter into and enjoy all the blessings of the Promised Land, but would miss out.  They had been miraculously rescued by the LORD through the Red Sea and were daily being led by the LORD’s ‘cloud’ through the desert.  These ‘watery’ experiences both foreshadowed the ‘Sacrament of Baptism’; and the LORD’s miraculous constant provision of food and drink was a ‘spiritual’ foreshadowing of the ‘Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’.  Yet, regardless of all these reassuring ‘signs’ and ‘credentials’, ‘God was not pleased with most of them’ and their appearance of ‘belonging’ was but a sham.

Let US not fall into this subtle trap.

– Bruce Christian