Thoughts on 1 Samuel 22 & 1 Corinthians 10

Today's reading: 1 Samuel 22; 1 Corinthians 10

Thoughts on 1 Samuel 22

Saul is such a great cautionary tale on the insidiousness of sin.

We have already seen over and over again where Saul goes his own way rather than trusting in God. This has gotten him in trouble, embarrassed him, and ultimately led to God selecting someone else to be His choice for king instead of Saul. But through all of this, rather than relenting or seeking the Lord in any way, Saul has continued to double down. We have watched him devolve to the point where he has tried to murder David multiple times to try to protect his own legacy. But then today we hit an entirely different level of hard-heartedness.

When Saul confronts Ahimelech the priest about having helped David, he has no category for someone having innocently helped his "enemy." Everything Ahimelech tells Saul is legitimate and innocent, but Saul cannot consider it true. He has become so paranoid in his self-protection that anybody who does not equally hate David must be a threat. This goes so far that Saul has Doeg the Edomite murder, not just Ahimelech himself, but 85 priests along with the entire city of Nob (the city of the priests).

When Saul first offered that rebellious sacrifice, I bet he could never have imagined murdering 85 priests of the Lord and their families. Honestly, as Yahweh's king, he probably would have felt an incredible righteous indignation at even the thought of someone wiping out the priests there to serve the Lord! And yet, here he is. It makes me think of the tv show Breaking Bad (skip to the next paragraph if you've never seen it and don't want a mild spoiler). If you haven't seen it, the show is about Walter White, a chemistry teacher who starts cooking meth to make money due to medical issues. As you follow him through the show, every decision he makes really seems to make sense for where he's at, and much of it you even feel sympathetic toward, but where he ends up is so incredibly far from where he started that they might as well be two completely different people. There are things he callously does at the end of the series that would have made him sick to his stomach to even hear about at the beginning.

This is why the Bible warns us to take sin as seriously as it does. Yes, sin is an affront to God, and that should be enough to convince us to turn from it, but there is very real danger to sin. When we indulge just that little sin that we think really isn't that big of a deal, we are setting ourselves up to take the next step after that one. And with each indulgence, and each little toe over the line, we gradually callous our hearts to His voice and make each further step away from Him easier and seem more logical. Saul was not tempted, when his army was fleeing in fear of the Philistines, to murder an entire city of priests, nor did this temptation arise after one or two steps off the course God would have had for him, but this is where he ended up. You may think that your little pet sin isn't that harmful or isn't that impactful, but we are the last ones to see the direction our sin is really leading us, and the danger is that we may not realize it until we have gone much further than we could ever have imagined, if we even realize it at all...

This is why God calls us to take sin seriously and not indulge it, no matter how minor we may think it is.

God has better things for us than sin ever could and the more we trust and act in faith on that reality, the more likely we are to keep running after Him, useful in His hands for the building up of His kingdom here on this earth, for years to come. 

Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 10

This is really following up on what we talked about a couple days ago in 1 Corinthians 8, but what strikes me in chapter 10 here today is just how much intent matters.

People really want to make sin about objective lines in the sand, "Do this and it is sinful, do that and it is not," and while there are things like that, much of the Christian life does not work that way. Just look at what Paul has to say about partaking in sacrifices made to idols. He tells the Corinthians that those who are participants in those sacrifices are participants with demons, and he doesn't want them to be participants with demons. But he also just told them that it was fine to eat meat sacrificed to idols. But if eating the sacrifice makes them participants in it, and therefore participants with demons, it would seem like they need to be incredibly concerned about where their meat is coming from, which flies in the face of chapter 8!

But this is really the point Paul is making, and the mentality he is combating. He is telling them, on the one hand, that if they are eating meat with full integrity, not doing it to participate in a sacrifice, then they are not participating in the sacrifice, and that is perfectly fine. But on the flip-side, if they are doing it to participate in the sacrifice, there is a significant spiritual reality behind it and they need to stop immediately. It is the exact same action, but for one person it isn't the least bit sinful, while for the other it is extremely sinful.

We want to categorize behaviors to excuse our sin. We want to say, "It's not wrong to eat meat sacrificed to idols," so that we can feel fine with continuing to worship other gods. We all do this with various areas of our sin, but God is calling us to something better.

I'm not going to go further on about this today, because this post is already getting pretty long and I've already written about this a few times, but this is a very important shift in our mindset on sin from, "Can I do this?" to "Does this glorify God?" or "Will this strengthen my relationship with Him?" When we start to make that shift in our thinking, that is very often where real growth in the Christian life starts to happen.