1 Corinthians 8. Knowledge and Love

You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsick preaches from his sermon series titled 1 Corinthians, Sinful Church, Powerful Gospel. Let's listen in.

Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsick. I am the lead pastor here and as Linda said, we enjoyed a couple of weeks out. Last week we were up north. You know you're from Michigan when you head north this time of the year and beautiful, beautiful colors up there last week when we were on our way up there.

But I'm really glad to be back and I echo the same thing that Linda said. I miss you guys when I'm gone and I mean that sincerely. Whenever we're gone on vacation, we do visit other churches and we actually kind of like that.

It's fun. It's just to see how other people worship and to remind us that there are other people in other cities and in other places that worship God too and it's really encouraging. And at the same time, we're always reminded when we visit other churches that the church we attend, it's not recast.

Like when we go and we visit there, most of them are good. Most of them are doing their own thing. Most of them are, many of them I should say, are teaching the Word but none of them are our church home like you guys are.

And so we're glad to be back. This morning we're going to be back in the book of 1 Corinthians and we're in the middle of several chapters where the apostle Paul is in essence managing a large Q &A. The church has responded to him in writing.

It started back in chapter 7. If you were to glance there, chapter 7 verse 1, he said, now concerning the matters about which you wrote, and that's a big heading shift in the book. And then he separates different issues that they wrote to him about, likely asking some questions and giving some commentary about the way that they're viewing things and asking for his correction or his direction.

And he divides those out with the phrase, now concerning. Now concerning shows you that he's tackling a new subject. He's addressing something new. And our text happens to start this morning in chapter 8 with a now concerning.

So a new change of topic, new thing that we're going to be talking about here. It's been a lot over the course of chapter 5 through chapter 7 about sexuality and marriage and singleness and all kinds of things going on there.

And the topic of hand now that's pressing on the minds of these ancient Corinthians is a topic that's far, far removed from our contemporary concerns. I don't think there's a person in this room over the course of your life that aside from reading God's Word has ever thought the thoughts that we're going to be talking about here.

This is the question, the kind of line of thinking that's being addressed in this text. What should a Christian's attitude be regarding food or meat that is sacrificed to idols? Ah, super devotional, isn't it?

How many of you have just like, you spent most of your teen years just troubling over that, right? What do I do about meat sacrificed to idols? What do I do at the butcher shop? Where do I go to get food?

Where do I go to get meat? Now, you don't really spend a lot of time thinking about that. And this topic seems further away from our contemporary concerns as a church until we begin to apply it. And once we begin to apply the principles of this passage, it comes to life.

Once we begin to see the application of the main principle espoused in this passage, we will see that it ought to be a driving force, not a secondary, not a third degree kind of like, oh, we ought to think about this from time to time.

The principle that is that when applied should impact our daily decisions, the way we live our lives in community together. This passage identifies for us an ethic of unity within the body of Christ that is radical, it's vital, and it is often overlooked.

It's radical, it's vital, and it is often overlooked. The reason I use such extreme words to define this is that we're a culture of knowledge. We're going to see knowledge and love put together in a way that is important that often isn't thought through.

You see, we think the one who is right, the one with the right argument, wins, right? I mean, raise your hand if you kind of basically think that's true. Like, the person with the right argument, the person with truth on their side should win in all circumstances, right?

And here in our text, we will see Paul emphasize that right knowledge is good. Landing on the truth is important, but only, only, only when applied with love, only when applied with love. The backbone of our unity is only as strong as our understanding of the call to love one another.

Certainly, we need to know right and wrong, but knowing right and wrong often leads the more knowledgeable, like us, right? We're all the more knowledgeable. We're all pretty much brighter than most people.

That's the way we think. But it leads the more knowledgeable into an arrogant self-righteousness and pride. Knowledge even of the truth can puff us up with pompous privilege, while the one without knowledge can be run over or overlooked or even led astray by those who model freedom in Christ without any care or concern, as this text is going to explain.

So much conflict in our lives, church, comes through the conduit of arrogance or a lack of love or a pride of knowledge. That I would go so far as to say that if you've experienced conflict within the past week, I'm not going to ask for a show of hands because I know all of you have, there's some level of conflict in your life, what be it internally or with a spouse or with a child or with a parent or with a coworker or with a boss or with somebody.

If you've experienced conflict this week, this passage will speak to it. This passage will speak to it because the vast majority of our arguments center either on a disagreement about what is true or an unloving response on our part or the part of the other.

And often, unfortunately, it's a combination of the two, a disagreement about what is true and an unloving response. This proves true to be true in my life, it proves true in my family, in my marriage.

When Lynn and I disagree, it is often over disagreement about what is true or what is not true, or one of us, usually me, has acted in an unloving way. And yet before I read this, let me be clear that more is at stake in this passage than just merely getting along with each other.

What is at stake in this passage is the peril of destruction, the peril of destroying one another, going about living in the freedom of Christ without a concern for fellow brothers and sisters can result in some very dire consequences, according to the Apostle Paul in this passage.

So let's open our Bibles or your scripture journals or your devices to 1 Corinthians chapter 8. We're going to read this in its entirety. A little bit of a shorter passage this week, at least a shorter chapter, maybe a longer passage than we are used to taking on, but it's an entire chapter.

And again, recast God's holy word. Chapter 8 is what he wants to take on for us this morning, what he wants to impact us with, and what he wants to transform our lives with. So please follow along 1 Corinthians chapter 8.

Now concerning food offered to idols, we know that all of us possess knowledge. This knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.

But if anyone loves, he is known by God. Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that an idol has no real existence, and that there is no God but one. For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and for whom we exist.

And one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we exist. However, not all possess this knowledge. But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.

Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol's temple, will he not be encouraged if his conscience is weak to eat food offered to idols?

And so, by your knowledge, this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died. Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble.

Let's pray. Father, we rejoice in the opportunity that we have to gather together. It's a privilege, and I pray that we would not take it for granted. We can kind of see church as a show that we take in on Sunday morning.

We gather together. There's an audience. There's a stage. There's things going on. Take in the program and leave. That's not church. Church is the united people under our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who love one another, who bear with one another, who are in relationship with one another.

Not, God, I pray that you would remove our blinders and the way that we become so myopic to our own lives, the way that we think only about ourselves, the way that we think even in terms of our personal relationship with Jesus, as if we can walk this road alone.

Father, I thank you that you've brought us together. I thank you that you're uniting people. I thank you for rumors that I hear over the course of this last 14 years of people loving one another, of caring for one another, of meals given to one another, of prayers offered to you on behalf of one another, of tears shed with one another, and laughter and joy with one another, sorrow over defeats and rejoicing over victories.

Father, I pray that you would be cementing us together to weather the storms. The world out there is raging. I can't hardly read a headline without thinking about Psalm 2, and the nation's rage. Church stands.

Father, make us a people who love you, love one another well, in the face of this storm. In Jesus' name. Thank you to the band for leading us in worship. Encourage you to get comfortable just like every week, but keep your Bibles open to 1 Corinthians chapter 8, so we can kind of walk through that together.

So, if you have your Bibles open in front of you, that's just going to help you. I'm going to keep referencing back to that passage, so get back there. And that if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donut holes, you can take advantage of those back there.

You're not going to disrupt me if you need to get up at all. Use the bathrooms that are out the barn doors down the hallway on left-hand side if you need those. But the topic at hand is like I mentioned in my introduction, a topic that we don't think about very often, food sacrifice to idols.

It shows up right away in verse 1. And our outline begins with Paul framing his answer to what I can only assume was a question that was something like, and I think it's framed this way, it's okay for us to keep eating the meat from the marketplace, right?

Even though it was all offered to Demeter or Diana or Zeus, right? Like the idea is that it was a pro, like I think the Corinthians were already doing this. The implications throughout this passage all the way through chapter 10 is that they're likely already doing it, and they're looking for confirmation.

They're saying we're okay with this, right? Now there were some within Corinth that were not, but the majority were, and we're looking for some kind of, you know, Paul's approval kind of thing. And so that's where we're at, and that's what we're looking at here.

We don't have the questions throughout this passage. It's not like a Q &A where we get to see what the questions are and then see the answers. But it doesn't matter that much that we don't have them, because what we do have is the active, proactive teaching of Paul in the answers throughout 1 Corinthians.

And the answers are what God desires to communicate to us. So it doesn't matter, but it doesn't keep our minds from wandering. Often scholars spend pages and pages and pages and commentaries discussing what was the likely question, but we ought to spend our time on what the answers are, right?

Here's the answer, so let's dig into that. Our outline this morning is the core of our actions, verses 1 through 3, the core of our actions. Then verses 4 through 6, the core of our knowledge. Verses 7 through 10, the core of our love.

And verses 11 through 13, the core of our concern. So we're all swirling around and Paul utilizing the topic of meat sacrifice to idols to get down to the core of these things. So we'll start with the core of our actions here in verses 1 through 3.

Paul introduces the topic and then seems to wander off into an unrelated topic right away. Like, how many of you have ever just like asked, remember when you were a kid you asked your parents a question and then they answered and it had nothing to do with the question you asked?

Like, wait, why are we talking about this? I was just asking if I can go to the dance and now you're talking about like modesty or something? Like, why are we talking about this? I don't know. So here he says they are concerned about food offered to idols.

And so concerning food offered to idols, Paul says, let's talk about knowledge and love. Let's go there. Let's talk about knowledge and love. And so that's the topic for these first three verses. He will definitively get back to the specifics of food sacrifice to idols throughout this passage, but barely.

What he wants to take us on is a quick lesson regarding ethics in the Christian life. The way that we roll with one another, the life that we are meant to live together. And he starts off with a presupposition.

We all have knowledge. All of us have knowledge of some sort. And I fear that many in the American church have misapplied Paul's concerns throughout all of 1 Corinthians. He's talked about knowledge early on and we misapplied it.

Evangelicalism has been an increasingly skeptical movement. It was kind of founded in a bit of skepticism towards education and therefore an increasingly uneducated movement has developed. And we may be tempted to think that we find our justification for being against formal education in 1 Corinthians.

I've heard people say, you know, I wouldn't trust somebody who went to seminary or something to that effect. Or, you know, it's kind of like that's the place you go to ruin your faith. You go get formally educated about these things and that's going to destroy you.

And I reject that idea. I recognize that making it too academic and not from the heart matters, and that's what he's going to say here. Paul is not against knowledge. We all possess it if we are in with Christ.

It's a given. It's a given. If you belong to Jesus, a given is that you have knowledge about Him. You didn't come to faith in Christ through feelings. You came through some understanding, through some knowledge about Him.

Christianity is a reading, writing, communicating with words kind of faith. God is a speaking, writing, revealing kind of God. And He's put it down in writing for us to study, to know, so that we can keep coming back to it time and time again.

The fact that knowledge puffs up doesn't remove us from the necessity of studying to grow in our faith. But rather, we must have something added to our knowledge to put us in the right place. And what is it that the text is going to tell us we need added to our knowledge to be in the right place regarding knowledge?

Love. Love must be added. Our knowledge comes from love. If I'm putting it into practice, we all have knowledge, each and every one of us. But knowledge without love puffs up, but love itself builds up.

Knowledge puffs us up. Knowledge without love is going to make us an arrogant people. It's going to make us proud and prideful. But love, love is what builds up community. Love is what, and it's specifically a love based on knowledge.

Now, I don't need to get too deep into this because I think all of us have plenty of personal experience with those arrogant people out there who, you know, nothing like us, right? No, they act just like us, really, if you think about it.

I mean, outside of the four walls, are there arrogant people? Inside the four walls, are there arrogant people? Yeah, we're here. But there is a better way to live, says Paul. Knowledge undergirded with love that desires the best for each other, that is in each other's camp, is ready to help, is ready to help the hurting, is willing to even go so far as rebuking those that are wrong.

That kind of love, a love that enters into it. You talk about a healthy church, you talk about a healthy people, show me a church or show me a people that has deep knowledge coupled to an equally depth love.

That's going to be an amazingly attractive community, right? One where there is truth held high and love held equally as high. That's an amazing community. That's what the church is meant to be. But Paul attacks any arrogance at the point of fiction.

Fiction, you know, kind of untruth. In verse two, he addresses anyone who thinks he knows something. Oh, this is getting close to home because I think all of us live in a day and an age where we can be experts about something with just a couple clicks on Google.

We think we read Wikipedia and now we're an expert, right? And then we can weigh in on chat groups about topics that we've never studied, right? You know what I'm talking about? So we live in a day and in a culture where we think we know something and we will speak into it with more confidence than we ought.

Raise your hand if you acknowledge that about yourself. Am I alone? You're not going to leave me alone on that? About 10 of us do that regularly. I think more of us probably have that feeling in us where we know a lot about things that we don't know much about.

And we can know the truth, but we can know the truth of God's word to a tee, but have incomplete knowledge without love. We can memorize huge chunks of scripture, be able to quote the 10 commandments verbatim.

We can go through the entire Bible in a year every year. Our Bibles could be marked up and highlighted and underlined and circled, but without love, our knowledge cannot be complete. And he concludes this caveat with a wonderfully pithy and deep observation in verse 3.

It drives us in the right direction, a direction that knowledge alone will not take us. If anyone loves God, he says, he is known by God. If anybody loves God, he is known by God. That's where knowledge matters.

What knowledge matters about you, what you possess, what you filled and crammed in your mind, is that the knowledge that's most important to you? Or is it that you are known by the Almighty? Which knowledge is valuable to you?

He says, if anyone loves God, then he is known by God. What can humble us and bring our eyes down when we've been puffed up with religious pride? What can put our feet back on the ground when we think we've pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps in our knowledge and our understanding and our academic pursuits and our reading of the Scriptures and our pursuing commentaries and our research online and all of that?

What can bring us back down to earth that nothing that we have come to grasp, nothing that we can intellectually arrive at by study, can bring us to the love of God? Rather, here in verse 3, we see notes of the gospel in this, that we love because he first loved us.

We love because he first loved us. And the good news is that we are known by him. Not that we know stuff about him, not that we can spit out right theology about him, but that we are known by him. Oh, one of the most terrifying passages of Scripture.

Some will say on that day that they did many good things in his name. Their trust will be placed in what they did. Did we not cast out demons? Did we not do all these miracles? Did we not do amazing things?

Things that I haven't done, things that I'm guessing you haven't done, and their resume is going to look better than yours. Their resume is going to look better than mine. And they're going to say, we did all these things in your name.

Let us in. And what is his answer going to be to them? Depart from me, for I never, what? I never knew you. What knowledge matters most to you? What you can cram in your head? Or that you are known and loved and cared for by the Almighty.

That is a recentering thing for us in this text. Knowledge about God is not bad in itself, obviously, but I believe that it always... I'm just making a radical statement here. I believe that knowledge about God always puffs up when it is not growing in the soil of love for God that springs first from being known by him and loved by him.

A heart that has not been grasped by the gospel is a heart in a dangerous position. Knowledge without a relationship of love with God through his great grace poured out on us through the cross of Jesus Christ, his son, is a religiously dangerous person.

It's a religiously dangerous heart, a proud heart that is filling itself with knowledge without the gospel, without Christ. That is a dangerous thing. Knowledge without love will always lead to pride and arrogance.

And in the end, without being corrected, will lead to hell. That's how important these things are. What are we talking about here? We're talking about the very core, the very core of our actions, the very core of why we live a Christian life.

And so the core of our actions is a knowledge supported by love for God and love for others that comes out of the gospel. The two greatest commands are love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.

He is deeply concerned here for the way we roll in our community as a church recast. And maybe an application point this morning is to check your attitude to determine where you're at. Are you puffed up and full of knowledge but really low on love?

That could be quite possible for many of us coming off of a few tough years here. Let this passage pop your balloon with the truth. The only thing that matters about you is that God loved you and rescued you from yourself.

He rescued you from your lies. He rescued you from your darkness. He rescued you from your brokenness. Amen? And now he is building you back up, giving you knowledge in order to live out a life of his love toward others.

Humble yourself this morning. Confess any arrogance and pride that you find within you and ask him to use you in the practical ways that are yet to come in this passage. Now that he's established the core of our actions as knowledge with love, we move on to the more specifics, the specific detailed and technical section of the text, getting more and more technical about meat sacrifice to idols.

We haven't even really talked about that yet. But he told us that he was going to be talking about food sacrifice to idols, and this is where we see the core of our knowledge come out in verses four through six, the core of our knowledge.

The beginning of verse four lets us know that what he says in this section connects to the previous section as an outcropping of that importance he's been talking about knowledge and love in the context of meat sacrifice to idols, and this section is going to be more focused on the knowledge aspect of things.

Paul right away says we know in verse four, that's how he starts, we know. Whoever he has, whoever he's writing this for, he assumes that they have some knowledge about idolatry, they have some knowledge about God that is shared in common, and yet in verse seven he will speak about others in the church that do not possess this knowledge.

We know, but some don't, all within the context of the church, all within the context of brothers and sisters in Christ, and I believe that he expects the average Christian to know some things. He expects that we have a very a very generic but common understanding about what Christ has done and the cross and the sacrifice that he made for us.

He expects us to have some things in common, but he is so totally leaving room for some people in the church on the periphery to not have come into this full understanding, particularly regarding the nature of idolatry, particularly in regard to this meat sacrifice to idols thing that's going on here.

I point this out here at the beginning of this because it shows that Paul understood that there's a variety of people that the church will interact with, a variety of people here in this room. Not all have and share the same knowledge, not all of us have the same points in which we need to grow.

Some of us are really strong in Trinitarian theology. Some of us are very weak in that, and we need to bolster that. We've got some study to do. We've got some work ahead of us. Not all have the same knowledge, but all of us need to grow, and we define maturity here at Recast as growing in faith, growing in community, and growing in service.

Maturity is not a line that we cross and one day we wake up and we go, got it, I'm now mature. Now I'm in. Now I got it all figured out. No, maturity is a commitment to a lifelong process of growing in faith, a faith that's built on knowledge about God and love for Him and love for others that flows out of His love for us at the cross.

But Paul expects those who will read this letter in Corinth to know something quite specific about idolatry, something that we ought to all be brought into. And he spends three verses here explaining that idols are not real.

That's what we ought to share in common. We ought to know that. Idols are not real. There is no other real God. Yahweh is not the head of a pantheon, and he roots this knowledge in Scriptures. He paraphrases a string of thought from Isaiah in the phrase, an idol has no real existence.

He's not quoting a particular passage, but a line of thought from Isaiah. And then he does quote directly from Deuteronomy with a common Jewish phrase, there is no God but one. And so we see all throughout Scripture an appeal back to God's revealed word as the source of the understanding.

What do we know, church? What do we know? How do we know anything about God? How do we know what is true about the nature of idols? How do we know there isn't a pantheon of gods up there, angry that we haven't given them their food in a while?

It's been a while since we made a sacrifice here. Maybe they're all angry at us. How do we know that that's not the reality behind the scenes? How do we know that's not the fabric of the universe? How do we know?

Scripture. Scripture. We trust this or we don't. If we don't trust this, how many of you know that anything goes? It might be the spaghetti monster in the sky. Look, if we don't trust this, if this is not our foundation, then really we're opening the door to all kinds of things.

That's why I love that he's revealed it in a written word that we can keep going back to, that we can study how it even came to us, and we can see the supernatural nature. How many of you have been impacted by this word personally?

It's changed your life. I've seen it time and time again when I dig in. It nourishes me. It gives me strength. It defines terms for me. It breaks down barriers. It reveals truth about me that's ugly, that I don't even want to believe, but it's true, that I'm broken, that there's a Savior that came to rescue me.

I'm so much here. Scripture is how we know, and Paul appeals to it many times. And so we know that there are many self-proclaimed gods and lords, he says, and he puts it in quotes. So many gods and lords.

Thor, Zeus, Nero, Tiberius, Herod the Great, all the way from myth and fiction to real live dudes who said, I am God. Worship me and bow right now or I'm going to cut your head off. Real people who claim deity and lofty titles for themselves.

And they are, in Paul's words, so-called gods. Now Paul will clarify that he sees more power behind these idols than merely nothing. He's going to save that revelation for chapter 10. Here he doesn't dive in and give us everything at once, but rather he does indeed see deceptive demonic forces behind idolatry, behind many of the things in our culture, behind the things in our culture, certainly behind many of the things in their culture as well.

But that's, again, we're going to save that for 1 Corinthians chapter 10, but for now, he wants to be sure we are all on the same page. Zeus, Hera, Artemis, Perseus, and the Roman emperors claiming deity are not really gods.

And further, there is one true God and one true Lord. Many will gladly take those titles, but only one God deserves them. Only one God it really lands with. And that one God has revealed himself in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And here we see either Paul being utterly inconsistent in this text or utterly Trinitarian because he sees no inconsistency in declaring that there is one God and Father from whom all things came and for whom we exist.

And there is one Lord, think King and Master, through whom all things exist and through whom we exist, running parallel lines with God and Jesus. The reason Paul goes here is to highlight that in the Father and Son, we have all of our existences and purposes.

We are created by him and we are created for him. And this core knowledge ought to be brought to bear on everything, church. It ought to come to bear on everything. As far as application, it's good to remind ourselves at the start of the day, throughout each day, and at the end of every day, that God is the maker, sustainer, and purpose of all things.

It's a good place to start the day. This core knowledge should drive the way we live moment by moment, minute by minute, hour by hour. It should put us in our place, but it also should heighten our anticipation for his purposes for us in each day.

He is our purpose. He is the one. Every day that our feet hit the floor, we're alive for one reason, church. Every single morning we get up and we breathe his air and our feet hit that floor is that he isn't done.

He's not done with us, so we live. How many of you know, when he's done, we won't. But we will live every moment that he has for us to live. Amen? I find comfort in that. I find encouragement in that.

I find strength to age. You know what I'm talking about. As you age, some days it's like, oh, wow, I'm here again. Depends on what you're going through, right? We wake up in the morning because he has more works for us to walk in, more good for us to do, more prayers to offer, more love to give, more service to render, more gospel conversations, more shining light and more salting the earth with his goodness, more growth in knowledge and love.

That's why you're here. That's why we're alive. But this truth that God alone is God comes to bear on the topic of meat sacrifice to idols in a very specific way. Those gods are nothing. They're really nothing.

There's really not anything behind them. It's not that important, neither here nor there. And that gets to the core of our love in verses 7 through 10. Because those that are in the know about these things can then have flippancy towards them.

But Paul encourages us to pause here. And here's the core of our love. Tells us to pause and think about others. Not your personal relationship with God. We're in community. What we do matters. What we do impacts each other.

And so the core of our love is verses 7 through 10, the third point. And most of us have little to no concern for the places. Just kind of set the stage. We have very little concern for where our meat comes from.

Where do you buy your meat? Some of you have a butcher. Some of you go to Walmart. Some of you get it at Meijer. Some of you get a Whole Foods place or wherever. I've recently discovered that we have three different people here at the church that raise and sell beef.

They raise and sell beef cattle. And Lynn and I just picked up a quart of a cow recently and our freezer is full. As a matter of fact, that was just within the last week or two. And some of us are coming back into the knowledge a little bit more of where our food comes from.

Some of us are starting to homestead a little. And some of you are doing chickens and turkeys and goats and all kinds of things. And how many of you know what I'm talking about? Some of you? No? There's a little bit more movement towards that.

More people are going in together and buying a quarter of a cow or whatever and are actually starting to get a little bit more connected with their food supply. And that can be a good thing. I'm not preaching on that, but I think there's, you know, we're doing that.

But honestly, we are really still far removed compared to Roman times of the knowledge of where our food comes from. You know what I'm talking about? We are disconnected a lot. I've never seen a Dorito tree.

Sure, they're grown somewhere and they are delicious, but they are barely food, right? I mean, is that really food? If you were to show that to somebody from like, say the 1700s, they'd be like, do you eat it?

What do you do with this? And then they would eat it and then they'd be addicted right away. So there's been, here's what's interesting. I do a little research and I try to figure out what to include for you and what not.

But I've always studied a lot more than what I stand up here and share. But this was one nugget that I kind of thought was helpful because there were a lot of people for centuries, this passage was taught in pulpits and in churches and up front and in scholarly debates.

It went back and forth that there was no place to buy meat in Corinth other than the temple. You had to go to a pagan temple to buy meat. And it's actually only been within the last 50 years that we've uncovered definitive, clear information that there was a public meat market in Corinth.