1 Corinthians 11 – [Part 4] – “BE Who You Are”

Filed In:

All Ate the Same Spiritual Food (Paedocommunion),

All Were Baptized in the Cloud and in the Sea (Paedobaptism)

“Judging ourselves rightly has been the common fear of many a Christian at the Lord’s table – as if it were about being good enough to get to the table.”

THE CALL TO “BE WHO YOU ARE”

Paul frequently tells his hearers to “be who you are.”

In the following the underlined are the identity (“who you are“), and the bold are the call (“be who you are“):

Therefore, [since] you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him…  (Col 2.6)

¹What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? ²By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? ³Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?…So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.  (Rom 6.1-3, 11)

Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, [since] you really are unleavened. (1 Cor 5.7)

WHO WE ARE, WHO WE MUST BE

In 1 Corinthians, Paul commands believers this way to live out of their identity; and he has two major identity themes I want to highlight here, and they converge in our pericope (1 Cor 10-12).

1. – The body is one. [Jews and Gentiles are united in a single family, rich and poor together, not factionalized]
2. – The body is holy.

As you skim the following, keep in mind that the opposites show up too- UNITY: disunity/fragmentation/strife/jealousy/division; HOLINESS: immorality, disobedience, unrighteousness.

Let’s examine a few passages before we see their convergence in chapter 11.

• UNITY:   ¹⁰I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. ¹¹For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. ¹²What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.” ¹³ Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? (1 Cor 1.10-13)
• UNITY: ³for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? ⁴For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?… ⁷So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. ⁸He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. ⁹For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building. (1 Cor 3.3-9)
• HOLINESS: ¹⁶Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? ¹⁷If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple. (1 Cor 3.16-17)
• HOLINESS: It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife. ²And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. (1 Cor 5.1-2)
• HOLINESS: Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? ⁷Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. ⁸Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.  (1 Cor 5.6-8)
• UNITY and HOLINESS: Let him who has done this be removed from among you….But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. ¹²For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? ¹³God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”  (1 Cor 5.6,11-13)
• UNITY: “When one of you has a grievance against another,…brother goes to law against brother,” (1 Cor 6.1,6)
• HOLINESS: Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, ¹⁰nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. ¹¹And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Cor 6.9-11)
  
• HOLINESS:  “For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.” (1 Cor 7.14)

So, Paul, by the Spirit, tells the church to “BE who you ARE.  You are HOLY, BE HOLY.  You are A UNITY, BE A UNIFIED.”

Major images used for the unity of the church in 1 Cor are field or vineyard, temple, and body, especially BODY.

There are two ways of hurting your fellow body member:

1. impurity – engaging in unholiness which spreads like gangrene in the body.  Unholiness is contagious, a little leaven leavens the whole lump.  If a member will not repent he is to be cut out so that the body does not die, that the temple is not defiled.
2. division – actually sinning AGAINST your brothers.  If you divide the body, the irony is you are actually engaging in unholiness.

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TEMPLE

We find that 1 Cor 3.16-17 (temple destruction) is very similar to 1 Cor 11.16-32 (body sickness).  In both cases, hurting the church is judged by God’s destruction:

“¹⁶ Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? ¹⁷If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.”  (1 Cor 3.16-17)

“When you come together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. ²¹For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. ²²What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not.   …²⁷Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. ²⁸ Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. ²⁹For anyone who eats and drinks without [recognizing] the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. ³⁰That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. ³¹ But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. ³²But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.” (1 Cor 11.20-22, 27-32)

JUDGING OURSELVES RIGHTLY

You are a body, so BE UNITED.  If you look down on, despise, treat poorly any other of your church body members, God will destroy your own body.  If you eat a meal of unity in a way that divides, then you are eating and drinking judgment upon yourself.  If you destroy God’s temple, God will destroy you, for God’s temple is holy, and that is what you are.

Judging ourselves rightly has been the common fear of many a Christian at the Lord’s table.  As if it were about being good enough to get to the table.  Paul is indeed addressing each individual with his responisbility to check himself, but the checking is for division, check to see if YOU are shaming the poor (11.22), check to see if you are drinking Dionysian drunken worship rather than sharing wine with your Christian brother (vv.20-21).  Paul is talking about making worship unholy by division.

This is an external, public hypocrisy sin.  Paul is not asking us to worry about being able to work out salvation in our minds before the cup gets to our seat.  This is also a big person sin.  This is not a sin of children.

We must admit that Jesus died for “even infants” (Luke 18.15-17), and we must admit that the symbol of broken bread and pour wine are a reminder of forgiveness and the removal of sin.  We are not to worry that “even infants” might commune with the God who saved them at the cross.  We are not to worry that “even infants” are not clean enough from the sin which was taken away by the breaking of his body and the pouring out of his blood.

We ARE to worry about taking the whole loaf of his body and feeding it to only part of his body.  We ARE to worry about getting drunk on the wine by hogging it while we leave some of God’s Vineyard hungry.  We ARE to worry about sharing the body in a way that we refuse to share the body with all the body.

Peter committed this sin at Antioch, refusing to be united with the Gentiles at the table (Gal 2.11-14) and was “not acting in line with the truth of the gospel”:

When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. ¹²Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. ¹³The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.

Rather:

¹⁷Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. (1 Cor 10.17)

¹³For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body— Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. (1 Cor 12.13)

THE BAPTIZED ARE THE BODY, THE BODY IS THE COMMUNION, THE BODY COMMUNES.

—–

In post [5] I will deal with the 4 verbs people use to say that 1 Cor 11 requires age of children.

1 Corinthians 11 – [Part 3] – “Who You Are”

Filed In:

All Ate the Same Spiritual Food (Paedocommunion),

All Were Baptized in the Cloud and in the Sea (Paedobaptism)

BOTH SACRAMENTS DECLARE WHO WE ARE

It’s the middle of the night and I’m holding a seven-month-old.  In this middle of the night she has been cleaned and fed.  These are two things we do with her and for her often.  We do them because we love her and because we are her parents.  God does these things for his children too.  We should think of baptism and communion as cleaning and feeding.  We should think of them as naming and continuously claiming.  Baptism calls us “his” initially, and communion renews covenant; it re-proclaims our family relationship weekly.  But if my children belong to Christ, if they have been bathed by him, marked out by him and are members in his family, they should dine at his meal as well.  This was a norm in the Old Testament too! =)

In this post, I want to show that there is a unity to the body (which should be obvious to us), and that the body is marked out by both baptism and communion: the baptized are the body, and the body eats the meal.

THE DOCTRINE OF COVENANT COMMUNION

As a side note, before I continue, I want to point out that no one in the New Testament has to argue explicitly FOR infant communion, because

1] it had always existed from of old (Ex 10.9-10, 12.47, 16.16, 17.3-6), and

2] the doctrine is not properly “INFANT communion”; rather,  the doctrine is “corporate identity and unity displayed in communion” or “Covenant Communion.”  That is, the whole body communes, and children are in the body (Rom 6.3, Gal 3.27, 1 Cor 12.13, Eph 4.1-6).  Since the contention is around children, we end up talking about infant communion.

I say this because we are accidentally used to thinking that BAPTISM is the only sacramental marker of the MEMBERS of the body.  But the Biblical pattern, both in Old and New Covenants, both sacraments identify the members.

THE SACRAMENTS BELONG TO THE BODY

We have covenantal sacrements.  We initiate covenant and we renew covenant.  We kiss at a wedding, and we continue to kiss as married people – this is not only symbolic of our marriage, in a sense, it IS our marriage – at least in the celebratory part.  I am married to the only one I kiss, and I kiss the one to whom I am married.

I bathe and feed my children.  I don’t bathe and shelter other people’s children (don’t try to make an analogy walk on all fours).  The point is that my children became my children, and I communicate my family love and grace to them constantly in renewal of that first fact.  I treat my family as family, and only my family do I treat as my family.

What we are saying is – sacraments are the expression of belonging to the Lord.  What I am not taking the time here to do is to prove that children are part of the covenant.  THAT has to be a given here (Ex 17, Ac 2.38-39, 1 Cor 7.14).   But I want to repeat, sacraments are about belonging – they shout identity.

A FAMILY NAMED TRINITY

We also share a name in a family – Look at the community of God’s family the same way:

²³“Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the people of Israel: you shall say to them,

²⁴YHWH bless you and keep you; ²⁵YHWH make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; ²⁶YHWH lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”

²⁷ So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them.”

Num 6.23-27

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Matt 28.19-20 (Yes, I changed the word “in” into “into,” but rightly so.)

THE SACRAMENTS INDICATE NAMING INTO A FAMILY

Take a gander at Acts 2.38, 8.12, 10.48, 1 Cor 1.13, 6.11 to see how often baptism and naming go together.

In family, people are marked out by name, by wedding, by adoption, by birth.  And FAMILY is a central aspect of that naming.  Another Passage that needs a full discussion of its own for this exact family topic is Ephesians 3.6-4.7.  In it Paul argues that the Gentiles are in the same family with the Jews, and together they derive unity by being in a family with a single father, this is known in our common baptism.  To mix metaphors, we are a single body, with a single Ghost.

ONE BODY, ONE SPIRIT, ONE BATH, and ONE MEAL

Here’s where we get back to 1 Cor 10-12.  This example of body unity is given over and over in 1 Corinthians.  This comes out in both negative and positive passages, but the fact of unity is essential regardless of which kind of tone Paul has.  We must look at 1 Cor 10.1-6 (reproof), and 12.13 (encouragement).

In Chapter 10, Paul says, – the OT saints were ONE BODY shown by SACRAMENTS but needed to examine themselves.  In chapter 11, we must examine ourselves, but in chapter 12, we are ONE BODY shown by SACRAMENTS.  It actually shows up in more than just these two sets of references.  But here they are:

¹For I want you to know, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, ²and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, ³and all ate the same spiritual food, ⁴and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ. ⁵Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness. ⁶Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did.  (1 Cor 10.1-6)

¹²For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³For we were in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body— Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. ¹⁴For the body does not consist of one member but of many.  (1 Cor 12.12-14)

The Situation is the SAME today, and it includes our children, as it did in the past.

Easter – Video: Resurrected Children and Passover

My new video about Paedocommunion-

Ephesians 4: Infants and the Lord

I will probably post a longer version of this at http://paedocommunion.wordpress.com later.

When you read the following, ask, “Who is baptized?” Who is a member of the one Body which is growing into the one head?  The Baptized are contiguous with the Body, contiguous with the children of the Father who is God.

¹I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, ²with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, ³eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. ⁴There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— ⁵ one Lord, one faith, one baptism, ⁶ one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. [Ephesians 4.1-5]

What are the implications?  Infant salvation at least is implied.

!!! Be sure: I don’t mean baptism saves you, but we baptize infants because God promised to be God to us and to our children after us, commanding that they receive the sign of inclusion [Gen 17.7-11 READ], which is the seal of the righteousness that comes previously by faith [Rom 4.11 READ].

We are commanded to presume them faithful, and matching this, we are commanded to include them sacramentally.

If you are interested in the doctrine of Paedofaith (a new word for an old idea), I have made a video about it here: http://www.WinepressFilms.com .