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Let us begin to read this morning in the prophecy of Malachi and chapter one. Prophecy of Malachi in chapter one um beginning in verse seven. You offer polluted bread upon mine altar, and you say, wherein have we polluted thee? In that you say the table of the Lord is contemptible. When you offer the blind for sacrifice, it is no evil. And when you offer the lame and sick, it is no evil. Present it now to thy governor. Will he be pleased with thee? Or will he accept thy person? Saith the Lord of hosts. Verse eleven. For from the rising of the sun, even unto the going down of the same, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place incense is offered unto my name and a pure offering. For my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of hosts, but you profane it. In that you say, the table of the Lord is polluted, and the fruit thereof, even his meat, is contemptible. And now to our First Corinthians, please, and chapter eight. First Corinthians chapter eight. m Now concerning things sacrificed to idols, we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffeth up, but love edifieth. If any man thinketh that he knoweth anything, he knoweth not yet as he ought to know. But if any man loveth God, the same is known of him. Concerning, therefore, the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that no idol is anything in the world, and that there is no God but one. For though there be they that are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as there are gods many and lords many, yet to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him. How be it, in all men there is not that knowledge, but some, being used until now to the idol, eat as of a thing sacrificed to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. But meat will not commend us to God, neither if we eat not are we the worse, nor if we eat are we the better. But take heed, lest there be any, lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumbling block to the weak. For if a man see thee which hath knowledge sitting at meat in an idol's temple, will not his conscience, if he is weak, be emboldened to eat things sacrificed to idols? For through thy knowledge, he that is weak perisheth. The brother for whose sake Christ died. Chapter ten and verse fourteen. Wherefore, my beloved, free from idolatry, I speak as to wise men, judge you what I say. The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion of the body of Christ? Seeing that we who are many are one bread, one body, for we all partake of the one bread. Behold Israel after the flesh, have not they which eat the sacrifices communion with the altar? What say I then, that a thing sacrificed to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God. And I would not that you should have communion with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of demons. Or do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he? God give us good understanding of his word. In our reading of the first epistle to the Corinthians during these weeks, we have noticed a recurring pattern. Paul will raise one of the practical problems that was vexing the church at Corinth. And then by way of solving the problem, he would bring his fellow believers back to the very fundamentals of the faith, to consider that death of Christ that is the basis of our salvation, and invite them to think through the implications and the principles of that great sacrifice of Christ, thus bringing to bear these great fundamental principles upon the particular problem, and thus solving the problem. We notice, therefore, that in the early chapters he directed their attention to the cross of the Lord Jesus. The fact that our Lord died not simply by a death, any death, but that he died becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. And there he showed us that the cross was no accident, but the deliberate policy and deliberate strategy of God. And then last week he moved on to another problem, the question of discipline in the church. And to bring us to the heart of the matter, he referred us once more to the death of the Lord Jesus. This time, not so much the cross of Christ, but rather the great Passover sacrifice that our blessed Lord offered on our account. Now this morning we come to another problem that vex the early church, the question whether you should or should not eat food sacrificed to idols. At first sight, of course, it seems a very remote problem to us, one that we might, uh, quite, uh, profitably dispense with thinking about. I'm not forgetting either when I so speak, that of course we are in danger of a spiritual idolatry, for Paul reminds us in the Epistle to the Colossians that, uh, wanting to have more than your share is a form of idolatry. Covetousness, he says, is idolatry. But this morning we are not thinking so much at that particular spiritual level of idolatry. We are thinking of a much more practical, down to earth problem that faced the early churches. They lived in cities where literal idolatry was rife. Hundreds of temples throughout the city where daily sacrifices were offi- offered. Much of the meat that resulted from those sacrifices would then be sold in the butcher's shops. And the question would arise, was it right to go and buy your Sunday joint from a butcher shop if you knew that this meat had originally been offered as a sacrifice to a pagan idol? And then, of course, uh, this question raised its head in social affairs. You would get an invitation, beautifully inscribed on a card, I suppose, in the modern fashion, from your next door neighbor or the boss at work to attend a dinner. But you might feel that you'd like to go to the dinner because you like dinners, or you might feel that whether you like dinners or not, it was a politic thing if the boss invited you and his wife to go to dinner, that you didn't show yourself churlish and not go, because, you know, there is such a thing as promotion, and to show yourself uncivil and uncivilized might go against your possibilities of promotion. But when the invitation came, it would announce that they were holding the dinner party not in their home, but in the temple of Lord Serapis, maybe. We have invitation cards that have survived from the ancient world, such invitation cards announcing that so and so and so and so were holding a dinner party in the temple of Lord Serapis, and you were invited to attend the dinner party would be in the temple there because there was a plentiful meat supply, and in one of the side rooms it would be a convenient and socially attractive thing to have your dinner party. Should you go? We'll say that's all very remote. We never get our invitations to the temple of Lords of Rapis here in Belfast, anyway. What's that got to do with us? Well, it is remote for us, I suppose. Not for some dear believers still. Well, our dear brother K. O. Lee, still with us, he would tell us, would he not, how this is a very serious practical problem for many young folks who get converted to the Lord while they are still minors in their parents' homes, and being of the age of fourteen or seventeen and finding the Savior, they live in heathen homes where the meal can be offered to the gods on the god shelf in the corner of the room. Should they eat it? And then, of course, it isn't quite so remote, is it, as it might seem. Here in Belfast, there are all sorts of Masonic lodges, where solemn businessmen gather, and others, and partake in rites of the worship of Osiris and On, and all those old pagan deities that Jezebel and Ahab worshipped. Plain, unadulterated idolatry in the crudest possible sense. And the business world and some of the ecclesiastical world here in Northern Ireland is riddled with it. And then it is not merely that Protestantism and mercifully Catholicism has always rejected that kind of idolatry, hasn't it? But then Catholicism, for its part, still engages in crude idolatry. Just the other year they held a great celebration in Zaragoza in Spain, where I was, in honor of the Virgin. There they proclaimed her co-redeemer alongside of Christ. And if we get our noses above our own little furrow here in Northern Ireland and look upon the world at large, there are great currents of thought afoot, are there not, for evangelization. It was put into my hand, I suppose, five years ago, a great magazine reporting the results of a congress on evangelism, where one good man was advocating that we ought really to return to methods used by earlier ancient evangelists, as he called them, which was that when you came to a heathen country, you shouldn't try and convert the people from their religion. That's stupid. It'll only put their backs off. Their religion is so entwined with their culture, and their culture with their religion. You must accept both and just sow your tiny seed of Christianity within their religion. So you shouldn't try to convert Hindus, but, uh, join the Hindus and add a little bit of, uh, Christianity into Hinduism. And that, of course, was a method used even here in Ireland centuries ago, when men came and, uh, preached the gospel and found all sorts of pagan festivals and took them over and baptized them and added a little tincture of Christianity to them, so that even respectable citizens in Belfast, having forgotten what it's all about, celebrate Halloween, which, of course, is nothing other than the worship of departed spirits. It is to be found in all sorts of parts of the world. The idea is that once a year you go to the cemetery and you escort back to your home the spirits of your departed relatives, and you give them a great feast, and then after a day or two you escort them back to the cemetery in the hope that, having had a good feast, they are now content themselves and not coming, come pestering you round your house for the rest of the year. That's why in some quarters they, uh, hollow out a turnip, isn't it, with eyes and mouth and put a candle inside and put it outside the window. It's supposed to be one of the departed spirits come back for the feast. And of course, it fitted in well with the notions of a purgatory and goodness knows what else, and praying for the dead, and thus it entered Christendom. Sheer idolatry. How shall we go about solving such a practical problem? Well, the first warning that Paul gives us is that we must beware of slick answers. It is so easy to take what in fact is true and make all our deductions from that and control our behavior from it without realizing that it is only one side of the truth, and therefore come to answers that are unhelpful, if not positive. The matter is more complicated than we think. For instance, Paul reminds us in chapter eight that, yes, you may have knowledge, that's a marvelous thing, but it isn't the only thing. More important than knowledge in this matter is love, love of the Lord, and love for one's fellow believer. Love for God that will always be sensitive, lest his unique glory as God should be infringed. Love for my fellow believer, lest I do him a damage. Knowledge must be subordinated then to love. For instance, says Paul, we all know, of course, of course we know, intelligent people, aren't we? We know that a mere idol is nothing. Bit of plaster of Paris or something, or a bit of wood. Absolutely nothing. And in one sense, you can make a mock of it. What does it matter if you've offered a bit of meat to a, to an image made rather torturally out of a bit of wood and painted with a little gold paint? Well, that's a sheer nothing. In that fashion, the great prophet Isaiah spoke, didn't he? When in the name of God he denounced Gentile idolatry and showed us the stupidity of idolatry. Here's a man, he says, he takes a beautiful tree. He says, now he's going to make a god, you'll see. Wow, so you better take a good tree if you're going to make a god, you don't want to make it of common or wood that would rot, would you? You, if you're going to make a god, you want a god that will last five minutes at any rate. So take a beautiful, strong, hard bit of wood, chisel it, form it, paint it, put it up on its, uh, pedestal. God. And the bits that are left over, what do you do with them? Well, you don't want them hanging around the place, do you? So they're due for putting on the fire that you can cook your breakfast on. So one bit of the God you worship and the other bit you cook your breakfast with. Nonsense is indeed. And we all know that, she idol is in one sense nothing. And in the true sense of the word, there is only one God. And because you know there's only one God and there's an idol is nothing, well, you may without any bad conscience, take a bit of meat that you found in Mr. O'Fleccity's shop, and whether it's been offered to a god or an idol or not, you can say, well, it hasn't affected the meat anyway, it's still a good beef steak, and I'm going to eat it, and that's okay. All right for you. But there are some people around, says Paul, who've been brought up in idolatry, and they are aware of the context, and to them an idol is a something. You may despise their weak conscience, you may wish they were more enlightened, but for the moment, this good believer here, having been recently converted out of paganism, for him an idol is a very sinister thing. And if he were to go and eat a piece of meat offered to an idol, his conscience would be defiled. He might do it to please you because he didn't want to beat the o- odd man out. And you'd invited him to dinner, and you'd cooked the old thing, and it smelt nice, and you put it before him, and now if he refuses to eat, there's going to be a very awkward scene, isn't there? So he eats it, but he's got a conscience about it. And he goes against his conscience. In his heart, he thinks he's dishonoring the Lord. In his heart, he thinks he's compromising the deity of the Lord Jesus. That's how he looks at it. And he hasn't got your knowledge. And you force him against his conscience to go and eat it, and he eats and sins against the Lord. Spoils the relationship between him and the Lord. And your brother, says Paul, using a very solemn term, perishes. The very one for whom Christ died. You say, why should I surrender my right? I, I know there's nothing in an idol, and and why should I surrender my right to a man like that because he hasn't learned very much? My good brother. See those emblems again? You surrender your right? What are you talking about? When for that man's sake, Christ surrendered heaven itself and gave his life and died for him. Oh come, for the first time now in this context, Paul brings us back to the death of Christ to consider it. Oh, what a price has Christ paid. Oh, how many of his rights he surrendered. And died for us. And as I remember it, let me ponder well my behavior, lest I spoil the work of Christ in a man for whom Christ died by my self-centeredness. And you see, it's not only that, is it? The matter is still more complicated. Wouldn't we like a world that wasn't complicated, where you could have simple pat answers to everything, and any problem you had, you could look up your handbook and get the rule. This is rule five hundred and sixty five, that's the one we apply here. Wouldn't life be simple? Life isn't like that. Life is complicated. Because there's another side to it. Some Gentiles would think that an old idol itself, the bit of wood or potchet or whatever it was, was, uh, important. But there were many enlightened Gentiles, and if you had mocked their idols, they would have looked at you in amazement, and you would have been the, uh, unintelligent one. They would have said, well, we don't worship the idol. Of course not. It's only an image to help us concentrate our thoughts. We're worshiping is the superhuman power behind the idol. In other words, what they would have called a god, or in Greek language, a demon. That is a supernatural power, a demon. That raises another complication, doesn't it? For if in their mind, it's not the idol that counts anything, but behind that idol there is this very real spirit power. Then for you to join them in eating meat that has been virtually offered to a spirit power, that would be serious indeed. So how now will Paul deal with the problem? He will bring us back to the death of Christ. This time, not the cross of Christ so much, nor the Passover so much, as this time the table of the Lord. You say, what do you mean exactly when you talk of our Lord's sacrifice as the table of the Lord? Well, of course, we all of us perceive at once we don't mean a literal table with four legs or even three, do we? We're not talking of that. Nor are we simply talking about the bread and the wine of the Lord's Supper, though they become a vivid illustration and symbol of what is involved in the Lord's table. The passage we read in Malachi will help us understand it. When the Old Testament speaks of the table of the Lord, it is speaking of the Lord's altar. Why then, you say, does it call it a table? Why can't it be content to call it an altar? Well, for this reason, that in many of the sacrifices of Israel that were brought to the altar, the animal itself wouldn't be completely burned. What would happen is this: the animal would be brought and offered to God. Part of the animal would be put on the altar and would go up as a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling savor, for God's benefit, so that, using the symbolic language, he would be delighted. He would be satisfied. It went up, so the technical term goes, as an offering of a sweet smell to God that God enjoyed it. And then part of the sacrifice would be given to the priests to eat, and they took it and cooked it and ate it. That's what they lived on. So these good priests felt they were in fellowship with God. The sacrifice that had been brought to God, now they shared it, and their daily food became sharing fellowship with God in the benefits of the sacrifice of that altar. And then the man who brought the sacrifice, he would be given back a large part of the animal, so big, in fact, because he had no deep freeze and was under obligation to get rid of it, eat it up within two or three days at the most, he was obliged to call his neighbors in, and they had a real feast, he and his neighbors together, happy in the street down, uh, the back row, and uh, there they were, all of the meeting, enjoying fellowship together as a result of a sacrifice that had been brought to the Lord's altar, and the altar thus, so to speak, in a figure of speech, became a veritable table loaded with provision for God and for men. The table of the Lord. And as we think of the death of Christ, we think of the table of the Lord because of the tremendous provision that the death of Christ has made. A table at which, first of all, God sits. All the tremendous joy and satisfaction and delight that God Almighty has received from the sacrifice of Christ. We think perpetually of our own benefit, what we have received. Pray, pause a moment and think what God has received. You say, how I tell you, but you see, when Christ gave himself as a sacrifice, my brother, you say to me, see what he provided for me, the forgiveness of my sins. I know he did, a marvelous. I'll tell you something more. Says Ephesians chapter five, he, Christ loved us and gave himself for us as an offering of a sweet smell to God. There was about the cross of Christ something that was infinitely sorrowful to God. He forsook his own son. There was about the sacrifice of Christ at Calvary something that delighted the heart of God. You take that miserable cr- wretch, wretches that meet in Apsey Street. Those twisted characters. Where would you find in the universe anybody willing to die for them? And God wanted to save them, but who would he get to die for? The fact that in this self-seeking world there was a someone sinless himself, to whom sin was abhorrent, yet found willing to die for that wretched crowd of folk in Naphtali Street. Why, when it happened, it delighted the heart of God. Heaven hadn't felt such a joy ever before. He gave himself a sacrifice, well pleasing to God, fragrant to God. All the joy that God gets out of that table of the Lord. We come on behind, and we get our benefit, the forgiveness of sins and justification and redemption, and one day the very redemption of our body and an endless heaven and fellowship with divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. How will you ever get to the end of enumerating the blessings that we receive from the table of the Lord? And not only the blessings themselves, so that we can take them and go and eat them at some quiet corner all of our own, but the fellowship with God, with Christ, with the Holy Spirit, with every believer the world round, of every tongue, people, tribe, and nation. Oh, what a tremendous fellowship that we have been allowed to enter through the table of the Lord. What food, luxurious, loads the board when at his table sits the Lord. The bread, how rich, the wine, how sweet, when Jesus deigns his guests to meet. And we must make a very nice hairbreadth distinction. We talk of the table of the Lord. There is an example before us. We have been enjoying the table of the Lord. But there is a slight distinction, isn't there, between the table of the Lord and the Lord's Supper that's very important. We've been here today at the Lord's Supper. My good sister, when tomorrow morning you're boiling the ke- waiting for the kettle to boil and dishing out the cornflakes, you won't be at the Lord's Supper. But you could be at the Lord's table. Washing the old dish, greasy, filthy old dish and pots and pans, horrible. Well, while you're doing it, sit at the table of the Lord, my sister, and say, oh, the blessedness of the man whose sins have been wiped out. Yeah? Sitting at the table of the Lord, enjoying the benefits that come to us through the death of Christ, even in the kitchen. Yes. However, there are some implications if you sit at the table of the Lord, and we can sum them up very briefly, because happily, those emblems on the table there will provide us with an illustration of what is involved for everybody that has fellowship at the Lord's table. And you can sum it up like this, there is no fellowship without involvement. The cup we drink, is it not a fellowship of the blood of Christ? The bread, is it not a fellowship of the body of Christ? What a sacred thing it is to be involved in blessings procured at such a cost. And it is a fellowship in them. How? Let's illustrate it. Well, says Paul, we being many are one. We being many are one bread, for we all partake of the one loaf. And that means simply this. You will see on those two plates on that table there the remains of the loaf that we used this morning. The loaf itself only a symbol of the body of Christ, but it will do us a practical, uh, picture of the underlying spirit. That loaf went round. This morning there's some over. Suppose there had been such a large gathering of the Lord's people here this morning that when the last believer had taken his part of that loaf, there was no loaf left, and the plates had gone back empty. And I say to you the next five minutes, where is that loaf? I would say the loaf hasn't gone, you know. There's the loaf, look. All these folks sitting around there, each of them with a bit of the loaf inside, they are now the one loaf, aren't they? In that same way, if we have partaken of the benefits of the death of Christ, we become one with every believer in whom Christ is. Isn't that so? That's why we sing sometimes at this Lord's Supper, isn't it? We would remember we are one with every saint that loves thy name. Christ in them, Christ in us, forming one loaf. Cannot have fellowship with Christ without being involved with all his people. Impossible to do it. But the corollary is true. You go to an idol's temple along with somebody who says, yes, the idol is nothing, but behind that idol are spiritual powers. And you eat of his sacrifice. You are having fellowship with those demons. No good my bother, businessman if you are, or I don't know, the other day we have a very gracious little lady who is, comes and helps us with, um, keeping the carpets clean and the house clean, who informed us that when she became a believer, she had to leave the Freemasons. I didn't know that such people were members, but apparently they can be. No good saying, ah, but they are such a nice society and they do a lot of good for widows and orphans, and I'm only in it for the business side and I don't approve of the religious side. God won't accept your argument. You cannot take the benefits without being involved in the source of them. That's solemn, isn't it? Says our, uh, Paul, you see, shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? It's a word that we don't often use, but still and still and still, the Lord our God is a jealous God. He will not give his glory to another. We mustn't make Mary co-redeemer with Christ, for Christ will get jealous. That's an infringement of his unique glory. We mustn't go and take benefits from the worship of Isis and Osiris and On and the sun god in your Masonic temple. Oh, Christ will get jealous. There is no partaking of the benefits without involvement with the person who supplied them. And that's a solemn matter. But our salvation is not just a little help over a difficult style. Our salvation, the very table of the Lord, calls us to sit down at the same table with the divine persons, unique in their glory. God will have no compromisers of his glory at his table. The Lord bless his word.