Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Corinthians · About this commentary
One God, One Lord
1 Corinthians 8:4-8
4 Therefore concerning the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that no idol is anything in the world, and that there is no other God but one. · WEB
Paul grants the Corinthian argument in full — idols are nothing — and then points out that not everyone in the room holds it that way.
Therefore concerning the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that no idol is anything in the world, and that there is no other God but one 1 Corinthians 8:4.
The concession is complete. Their theology was right: an idol has no existence answering to it, and there is one God. Nothing in the chapter retreats from this, and it matters that the argument for restraint is built on top of a granted truth rather than by casting doubt on it.
Yet to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we live through him 1 Corinthians 8:6.
One of the most compact statements about God in Scripture, and it is deployed to settle a question about dinner. Its shape is the shape of Israel's confession — Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one Deuteronomy 6:4 — with the two titles distributed and Jesus placed inside the formula. All things are of the Father and through the Lord Jesus, and the same prepositions are used elsewhere of the Son's part in creation John 1:3 Colossians 1:16 Hebrews 1:2. A congregation arguing about meat is given a sentence that puts Christ on the creating side of the one God's work.
However, that knowledge isn't in all men. But some, with consciousness of an idol until now, eat as of a thing sacrificed to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled 1 Corinthians 8:7.
Here the argument turns from theology to people. The knowledge is correct and isn't in all men — some members had spent their whole lives in that temple system and could not eat the meat without the association coming with it. Their conscience is called weak, which is a description of capacity rather than an insult, and what happens is that it is defiled: not by the meat, which is nothing, but by acting against their own conviction. Scripture treats that as real damage wherever it appears Romans 14:23 Titus 1:15.
But food will not commend us to God. For neither, if we don't eat are we the worse, nor if we eat are we the better 1 Corinthians 8:8.
And the last concession removes the ground from under both parties at once. Eating gains nothing and abstaining gains nothing; the matter is religiously weightless in itself. That cuts against the scrupulous, who thought abstinence made them better, and against the confident, who were treating their eating as a demonstration of maturity. If the act is indifferent, then nothing whatever is at stake in insisting on it — which is exactly the point the next paragraph presses 1 Corinthians 8:9.
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