1 Corinthians 8:4-7 - Food offered to idols

8:4-6

Paul now turns directly to the issue at hand. It seems that there were two views. One was that idols are actually nothing at all, they were just lumps of metal, wood or stone. Therefore there was no problem with eating food offered to idols. The other view was that the food had been involved in a ceremony where a false god was worshipped and therefore should not be eaten. Paul agrees with the first argument. “An idol has no real existence” and “there is only one God”. But while there is actually only one God, throughout the world people worship all sorts of things, there are many “gods”. But these “gods” are false gods, not gods at all. There is only one God, the Father, and only one Lord, Jesus Christ. And all things were created by this one God, and all things exist only because of this one God. The terminology “One God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ” is putting the Father and the Son on a par with each other.

So Paul agrees with the intellectual content of the first view, but this is not the whole matter, and is not even the crux of the matter.

8:7

Idol worship was all pervasive in the society of the day, and many converts would have come from this background. So they would still associate idols with some form of reality, as having an existence of their own, and as having an influence on life. In turning to Christ they had turned away from all the idol worship, but if they ate food that had been involved in idol worship then this, for them, would be like having something to do with idol worship again. Of course, the sort of logic outlined in the previous section shows that this is not the case, but in the mind of the “weaker brother” it was still connected with idol worship. Our conscience matters, and our conscience is not always driven by pure logic.