The 1988 Olympic Games were held in Seoul. On the 24th of September came the final of the 100 meters. The world record at that moment belonged to Ben Johnson and stood at 9.83 seconds. On the track stood the eight fastest men on the planet, and among them the two great rivals of the decade: the American Carl Lewis and the Canadian Ben Johnson.
The starting gun fired, and Johnson set a new world record, running an incredible 9.79 seconds. He was so sure of himself that a few meters before the finish he raised his hand and looked back at Lewis. Then came the gold medal, the anthem, the ovation from the stands. The newspapers wrote about him, and Canada celebrated a national hero.
But three days later he is woken in the middle of the night in the Olympic village. The doping sample taken right after the race showed stanozolol, an anabolic steroid. The gold is taken away, the record annulled, and Johnson is put on the first flight home. The fastest man on the planet became, in one night, the most famous cheat on the planet. Later, at a government inquiry in Canada, his coach admitted that steroids had been part of the training program since 1981, which means that seven years of victories, records, and ovations rested on them.
Notice one detail: the doping test changed nothing about Johnson. It did not make him faster, or a loser, or a cheat; it simply helped everyone see who he had been all along. The stands, the commentators, and all of Canada saw a champion, and the test showed what was inside.
Context
We are working through Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, and for the third message in a row Paul is talking about the same thing, freedom and rights. It all began with meat offered to idols. In chapter eight he warned the strong:
But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. (1 Cor. 8:9)
We said then that your freedom can wound a brother and even destroy him: “and so by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed” (8:11). And in chapter nine Paul demonstrated this principle from his own life: he had an ironclad right to be supported by the church, and he never used it, so that nothing would stand between people and the gospel. We put the main idea like this: freedom is not a treasure to be guarded; freedom is something you spend on people.
The text we are reading now is very often pulled out of its context. It gets used to show that we must labor and, as it were, earn our salvation. But it is a continuation of the same subject and the same argument: yes, Christians are free, but freedom must be handled wisely, and most often that means voluntarily limiting your own freedom.
Remember how it all started? With meat. And that whole conversation about meat committed the strong Corinthian to nothing. Up until our passage he could listen to this letter completely at ease. The problems belong to the weak man: he is the one with the tender conscience, he is the one who stumbles over meat. And the strong man listened and thought: what could possibly threaten me? I know the gospel, an idol is nothing in the world, and meat neither brings me closer to God nor takes me further away. I am baptized. I am at the Lord’s table every week. The most that is being asked of me here is to go easy on a weak brother. Fine, we’ll condescend to go easy.
But it is precisely for the strong that Paul writes this passage. Up to now he has been telling them that their untamed freedom can destroy a brother. And now he says that this untamed freedom can also destroy you. And there is a way to check whether your faith is genuine or whether you are a fraud like Ben Johnson.
Paul speaks here of three tests, and we will divide the passage into three parts: the tests in the stadium, the tests Israel failed in the wilderness, and the tests that come in our own lives. Stadium, wilderness and life.
1. The stadium (9:24 – 10:5)
The race
The picture Paul uses was very familiar to the Corinthians. Every two years, some fifteen kilometers from the city, the Isthmian Games were held, which alongside the Olympic Games were among the great athletic festivals of Greece. The Corinthians went to those games, and some may even have competed. Paul lived in Corinth for a year and a half and most likely saw the games in person.
Ten runners stand on the track; all ten start and all ten run, and one receives the wreath.
It matters that we take the right detail from this illustration. Paul is not saying that only one Christian out of all of them will be saved. There are many crowns for the saved; the crown of salvation is not a single prize:
Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing. (2 Tim. 4:8)
Paul is drawing our attention to something else. The illustration of the runners highlights one important detail: there is a difference between “started” and “obtained.” So “run that you may obtain it” means run as a contender for the wreath, not as a participant who will be handed a T-shirt at the end for taking part. And it is obvious to everybody that if you want to win, you have to limit your freedom to do it.
Self-control
That is exactly what Paul says:
Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. (1 Cor. 9:25)
That is, every athlete competing for the victory restricts himself in everything. Before the great games, athletes swore an oath that they had trained for ten months according to all the rules. The philosopher Epictetus, who lived a generation after Paul, describes that preparation like this: “Do you want to win at the games? Then submit to the regimen, eat on schedule, keep away from sweets, train at the appointed hour, in heat and in cold, drink no cold water, drink no wine whenever you feel like it.” For ten months a man did not belong to himself.
And for the sake of what?
They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. (1 Cor. 9:25)
The wreath at the Isthmian Games was woven from pine or from dried celery. In itself it was worth nothing, and it crumbled within a week. The athlete’s entire winnings consisted in the right to say: I was first. For the sake of that right, a grown man stopped belonging to himself for a year. A year on a schedule, a year without feasts, a year under a coach’s command for a bunch of wilting greenery and the right to talk about it.
Paul is of course being ironic here. For a wreath that crumbles within a week a whole life is given without remainder, and for a wreath that will never crumble, how much? How often that proportion is inverted in us: everything to what is perishable, and to what is imperishable, whatever is left over. If people are ready for that kind of discipline for the sake of celery, how should those run who are awaited by an imperishable crown?
Disqualified
Next Paul shows how he himself runs:
So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control… (1 Cor. 9:26–27)
“Discipline” is a boxing word in Greek, literally “to strike under the eye.” “Keep it under control” has the same root as verse nineteen: “I have made myself a servant to all.” It is not the body that decides where Paul runs, but Paul who decides where the body runs.
And what is it all for? The end of verse twenty-seven:
…lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. (1 Cor. 9:27)
That last word matters enormously. In Greek it is ἀδόκιμος, adokimos. It doesn’t mean “too weak,” and it isn’t about strength or ability. It is a word from the world of testing and assaying. There were no doping tests in Paul’s day, but the word carried exactly the same meaning: it was the word for a coin that had been examined and rejected. Adokimos is a counterfeit, metal that failed the assay, and in sport it is the word for a man disqualified.
A runner is not pulled off the track because his legs are weak. He is pulled off when the test has shown what was inside. Ben Johnson ran faster than anyone on the planet and received nothing.
And Paul admits this outcome as a possibility for himself. An apostle, a man who had seen the risen Christ, the founder of churches across half the empire says: “after preaching to others, I myself might be disqualified.” It turns out you can spend your whole life preaching to others and be rejected yourself.
Does this mean Paul doubted his salvation and was trying to earn it with running and bruises? No, and we will see the answer to that at the end of the passage. But right now Paul is pointing us to a real danger for strong believers: a good start does not yet mean a finish.
Those who did not finish
This was not a theoretical fear. Paul had seen such people with his own eyes, right beside him, on his own team. In his letter to Philemon he passes on greetings from his coworkers:
…Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my fellow workers. (Philem. 24)
Demas was a man from Paul’s inner circle, a partner in his labor. And a few years later, in the apostle’s last letter, we read:
For Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica. (2 Tim. 4:10)
When you take that in, it brings tears. Here, on the pages of the Bible, Demas is running with everyone on the same team and remains a faithful coworker, and here he is already disqualified. Demas didn’t “get frightened by persecution,” didn’t “get tired,” didn’t “grow weak”; he fell “in love with this present world.” In the same letters Paul recalls Hymenaeus and Alexander, who “made shipwreck of their faith” (1 Tim. 1:19–20).
And such stories did not stay in the first century. In the 1940s two young preachers were making waves across America. They served together in the Youth for Christ movement, filling halls and stadiums together. One was named Billy Graham and the other Charles Templeton, and many at the time considered Templeton the more gifted of the two. Half a century later Templeton published a book called Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith. A man who had preached the gospel to stadiums died calling himself an atheist.
Paul’s warning is not a scare story but reality. You can look very impressive at the starting line and even run ahead of everyone for a while, and still not make it to the finish.
Five times “all”
Paul’s second illustration gives an even stronger example of the difference between start and finish. In the original, chapter ten begins with the word “for,” so these are two examples of the same thing, arranged in ascending order.
[For] I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ. (1 Cor. 10:1–4)
Five times in a row we hear “all,” and at the start there really were all of them.
Notice that Paul describes Israel in the exodus in church language. “Baptized into Moses” means they had their own baptism: the cloud above, the sea on either side. “Ate spiritual food” is the manna from heaven, and “drank spiritual drink” is the water from the rock. This is an allusion to the Lord’s Supper: they had their own table, set by God himself. And “the Rock was Christ” means that Christ went with them through the wilderness.
Why does Paul put it this way? Because these are exactly the arguments a Corinthian believer used to shore up his own confidence. They said: “I am baptized, I am at the Lord’s table, I know Christ.” Paul answers that that generation had all the same things. You are baptized? So were they, all of them. You are at the table? So were they, every day, forty years in a row. You know Christ? He walked with them. No generation in history has ever had so many privileges: they saw the plagues of Egypt, the sea parted before their eyes, they ate bread from heaven.
One “nevertheless”
Five times “all,” and then one “nevertheless.”
Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness. (1 Cor. 10:5)
“With most of them” is putting it very mildly, because the numbers are staggering: about six hundred thousand men came out of Egypt, that is, roughly two million people, and two entered the promised land, Caleb and Joshua. Two out of six hundred thousand: at the start there were all of them, and at the finish two were left. The same thought as the stadium: a good start does not guarantee a finish.
Why?
How did it come to that? In verse five there is a word that ties Israel’s history to everything Paul has been saying. “With most of them God was not pleased” is, in Greek, literally “God did not approve,” and that word shares its root with “disqualified” in verse twenty-seven.
The wilderness generation had every privilege and an excellent start. But God was not looking at privileges, God was looking at the heart. God ran four doping tests, and all four came back positive. The forty years in the wilderness were not merely the road from Egypt to the promised land, they were a test. What those tests looked like, Paul shows next, in four short stories.
2. The wilderness (10:6–10)
The key to the wilderness
From Egypt to the promised land is a journey of a few weeks, and Israel walked for forty years. Why?
On the surface the answer is this: it was the punishment for the forty days of scouting, after which the people took fright and revolted. But at the end of the road Moses explained to the people that the reason went much deeper:
And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. (Deut. 8:2)
“Testing you.” “To know what was in your heart.” The wilderness, in other words, was a doping test, and God arranged these tests deliberately. Even the manna was a test, and God announced it in advance:
Behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you… that I may test them, whether they will walk in my law or not. (Ex. 16:4)
Their daily food was a daily examination.
Why did God need these tests? He didn’t. He knew this people, each one personally, inside and out, and their behavior could offer God no new information. The test was needed by the one being tested, so that the condition of his own heart would become visible to him.
And Paul selects four stories out of those forty years, four different tests: the test of silence, the test of pleasure, the test of weariness, and the test of control.
The test of silence
The first test is the golden calf.
Do not be idolaters as some of them were; as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.” (1 Cor. 10:7)
How did that story begin?
When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain… (Ex. 32:1)
Moses went up the mountain and vanished. A day, a week, a month, forty days with no Moses and no word from God. He had not said how long he would be gone, and everyone knows that without food and water you don’t survive forty days in a hot climate.
But on the other hand, this people had just lived through the impossible. They had seen ten plagues, they had seen the sea part, and still they could not endure forty days of silence. They cast themselves a god they could see, one they could touch and carry in front of them.
The test of silence asks a question: what do we do when God is silent and does not answer? What do we do when God delays? What do we do when a prayer has gone unanswered for months? Do we take it all into our own hands and find a solution? Israel made a calf, a god that was comprehensible and close at hand, one you could keep in a box.
The test of pleasure
The second test looked entirely different.
We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day. (1 Cor. 10:8)
This is the story from Numbers 25. The forty years are almost over, the wars are won, the Jordan is within reach. The people are camped at Shittim, and the women of Moab invite the Israelites to their festivals, to the tables of their gods and into their tents. No disaster and no famine, quite the opposite. This was a test of abundance, safety, comfort, and pleasure, and the people who had survived wars and serpents were struck down at the feasts.
In trouble we cry out to God, and in prosperity we forget what we needed him for.
The test of weariness
The third test is weariness.
We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents. (1 Cor. 10:9)
What happened there? An ordinary Monday.
And the people became impatient on the way. And the people spoke against God and against Moses… “we loathe this worthless food.” (Num. 21:4–5)
They were taken on the long detour around Edom. Not a war, not a disaster, not a catastrophe, just long, hot, and monotonous. And the bread from heaven, the miracle they had once given thanks for, became “worthless food.”
This is the test of weariness, the grey sameness of ordinary days, when God’s astonishing, undeserved, daily provision goes bland and uninteresting. And Paul specifies that with their grumbling they were insulting Christ himself: the Rock went with them and fed them, and they were sick of what he fed them with.
The test of control
And the fourth test is the test of control.
…nor grumble, as some of them did and were destroyed by the Destroyer. (1 Cor. 10:10)
Numbers 14: the spies came back from the promised land. And the land turned out to be exactly as God had promised: they saw the milk and the honey and a cluster of grapes so large it took two men on a pole to carry it. There was only one problem: the land was already occupied, strong nations lived there, and the cities were fortified.
They had pictured the resettlement differently: arrive, spread out, settle down. God’s plans did not match their plans, and the people wept: “Why is the LORD bringing us into this land, to fall by the sword?” (Num. 14:3). And then:
And they said to one another, “Let us choose a leader and go back to Egypt.” (Num. 14:4)
Let us choose a leader, that is, let’s change the management, rewrite the route, take back the controls.
This is the test of control: they wanted God’s land, but God’s way of getting there did not suit them. We are willing to walk with God as long as he leads along our plan, and when his plan requires something our plan did not include, we look for a way to grab the wheel.
One answer
Four tests, and all of them different. God tested them with silence and with pleasure, with weariness and with disappointed expectations. And Israel’s heart gave the same answer every time: “Make us gods who shall go before us,” as in Egypt, where the gods were visible. “Let us go back to Egypt.”
Fifteen hundred years later Stephen would sum up that generation in a single phrase:
…they thrust him aside, and in their hearts they turned to Egypt. (Acts 7:39)
For forty years their feet walked forward, toward the promised land, and for all forty years their hearts were walking back to Egypt.
And it was not the trials that made them this way. The tests showed what had been in their hearts the whole time, just as the doping test did nothing to Johnson but only showed what was inside. This is why at the start there were all of them and at the finish there were two. Four failed tests answer every question about why that people was disqualified.
Examples for us
In this illustration Paul says the same thing twice, at the beginning and at the end:
Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did. (1 Cor. 10:6)
Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. (1 Cor. 10:11)
All of it is an example for us, written for our instruction. And the God who tested them has not changed, and he runs the same kind of tests in our lives too. That is what Paul turns to next, our wilderness and our tests.
3. Life (10:11–13)
Our wilderness
All of this is written down “for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.” We are living in the same place in the story as Israel was then. Our exodus is behind us, because Christ has brought us out of slavery. Our land is still ahead, because we are heading for heaven. And right now we are on the road through the wilderness, a road that may well be longer than forty years, and on that road God does what he did then: he tests what is in our hearts.
The test of silence today may look like a prayer that has gone unanswered for three years, or an illness the whole church prayed over that does not go away. God is silent, and something inside starts looking for “a god you can see,” a comfort that will work immediately.
The test of pleasure looks different: business is booming, the salary went up, everything has finally come together. This is a test that doesn’t look like a test, which is why it is failed more often than the others. In trouble we cry out to God; in prosperity he becomes optional.
The test of weariness comes when faith has grown stale, like manna. The service is familiar down to the last song, the Scriptures have been read and reread, prayer runs on habit in the same words that never change, and God is no longer as beloved and as astonishing as he was right after conversion.
The test of control comes when God’s plan has broken our plan: when we unexpectedly lose a job, when a friend betrays us, when we get a diagnosis and the illness was nowhere in our plans, when there is a move we neither wanted nor planned. We were willing to walk with God, but only as long as our plans lined up, and when God rerouted us, we didn’t like it.
These are the same four tests Israel faced. It’s only that when we look at Israel we are baffled and say, “how could they, when it was all so obvious?”, while in our own circumstances we sometimes cannot see the obvious at all.
Whoever thinks he stands
Paul brings all these examples and tests to the main point of the passage:
Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. (1 Cor. 10:12)
“Thinks” is yet another word from the same root as “disqualified” and as “was not pleased.” With that same root Paul said that God “did not approve” of those who were overthrown in the wilderness. He is setting self-approval against God’s approval: what matters is not our own assessment but God’s.
This warning was for the strong and confident Corinthians, for those who know their theology, are sure of their freedom, and think they are standing upright. It is a warning for Christians of many years’ standing and experience, for third- and fourth-generation Baptists.
And this warning contains a test that anyone can run on himself and answer honestly the question, “am I standing?” How? By looking at how we have handled and are handling our trials. We know our reactions to past tests very well. How I behaved when I was betrayed, only I and God know. What became of my prayer life when everything came together, only I and God know. Johnson knew about the stanozolol seven years before the world did, and we too know what is inside us, we just don’t show it to others.
So Paul gives the Corinthians not a sedative but a prescription. In his second letter he says it to them directly:
Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves… unless indeed you fail to meet the test! (2 Cor. 13:5)
And again “test” carries the same root of assaying, of checking for authenticity.
Small doses
What does disqualification look like in real life? Almost always it is a long road of deceit and self-deceit that is eventually exposed. Doping is taken in small doses. For Ben Johnson it did not begin at the Olympic final but seven years before Seoul, with a single injection “for recovery,” because “everyone does it.” And Demas did not wake up one morning an apostate: “in love with this present world” is not an event but a long process that ends in tragedy.
Jerry Bridges wrote a very good book about this with a telling title, Respectable Sins. We may loudly condemn the sins of the world and the sins of others, while quietly living at peace with our own: grumbling, irritability, pride, self-pity. Paul’s illustrations from the wilderness make up that same list of respectable sins: grumbling, dissatisfaction with the food, a craving for comfort. We may not even count them as sins, but thousands of Israelites fell in the wilderness because of exactly these and never reached the promised land, never finishing the race.
John Owen, the Puritan writer, put it almost four hundred years ago: “Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.” Saving faith is not a one-time decision made at some altar call. Saving faith is the direction of a life.
The test is for you
And here it should become clear why God sets tests at all. He does not need them: he knows you inside and out before you do or say anything. This test is for you, so that you can see and know whether you are in the faith.
The trials in your life are his mercy. They are training runs, not the final; they are an assay that shows what is inside, while there is still time to run to Christ. Better to fail a test now, correct course, and finish the race, than to look flawless right up until he says, “I never knew you.”
God is faithful
That is why the passage ends not with the word “take heed” but with a word about God:
No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. (1 Cor. 10:13)
There are three encouragements here.
First: the temptation is “common to man,” ordinary. Your test is not unique, thousands have faced it and are facing it, and many have come through.
Second: God “will not let you be tempted beyond your ability.” The test is measured out for you personally, and God knows your limit better than you do.
Third: he “will also provide the way of escape,” literally an exit. God is not an examiner who dreams of failing you. God is a coach preparing a runner for the finish, and a doctor helping you see the diagnosis and accept the treatment before it is too late. Moses ended his explanation of the wilderness with those very words: God tested you “that he might do you good in the end” (Deut. 8:16).
And this is the answer to the question we left open: did Paul doubt his salvation? No, Paul ran relying not on his own bruises but on a faithful God. And when we come through a test, our tested faith becomes his glory.
Conclusion
At the start and at the finish
One thought has come up three times today. In the stadium everyone starts, but one receives the wreath. In the wilderness everyone came out, and only two went in. And in life you can run ahead of everyone for years and end up out of the race.
A good start still does not guarantee a finish, and it is possible to be disqualified. Baptism, the Lord’s table and correct theology all belonged to the generation that was buried in the wilderness. God gave them a test, and they did not pass it. And what God tested was not what they knew, God tested their hearts.
God still tests hearts today, and he does it out of love for us. His tests show us ourselves, whether our faith is genuine or whether we are on the edge of disqualification.
The One who finished
But after such terrible statistics, two out of six hundred thousand, a question remains: who can actually finish?
We know the answer from the gospel. Only One truly finished. Christ is the only one who passed every test of the wilderness. Where Israel fell for forty years, he stood firm for forty days, hungry, in the desert, answering the tempter with words from that very book of Deuteronomy. He passed the test of silence when he prayed in Gethsemane and the cup was not taken away. He passed the test of control: “nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” And he ran all the way to the end.
So our hope is not in the quality of our running but in the One we are running after.
Looking to Jesus
The author of Hebrews gathered everything we have talked about today into a single sentence. It is all here: the stadium, the runners, the weight thrown off, the finish. And our hope is not in our own abilities but in Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Heb. 12:1–2)