First Letter to the Corinthians 10

¹ I want to remind you, brothers, how our fathers were all guided by a cloud above them and how they all passed through the sea.

² They were all baptised into Moses in this cloud and in this sea;

³ all ate the same spiritual food

⁴ and all drank the same spiritual drink, since they all drank from the spiritual rock that followed them as they went, and that rock was Christ.

⁵ In spite of this, most of them failed to please God and their corpses littered the desert.

⁶ These things all happened as warnings[*a] for us, not to have the wicked lusts for forbidden things that they had.

⁷ Do not become idolaters as some of them did, for scripture says: After sitting down to eat and drink, the people got up to amuse themselves.[*b]

⁸ We must never fall into sexual immorality: some of them did, and twenty-three thousand met their downfall in one day.

⁹ We are not to put the Lord to the test: some of them did, and they were killed by snakes.

¹⁰ You must never complain: some of them did, and they were killed by the Destroyer.

¹¹ All this happened to them as a warning, and it was written down to be a lesson for us who are living at the end of the age.

¹² The man who thinks he is safe must be careful that he does not fall.

¹³ The trials that you have had to bear are no more than people normally have. You can trust God not to let you be tried beyond your strength, and with any trial he will give you a way out of it and the strength to bear it.

¹⁴ This is the reason, my dear brothers, why you must keep clear of idolatry.

¹⁵ I say to you as sensible people: judge for yourselves what I am saying.

¹⁶ The blessing-cup that we bless is a communion with the blood of Christ, and the bread that we break is a communion with the body of Christ.

¹⁷ The fact that there is only one loaf means that, though there are many of us, we form a single body because we all have a share in this one loaf.

¹⁸ Look at the other Israel, the race, where those who eat the sacrifices are in communion with the altar.

¹⁹ Does this mean that the food sacrificed to idols has a real value, or that the idol itself is real?

²⁰ Not at all. It simply means that the sacrifices that they offer they sacrifice to demons who are not God.[*c] I have no desire to see you in communion with demons.

²¹ You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot take your share at the table of the Lord and at the table of demons.

²² Do we want to make the Lord angry; are we stronger than he is?

²³ ‘For me there are no forbidden things’, but not everything does good. True, there are no forbidden things, but it is not everything that helps the building to grow.

²⁴ Nobody should be looking for his own advantage, but everybody for the other man’s.

²⁵ Do not hesitate to eat anything that is sold in butchers’ shops: there is no need to raise questions of conscience;

²⁶ for the earth and everything that is in it belong to the Lord.[*d]

²⁷ If an unbeliever invites you to his house, go if you want to, and eat whatever is put in front of you, without asking questions just to satisfy conscience.

²⁸ But if someone says to you, ‘This food was offered in sacrifice’, then, out of consideration for the man that told you, you should not eat it, for the sake of his scruples;

²⁹ his scruples, you see, not your own. Why should my freedom depend on somebody else’s conscience?

³⁰ If I take my share with thankfulness, why should I be blamed for food for which I have thanked God?

³¹ Whatever you eat, whatever you drink, whatever you do at all, do it for the glory of God.

³² Never do anything offensive to anyone – to Jews or Greeks or to the Church of God;

³³ just as I try to be helpful to everyone at all times, not anxious for my own advantage but for the advantage of everybody else, so that they may be saved.