As we go into this book, it's helpful to do an introduction, so I'm going to spend a little time with the city of Corinth and some of its ancient history, because it was a thousand years before the Apostle Paul got there that it was founded. There's a map on the front of your notes in the opening page, and that shows us where it is. It's on actually the cover. I expanded it out so you could see it. Ancient Greece was not called Greece. It was three different designations. In the far north, it was Macedonia, which still exists today. People, even though Greek controls it, the people from that region still call themselves Macedonians. And it's similar to the British Empire, where the British Empire is composed of Great Britain, or England, shall we say, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. but they're still Great Britain. Well, this now is Greece. Macedonia was in the north. In the middle was Thessalonica with a city and a region. And then in the far south, there was a big peninsula there called, it's next to Athens, Peloponnese. And next to Athens was the city of Corinth. It was founded, again, 10th century B.C., it was 1,000 years before Paul got there, and it was a very, very rich city. It was situated in a spot where there was an enormous amount of commerce. The Mediterranean Sea had a lot of cities on it, next to it, close to it, and those cities, because of the shipping and the merchants, brought wealth to that area. Corinth was probably one of the largest economies in that Mediterranean area. They looked at this, as a very, very rich area. Paul the Apostle, he was able to make three missionary journeys, and his books to the Corinthians, one and two, were written in the second missionary journey there, or because of the second missionary journey. There was a guy there that lived, Periander, and he was a tyrant. And I've designated him as such in our notes here. He basically ruled and lived nearly from 625 to 585 BC. So he's only about 40 years there he was living. The second tyrant who succeeded his father was Cypselius. The first tyrant, he constructed a five-foot brick cut track for the ships that come in. In other words, he just made the port more acceptable. The Achaean League was a Hellenistic era confederation of the Greek city-states on the northern and central Peloponnesia. In the ancient world, there were cities that were also a country, Babylon, Assyria, and here, before it was Greek, Greece, if you will, and these three areas were unified later on, it was simply the northern part, the central part, and the southern part, Peloponnesia. and Corinth was across this little isthmus from Athens. Athens would become the city of love, the city of care. Sparta would become the city of war, the city of massive fighters, and strategically war-like people. Corinth was noted for commerce, wealth, And this Achaean League was an attempt, if you will, to make that whole Peloponnesia unified, not just city-states, but Peloponnesia. Well, they started calling it the Achaean League, and Rome, starting to take things over, said to those guys, we want you to dissolve this and be part of us. The Roman council at that time was a guy named Lucius Muminius and he leveled the city in 146 BC because they refused. They just refused. Very similar to what Alexander of Macedon did. He leveled some cities up in Lebanon because they refused to comply with him. They basically just, you know, shrug their shoulders. Who's he? Well, what he did was he comes in there in southern Lebanon and he wipes them out and he starts crucifying the men, raping the women, and killing the children in front of their eyes. You don't want to do what I'm telling you to do? You don't realize how powerful I am? Well, that's what happened here, the same thing. So this guy, Lucius Momenius, he kills the men, sold the women and the children into slavery. Some of the wealthiest of the families, they had the means to escape. They went to the island of Delos. And they stayed there and their families and their progeny for 100 years. Julius Caesar, In 44 BC, he renamed it the Colonia Laos Julia Corinthias. And he brought a bunch of freed slaves from Greece, Syria, Italy, Egypt, and Judea. The new Corinth survived just like the ancient Corinth and it got extremely wealthy because we've got people there that had their freedom and hadn't had it for many years and these became what we would call like a self-made person. You know, he didn't adhere to somebody, he didn't You didn't look for some handouts. You didn't look for anything from someone else. They did it themselves. And they got these people there that became wealthy through their own work, and they began to think that they had it all, which makes it very difficult for somebody bringing the gospel to that kind of a mindset. I've done it all, I'm a self-made man. You know, you're bringing something to me that I need, I got everything I need. I got wealth, I got family, I got, you know, business, I'm all set. And at that time in the Roman Empire, there were many cults as they called them. And I've got stories in church history about the Romans having these so-called toga parties, where they were having a great time, drinking and dancing and so on, and they would ignore anything about Christianity because it didn't make any sense to them. They had all these cults, and they would talk to each other. Hey, how's your cult doing, man? What do they let you do, and what are they telling you you're gonna get if you do all this stuff? And they would trade these stories of their individual cults. When along comes Paul, And I can tell you that brought on massive persecutions for the first 300 years of the church age because it entered the world and the world did not want that. If you've never read Fox's Book of Martyrs, it's really helpful to know that because you can see the persecutions that came all over the Roman Empire, everywhere. The Romans were taking Christians, tying them up, and having those ropes be made out of, and pieces of meat put into them, and then they put them in a coliseum and they let lions that hadn't eaten for a couple days out. And everybody was cheering and going, yeah, isn't this fun? and the lions were eating the Christians. They would tie the Christians up and put oil all over them and light them on fire for their torches at their toga parties. You read Foxe's Book of Martyrs and those are some of the easier ones that they did. All this stopped a little over 300 AD, like 312 or so, the Emperor Constantine came to power in the Roman Empire and he stopped the gladiatorial fights, even just the fights between the individuals, and mostly they were having slaves do this. He stopped the slavery. He stopped the Christians being persecuted. He claimed to have had a personal born-again experience. And for the next few years, Christianity was no longer under assault. And this started with Julius Caesar. Because he conquered Achaea and told them that they had to start paying attention to Rome. And they started believing the gospel too. Here comes Paul about AD 51. Now the dates that I put into your notes there are approximate. We know it was in the 50s. Some of the sources that I have that I depend on said for first meeting there in the second missionary journey was about 51. It was a young and dynamic place that was not bound by tradition. There was a mix of itinerant individuals, these freed slaves, and these people there, the church history writers tell us, they had come from some very bad backgrounds and they were doing everything they could to shed that culture that they came from. And as I mentioned before, they wanted to be self-made men. You know, they wanted material success. The Apostle Paul, driven by the Lord Jesus, he wasn't intimidated by anybody there. You know, I had, I was talking to my accountant at one point in time, and she lives in the western suburbs of Chicago. And I was saying to her, you know, the culture is getting sicker and worse towards Christianity. She said, well, so what? They take us out, we're with the Lord. That was the Apostle Paul's attitude. He was not going to stop because he knew where he was going. You know, he met Jesus on the road to Damascus when he was a terrible persecutor of Christianity. And all of those apostles did the same thing when they saw him come back. Every one of them went out proclaiming the gospel. They saw the risen Jesus. They knew what he had said and they knew where they were going. They didn't care. Every one of them, except perhaps John, died as a martyr. Well here's the Apostle Paul going into that culture that of self-made people that have lots of money, that they're all really filled with themselves and their capabilities and so on. And he's telling them that Jesus is the only way. Who is Jesus and why is he the only way? What are you talking about? And the Romans, they wanted to kill him, which they eventually did. They eventually cut his head off. You know what is so fascinating to me? When he was in that Mamertine prison, waiting to be executed, he writes some of the most beautiful scripture. You read these books like the Philippians, read it. You don't think he's imprisoned and ready to have an ax come down on his neck. He's wonderful. He knows where he's going and he's just so in love with the Lord Jesus and the gospel that he wants others to know it. I remember reading in seminary about him being in jail. that Mamertine prison, and they even had to chain him to the jailer. And you know the story's told that people thought that the jailer was chained to Paul, but it's actually it was Paul was chained to the jailer. It was the other way around you know. This guy was going to get the gospel 24-7. You know, and the jailer was captive and got the gospel. It's just incredible. So this place was filled with temples and shrines and various members of his family and all of these crazy things. Corinth then, Corinth, excuse me, was an especially licentious city. It was terrible what they were doing there. It even had that reputation in ancient times. Remember now, it was founded 1,000 B.C. or so. The Greek verb for fornication, which is any kind of sexual activity outside of a committed heterosexual marriage, is called korinthiaisomai. They even invented a verb to describe that. It's derived from the city's name. Sacred prostitution was done there, thinking that they were gonna get closer to God by doing these things with these loose women. Paul comes into this trying to bring the truth of Christianity to this moral cesspool. It was sort of like, but a lot worse than modern day Las Vegas, where divorce is just easy. People go there to get divorced. At least they have in the past. I don't follow that, but I know a lot of the movie stars would go there for the easy divorces. People that get too much money too fast generally don't know how to handle it and get loose. Their behavior gets loose. They start engaging in all kinds of behaviors that they never would have. And this happens. I mean, it happens. You see this in these movie stars, that their lives are licentious. And it gets worse. The broken lives for new believers in Corinth continued, and it was their debauched lifestyle, and these easy women, if you will, that roamed the streets. The Apostle Paul, as I've mentioned, he came there on a second missionary journey, and there was a leader there, a pro-council, named Gallio. Gallio had a elevated seat watching the Olympic Games, as they called them, and that seat was called the BEMA seat, and that's where he would issue judgment for the winner of the Games. Paul took that and called that the seat of judgment that we will be at when we leave these bodies as 1st Corinthians chapter 4 tells us. The dead in Christ will rise first and then we which remain will go up with them. We will all be converted and go to the Bema seat for judgment. Well that's how he described it from this Pro Council's Judgment there are these athletic game. Galileo ruled. All religions were equal. Just, you know, just a bunch of cults and have at it, have whatever you want. And here comes Paul with this hostile message that they viewed what he was saying. in Jesus Christ, God entered this body of this man to physically suffer and die for the final sacrifice that ever will be made in this time, the church age, for everybody that believes. and you believe that this has happened, a historic event. That's what is so pertinent to this gospel. It's a historic event. You know, I've had people tell me, well, just your Bible says that. How about Tacitus? How about Josephus? How about Philo? How about, these Romans knew it. How about the Romans Pilate writes to Tiberius in Rome and says, you know, since Augustus, you guys have been declaring yourselves gods as an elevation from Caesar, you know, and it was Augustus' wife, Livia, that said to Augustus, man, I think you're doing a really good job. I think you ought to get the Senate to declare you to be a god. You know, that's the next step up. They really believed this stuff. And, So Pilate, the guy that killed him, didn't really want to, but was pushed into it. He goes, he writes a letter to Tiberius, and that's still available today. I got a copy of it. Not in the original text, but I've got a copy of it. where he says to Tiberius, man you gotta get the Senate to declare this guy a god. I know I killed him and he's walking around here in some kind of a luminous body or something. There's something going on here. I know he died. And Tiberius took it to the Senate and the Senate, because they hadn't seen it, and two, it was one of these outpost, they called it, you know, a Syrian name. Yeah, it's just way out there, we don't care. So they wouldn't do it. I don't think Jesus cared at all. You know, and it's interesting is that this is significant because the life of Paul saw Jesus. saw Jesus. When he came to him on that road to Damascus, Jesus was just shocked, or Paul was shocked that Jesus was there. He was blinded, he couldn't see, and Jesus says to him, Saul, which is his name before he changed it to And Saul says, who is this? This is Jesus, whom you have persecuted. And he had that conversion experience. And he went and hid out for a few years. And when he went to Damascus, one of the believers there said, I don't want to take him in. This guy's killing us. And he did. He took him in and he saw the conversion. And the Apostle Paul ends up writing 13 books in the New Testament. He was used mightily because he had a desire that was so strong to get this out. 13 books he wrote of his experience that we need to understand. And that's why we are looking at this book today. This book talks about It was written about six months after First Corinthians, and he emphasized that God's power is made perfect in weakness. Now that may not be obvious, but those of us that have had born-again experiences through a crisis of some sort know this. You know it. And in the seventh chapter, when we get there, he's going to describe his born again experience, exactly what the steps are, how he got born again and how he acted and how he accepted it. It was something that happened to him that he had no control over because he saw Jesus, he believed, and then the Holy Spirit enters him. You know, I hear people saying, well, you gotta repent and then you gotta do this. You can't repent if you are not born again and the Holy Spirit is within you. You can acknowledge that there's something there, you know, that Jesus did something interesting, you know, but you're not compelled to repent. You're living in your sin. And even if you're thinking about it, Until you believe that Jesus died and rose from the dead, immediately the Holy Spirit enters you. And the Holy Spirit is also called the spirit of truth, comfort, belief. And that spirit convicts you. So some think that it's so close together that you repent first. No, you repent right after you believe. But it happens so fast. You know, the Holy Spirit enters you. And when do we get to chapter seven? I'll go into that in great detail because it's just fascinating how Paul says that he became a believer and once he believed, he started really feeling bad about everybody that he hurt. You want to go out and tell everybody, you know, I did this, I'm sorry, please forgive me. And it's the way it is, the way it is. is genuine. That is a manifestation of belief. But it happens so fast. Because when the Holy Spirit enters you at the point of belief, He stays. He doesn't leave. And our Bibles call this a deposit. A good money. You know, if you're going to buy a house from somebody and they want $200,000 for it and you make an offer, you've got to make an offer with some money. to be a bona fide accepted offer. Somebody comes and wants to buy a house, they don't make an offer, you don't even consider it. They don't give you some good money. Well that is the description, not buy house and purchase, but it's called the good money. The earnest deposit, because those deposits are called the earnest money that's given for future redemption. So you make an earnest deposit on a house, And in the future, once all the legal items clear, then you take possession of the house. Well, that's what Paul is telling us. We will have the deposit of the Holy Spirit in us. And then at the point of the rapture and the resurrection, the Holy Spirit takes us to heaven. And it's so simple the way he describes this, the earnest deposit. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians a whole host of things about this forgiveness and repenting and staying away from the false prophets, of which there are many. And, you know, I've made comments about some of them that have entered the church. In the mid-1850s, there was a big decree that was made in the German churches by a couple of guys, Graf and Wellhausen. They wrote a treatise because they were in big universities. Big universities have this requirement. They all want tenure. They want to get to that point where they can't fire you. I mean, unless you're really engaging in malfeasance, but you gotta write things, you gotta publish things, you gotta speak things, you gotta bring money in, and if you are doing something new, something really interesting, then that puts you a leg up, if you will, on getting your permanent status as a teacher there, a faculty. Well, what these guys came up with was that Moses didn't write the five books of Moses, even though Jesus said he did. And they called it the documentary hypothesis. And what they did was, in the Bible, there are at least seven names for God. El, Elohim, Yahweh, Yah, Adonai, and a few others that are combinations of those. and they made the independent evaluation that each one of those names is actually another writer. So the Adonais, the Yahwehis, the, you know, and so on were all independent authors. No basis for this, no evidence. They just started, you know, and they're in this big university and everybody went, oh, that's so cool. So they rearranged the first five books of the Bible into different authors. And that was, one of my professors called that the closing of the book, the Bible, because people started believing that Moses didn't write the books of Moses. And when that idea came in the late 1800s, over to the eastern seaboard of the United States, the Ivy League schools just ate it up. And they started teaching, well, the Bible is really not true, not accurate. The church we got saved out of, one of the pastor came from that background. And I told him, I said, you know, I have to leave. It's a liberal church. I have to leave. Joan and I are going to leave because we have had a born again experience. I've been reading the Bible voraciously every day. I've been listening to some pastors that believe the Bible. And he looks at me and he says, well, I get born again every day, you know. I said, I knew you wouldn't understand this. You know, I knew you couldn't understand this. And he was a little upset with me and he says, look, if you knew how that Bible was written, you wouldn't be thinking like this. You wouldn't be doing this. He had never been born again. He didn't know what it was like to have God's spirit come and take up residence in us and enlighten us. capture us. And I knew because I knew how I felt before I was born again. You know, I knew what I thought and I was guiding my own life and everything's fine as far as I knew. And the Lord saved me and my wife, Joan, 1990, early 1990, February the 16th. And she got saved a week later. It was just amazing. You know, I'm here going through this agony of, and I'll explain it later, but, and Christ finds me. I didn't find him, he found me. And I became born again. The lady next door a couple days later comes over and says to Joan, hey, you want to do a Bible study with me? Let's go through the book of John. We both got saved February of 1990. Well, Paul has a message. And in his epistles, he describes everything that we need to know about living the Christian life, not fearing, not being worried about different things that are taking place. And I just want to, I know I put the outline in your notes, but I just want to touch on those 13 big issues that are going to be seen in this book. You know, he starts talking about consolation and how we are to be married to the Lord Jesus. And he talks about the forgiveness that we have to have. Forgiveness is a difficult subject. He is seeking reconciliation, but it's not always going to happen. And that is one of the things about forgiveness. The central tenet of forgiveness is to take the burden that you have about somebody hurting you away. Take it away. I don't know if you know who Corrie Ten Boom was. Well, she forgave the jailer that she had in that Nazi concentration camp. And she says, I don't want to do this, but the Lord says I have to. They forgave him. And that's what we have to do. That doesn't mean you go embrace this person and say, whoopee, we're friends again. No, it doesn't mean that. If that happened, that would be good. But that's not the requirement. The forgiveness is the requirement. Don't carry that burden around. Somebody harms you, you forgive them and give that burden to the Lord. Let him deal with that person. And I have made this comment many, many times, that when somebody hurts you, you have to be aware that they may not have changed. and they're going to be hurting people again. So you beware, you know. You don't go embrace somebody and then, you know, you ever heard the statement, you know, hurt me once, shame on me. Hurt me twice, shame on you. Hurt me twice, shame on me, you know. I went back and figured that you had been in my causing you to be distance from me that you had now recovered and refined. Well, no, you know, you can't do that. We know them by their fruit, but you've got to forgive. You've got to do that. Get that burden off of you. He talks about the new covenant. The new covenant was written in the old Testament, Jeremiah chapter 31 to the Jewish people, not to the church. I'll go into that in greater detail when we get there, but the new covenant is not for the church. The new covenant is a description of what the Jewish people are going to have in the messianic kingdom after the tribulation. They will have an incredible life The new covenant was announced in Jeremiah 31. It was started, or should I say it's blessed by the Lord Jesus and his death on the cross. Then there will be an inauguration and a realization. The new covenant embodies two different aspects. One is the spiritual adherence and the other is in addition to that it's the physical adherence. The Jews in the messianic kingdom are going to have both. We have the spiritual blessings of it by the Lord Jesus dying and we believe that. So we get this salvation but we don't have the technical aspects of the new covenant. I know people read the gospel and they say well here's Jesus announcing the new covenant. He's announcing it to the Jewish people that he came to be with. He came to the Jew first as Paul says in first in Romans 1 16 and to the Gentile after. He came to the Jewish people first And I'll go into this in great detail. But I know people think, well, we're under the new covenant. No, we're not. Nowhere does it say we are. And we have to understand that during the gospel period, it was all God coming to the Jewish people to try and get them to pay attention to him. Here's my Messiah. Pay attention to him. And the leaders didn't and wouldn't. So they killed Jesus. Jesus had to die. God knew this was going to happen, but the gospel goes out from there. And that's what our missionary, Todd Baker, is doing. He's going to the Jew first and then the Gentile, just like the Bible says. So we'll go into that in a lot more detail when I get there. we have to have an appropriate attitude towards suffering. I've had friends years ago, why is this happening to me? What's going on? What is, and God provides some degree of suffering at different times in our lives for different reasons. We touched on that when we were in Isaiah and Ezekiel and, uh, There is a reason for suffering, and it's something that we have to come to grips with. Nobody likes it, but it happens for reasons, and we'll look at that. We are going to have resurrected bodies. Everyone that has ever lived will have a resurrected body, and Paul tells us in It'll be a new body impervious to the Earth's decay, entropy. It'll live forever. It will still be able to eat. And we'll have a heavenly body. You know, it's interesting, after Jesus rose from the dead, he's meeting with people, yeah, I'll have some of that fish, you know. Oh man, he was able to pass through walls. He wasn't subject to the physicality of this earth, time and space. It was a heavenly body. He could be in one place and then be somewhere else immediately. You know one of his disciples, Thomas the doubter, He made the comment, he says, hey, look, you know, I can't believe he's back from the dead. Come on, give me a break. I saw him die and all this. And Jesus immediately appeared with him. Immediately, just, he's there. You know, passed through walls and whatever, wherever he was, it didn't matter. He's not subject to this world's obstacles. we'll have that too in our resurrected bodies. We will not be subject to this. And Thomas said, because he's, you know, he told his colleagues, you know, unless I can see the nail prints in his wrist and see the sword in his side. And Jesus said, here, give me your hand, Thomas. Thomas falls on his knees. Oh my God and my Lord. He needed to see. Jesus told us that because we believe and we haven't seen, we're even more blessed. But we have evidence. We know what these guys said. We know what they did. It's not a matter of, you know, competing one God against another or one set of philosophies. No other religious idea ever had a savior Nobody else. And it's all validated. So the biggest, I think, for most young people, that next section talks about being unequally yoked. The primary application is in marriage. Don't marry an unbeliever. You're setting yourself up for some massive problems. And I heard a message from a pastor one time talking to some girls in high school. And he said, you know what the text says? That you're not to marry someone that is an unbeliever. Well, they come up with these ideas. Well, I really like Joey. I'm gonna make him a believer. I'm gonna tell him about Jesus. And how do you know that? How do you know? Give him the gospel and see where he goes with it. Give him the gospel. Being unequally yoked is an illustration about ancient farming methods where they would tie two animals together to work in pulling plows and pulling carts and so on. And they had this yoke, it was a wooden There was one wooden piece cut in two arcs, and then there was another piece, so the two oxen were tied together. And when you're tied together like that, you better like this guy. You're gonna be with him 24-7, you know? Well, what Paul is saying, and again, the primary application is marriage, but it holds true in other. business relationships, other times when you're tied together legally, culturally, whatever, don't do it because you're setting yourself up for big time failure and a very stressful relationship. And most people just won't accept that because, well, I love Jolie. Anyway, this pastor that gave this message saying you should probably not even be dating people that aren't believers because you can fall in love with them, right? Yeah. And then you're in big trouble because you're going to want to marry them because you love them and they're not a believer and you're setting yourself up for massive failure. Paul talks about the grace of giving to support the church, to support missionaries, to support the work of God. He spends quite a bit of time with that. And then he talks about the concept of Judaizers. The Judaizers, they still exist. They were not called by that. And in his time in Galatia, he was in Galatia, and he wrote about the Judaizers. What they were doing is they were Jewish people that were giving the gospel. They believed, but they were telling people, but you got to become a Jewish person first, and you got to follow the Mosaic law, and And you have to be circumcised if you're male, and you've got to make this commitment to the Mosaic law. And then you can become a Christian. And Paul goes out. to Galatia and sees what they're doing. And he comes back to Jerusalem and they have what we call the First Worldwide Church Council, where he met with the apostles and he said, they don't have to do this, do they? No, not at all. The gospel is unique, it's independent, and they just have to believe that Jesus died and rose from the dead. So the concept of the Judaizers is going to be explained here again. in addition to the false teachers that were there and still continue. I'll tell you the church age is rife with them, just rife with them. The name it and claim it guys, you know. Give me lots of money and you know we'll give you the benefits of this. And terrible things that are going on. Paul has a heavenly experience that he described, just like Daniel did, just like the prophet Isaiah did. They got to see heaven. They got to see heaven. They got to see where they're going. When Isaiah saw it, Oh man he immediately saw how unclean he was in this body and this corruption and it let him have that vision of God and the perfection and the perfect heavenly environment and that really gave about what God is doing and what he will do. And then finally, he gives a benediction to close the whole thing out. So we will be going through this book and we'll get into the first chapter next week. Let us pray. Father, we love you.