Reflections on 1 Corinthians 10:18
Behold Israel after the flesh: are not they which eat of the sacrifices partakers of the altar? (1 Corinthians 10:18, KJV)
My mind went in an unexpected direction this morning. Paul is still working through the question of meat offered to idols, something most of us file away as an ancient problem that has nothing to do with us. We don’t buy our meat at a pagan temple. We don’t sit down to a meal in honor of a demon idol. We assume we don’t worship at those altars today. But we still do. And we are affected by the gods we worship.
Eating Was Fellowship
In Corinth, eating at the altar was never just a meal. To eat the sacrifice was to join yourself to the one it was offered to. Paul points to Israel’s own worship to make the point: those who ate the sacrifices were partakers of the altar. Several of the translations I compared this morning capture this beautifully. Goodspeed asks whether those who eat what is sacrificed do not have “divine fellowship” at the altar. Williams calls it “spiritual fellowship.” The Jerusalem Bible says they are “in communion with the altar.” Beck says simply that they “share the altar.”
Reading them side by side, the same thought kept coming to me in the margin: united to their God. United to the God they serve. The God they worship. The meal joined the worshipper to the one being worshipped.
The Remedy carries it one step further: “When we ingest Christ, we become like him and faithfully live out his principles in fulfilling all our duties.” There is a truth, a living truth, that you will model: you become like the God you worship.
This is not a new idea that Paul invented. It runs all through the Old Testament that Paul’s thinking is rooted in. Of the idols that have mouths but cannot speak and eyes but cannot see, the psalmist says, “They that make them are like unto them” (Psalm 115:8). Hosea says Israel’s abominations became “according as they loved” (Hosea 9:10). We take on the character of what we give ourselves to.
Our Altars Today
This truth has a different application to how we live today. You do not go to a temple to buy your meat or get a cooked meal, then enjoy the entertainments of that temple for the evening. Our altars are in our homes now. We don’t need to go out to the temple to worship. The temple is being fed live right into our living rooms, and the sacrifices are delivered right to our door.
Today we fill our bodies with cheap, unhealthy food, degrading the temple of the Lord, our mind and body. Then we turn on our mind-numbing media entertainment for the evening, turning off our reasoning and thinking, allowing all the junk food for the mind to enter unchallenged by our reasoning ability. The food we eat and the media we watch: this all becomes the society we live in.
We are eating and fellowshipping at our altars. The question is, what god are we communing with?
You Are What You Take In
Look honestly at your physical, emotional and spiritual food program. How much time do you spend filling your body and mind with the foods that build up your life, and how much with what degrades it?
You are physically what you eat; that is all you can be. There is no magic that turns worthless food into the nutrition your body needs to function and thrive. Eating a protein shake in the morning and cookies, candies and cheap carbs the rest of the day does not create health in the body, mind or spirit. The same is true of your emotional and spiritual life. You are what you take in. You become like the God you worship.
Every Choice Sets the Direction
You only have to choose today, and continue to choose, what you will consume, what you will take into your very heart and mind and allow to influence your eternal destiny. Each day, with every decision you make or fail to make, you are deciding who you are becoming. Each decision sets your life more firmly in the direction you are facing.
As the decisions go by, one after the next, you stop thinking about changing. The good you choose to do becomes your natural habit; it is who you are. The careless, foolish choices you once made no longer even interest you. Your mind is brighter, your body has a quicker step, your conversations are more intelligent. You are becoming more.
The other side takes hold just the same way. Each choice to put off the good you can do today adds up. You are tired and just want to veg out with a pizza and a good movie; it becomes your comfortable evening habit. You think, I should start that study, that walk, that project, but you choose to feed your brain and soul one more night of junk food first. That one more night turns into your life. There are no redo buttons on life.
And by then you no longer wish to change. You have lost all interest or taste in expanding your mind or ennobling yourself. All that Bible stuff seems so unappealing; there is no taste or inclination toward deep study. The mind has been starved to the point it has lost the ability for deep thought. The rule still applies: you become like the God you worship. No choice is a choice to not change anything.
This is what being settled into truth looks like, or settled away from it. There is no magic or lightning strike from God. You are just who you are. You have made every choice to be exactly who you are.
A Word on the Translations
Reading ahead into verses 19 through 21, it amazes me how some versions get this so right, while others change it just a little and lose the whole concept. The key word Paul uses through this passage is koinonia: fellowship, communion, sharing a common life. Some versions keep it. Others soften it to “associate themselves with,” or turn it into “sharing in the altar’s service,” something you do rather than someone you are joined to. Once that happens, Paul’s warning goes flat, and the question of meat offered to idols becomes a matter of manners instead of a matter of whom you are united with.
That too shows the choices and decisions of those doing the translating. It is hard to see beyond your own choices to think that there is something more, and an intellectual doing a translation can get stuck there as easily as anyone. Every rendering is a decision shaped by everything the translator has already taken in.
The same pull works on every one of us as readers. That is why I lay many translations side by side, not trusting any one voice, and keep asking the same question of every passage: what does this tell us about God? It guards against the translators’ bias, and against my own.
One Choice at a Time
All of life’s big moments begin with a small, insignificant choice, just a small moment in a day: the day you set your feet on the path to becoming who you would be. You are free to change your mind, make a turn, go a different way. The longer you have been set in your current pattern of life, the more effort it will take to make a lasting change. But it can be done, one choice at a time.
And the same law that pulls us down can lift us up. Paul writes later to this same church that “we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Choose the table you sit at. Choose the God you commune with. You will become like Him.
We are our choices.
Oct 1, 2026 · @Dara Dietz
