Author: Dara Dietz

Reflections on 1 Corinthians 10:22

“Are we trying to arouse the Lord’s jealousy? Are we stronger than he?” Paul asks in 1 Corinthians 10:22 (NIV). He is still speaking to believers who thought they could eat at the Lord’s table and then sit down at the idol feasts as well. His question goes straight to the heart: do we really think we can handle the enemy on our own ground?

Jude gives us a scene that answers it. When Michael the archangel, whom I understand to be Christ himself, contended with the devil over the body of Moses, he did not argue. He did not debate Satan’s accusations. He simply said, “The Lord rebuke thee” (Jude 9), raised Moses up, and left the devil without another word. All the power in the universe, and he did not even mentally arm wrestle with the devil. He did not give Satan the satisfaction of an argument.

If Christ refused to contend with the devil, do we think it is our duty to spar with him?

Resisting is not sparring

James tells us, “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). But resisting the devil is not arguing with him. It is refusing to sit at his table, never putting ourselves on his ground, where we can easily come under his deceptions. Satan and his minions have no ability to distress or annoy us unless we sit down at their table and entertain ourselves there.

We are surrounded with all the support heaven has to offer: a full set of armor, the Holy Spirit as our constant guide, and our angels always with us. We alone can break faith with our Savior and wander into Satan’s dining room. Our only job is to choose which side we will join, and to accept the invitations that come to us each day to sit at the Lord’s table.

The wrath we do not want

Phillips renders Paul’s question, “Are we trying to arouse the wrath of the Lord?” Understood rightly, God’s wrath is letting us go, allowing us to experience the results of our own poor choices, just as Romans 1 says God “gave them up.” We do not want Christ to leave us to ourselves.

He is jealous for our loyalty, not out of pettiness, but because he knows that if we put our trust anywhere else, we will be destroyed. He is Love, drawing us to himself by his Love and Grace. If we resist him, we are left with no protection against the overwhelming deceptions of the king of fantasy land. Christ will lose us. The battle for our very existence is at stake.

No partial healing

The Remedy translation puts Paul’s second question in terms of healing: the Lord will not settle for a partial cure; he wants selfishness removed from the heart completely. Do we think we can heal ourselves, that we have a more powerful remedy than his?

Every time we choose to act in a better way, however small or inconsequential the choice seems, it has an effect on our minds. We are choosing to be healed, choosing to let Christ heal our hearts and minds. Once we make that choice, Christ through the Holy Spirit fills our lives with the power we need to stick with it. It all comes from him.

So let us protect our relationship with the Lord. Let us not entertain, even for a moment, the suggestions, thoughts or emotions that would draw us back to the old table. Fill the mind with uplifting thoughts, stay active, and build new habits. They will not feel as comfortable as the old ones at first. Stay with them, and we will discover this is who we truly are.

Oct 4, 2026 · @Dara Dietz

Reflections on 1 Corinthians 10:21

“You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons.” (NIV)

In Corinth, the question was literal. Meals were eaten in pagan temples, and the meat came from the altar. Paul tells the believers that sitting at a table means sharing fellowship with the one the table belongs to. You cannot eat at the Lord’s table and the idol’s table and remain undivided.

We may not face temple feasts, but the two tables are still set before us every day. The Remedy translation shows what is really at stake: we cannot internalize both the character of Christ and the character of demons. What we eat becomes who we are.

The choice must be made

You cannot choose both, and failing to make a conscious choice is itself a choice for the devil’s table. The Lord will not press Himself into your life or insert Himself where He is not asked. This is not because He does not care, but because no one can be healed without their permission and cooperation. Christ brings everything: the calling of your heart toward something better, the situations that make you face yourself, and the power to follow through. The one thing He cannot provide is your choice.

When Adam fell, God promised to put enmity between the serpent and humanity. That enmity works like a blanket of Grace around our world, a gentle tug on our minds and hearts upward to Christ. It is His invitation to His table. We are free to resist it, and every time we do, we build up muscles against the call to come and be healed.

Seated by small choices

We take our seat at Christ’s table through little things: each choice to bless someone at the expense of our own comfort, a simple kindness to a stranger, a helping hand when our time is rushed. These small choices are how we eat His bread and drink His cup.

In the same way, every missed opportunity Grace has made us aware of seats us at the other table: the person we passed on the other side of the road because we had important business. We go on unaware that we have just accepted bread and wine at the table of demons. Looking the other way gets easier, and the invitations to grow and become more lie unopened on the floor. Grace still draws, but we have trained ourselves not to feel it.

The other road is to answer the call: never passing a struggling soul without giving them something to brighten their day. And each time we give of ourselves, we find our cup refilled and our bread basket full. The Lord’s table is never lacking.

It is the heart that chooses

Outward kindness put on for show does not seat us at Christ’s table; it is still self-focused. The heart chooses the table. And when the heart of Christ is in us, we can see His presence flickering dimly in a wounded soul whose troubled life has left its marks. Let that person see you. Love them, value them as a child of God, and let the Spirit guide your time together. Trust comes first; then they will allow you to love them.

Two tables are set before us today. We cannot sit at both. Every small choice is a meal, and every meal is shaping who we are becoming. Which table will you choose?

Oct 3, 2026 · @Dara Dietz

Reflections on 1 Corinthians 10:19–20

What say I then? that the idol is any thing, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is any thing? But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. (1 Corinthians 10:19–20, KJV)

Paul asks a plain question this morning: is the idol anything? Is the food offered to it anything? The translations I laid side by side answer him with real force. Williams puts it, “Of course not!” Phillips says, “Not at all!” The Remedy says it best for me: the sacrifice is nothing, and the idol is nothing, “for neither have any power.”

No Power in an Idol

There is no healing or restorative power flowing through false idol worship. We are healed and restored by and through our connection with our Creator and Redeemer. Christ has the only answer, the only power to raise the heart, mind, and physical body of humanity above our current condition to a place of healing and restoration.

Made to Become Like Him

We were created to take our place in the universe, to mature, to grow up into the image of God Himself. He even endowed humanity with the power to create living creatures like ourselves, to give our life, to instil our very self, the whole of who we are, into the creation of another life. This gift is what Satan could never have, and his jealousy of it became his hatred of us. Adam “begat a son in his own likeness, after his image” (Genesis 5:3); the image of God passes on through us. This is truly an amazing gift for God to grant to a creation He knew would fail the test, fall into sin and need rescuing. Even so, He chose to go on with the creation of man. God is Love, and it is apparent in every form of life on this planet.

Man is the highest intelligence on planet earth; no other creature here has the reasoning, the heart and the mind of man. And another natural law of life is that we model whatever we take into our minds and hearts as our god. We become like the god we worship. Since this is reality, a proven truth, how can man receive anything good into himself from worshipping an object he has shaped with his own hands? It makes no sense. There is no life or power in a thing made by the hands of man.

Fantasy Is Not Harmless

You can degrade your mind by imagining an idol has something to offer, but that is just a fantasy, magical thinking. Living in a fantasy world, believing it to be true, does not make it so. All it will do is wear down your own mind and heart to the place where reality has no draw for you. The fantasy and the magical are all you will accept as your reality.

The mind that chooses to live unto itself in this way breaks completely with reality and is finally sealed, settled for eternity in a fantasy of its own making. Such a mind is lost to life as it really is.

The First Fantasist

Fantasy has a ruler. To worship idols is to join your heart and mind to the kingdom of magical thinking, ruled over by the king of liars, the first and greatest magical thinker of them all, Satan himself. He got it in his mind that he could be God, that he should be God, that Christ, who is God, was no different from himself. “I will be like the most High,” he said (Isaiah 14:14). He is still living in that delusion, and he passes it on to anyone who will listen. It was the very promise he made in Eden: “ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5). He wanted to be a creator, and he was not and is not. He cannot give life; Jesus called him “a murderer from the beginning” and “the father of it,” of the lie (John 8:44). He can only counterfeit, and his fantasy land is the only creation he has to offer.

Picture someone on a beach, arms raised, crying, “I am God.” It is Eden’s lie all over again, and it is tragic, because the one who believes it is trading the true greatness God offers for a fantasy. We cannot do a thing to save ourselves; we will die just like everyone else, and nothing we declare on a beach will change that. The scene is ridiculous, but the person is someone Christ died for.

Not Nothing After All

And now Paul shows what stands behind that empty idol. It is not nothing after all. It is demons. Phillips calls them “evil spiritual powers.” The Remedy says the sacrifices of pagans are offered “with hearts in harmony with demons.” The idol has no power, but the worship still goes somewhere.

Once you refuse to offer your heart in worship and service to Christ, our God and Creator, the only other thing left to worship, no matter how you dress it up, is demons. Reality, truth, what actually is: this is a narrow way, with only one right answer. We are free to reject reality and truth, but once we reject what is real, every other option is a counterfeit, and the ruler of the counterfeit is the king of demons.

You are free to worship God and grow beyond your wildest dreams, or you can choose to live in the land of the lie, separate yourself from every ennobling truth, and worship the king of demons. There is no future with the devil. His only goal is to take as many with him as he can.

Unmasked at the Cross

He knows the truth about him is out. He was unmasked to the entire universe when he murdered Christ, his Creator. The only place in the universe where anyone will still listen to him is here on earth, and his delusions still have weight here with those who refuse to think for themselves.

You can see who lives in that land by its fruit. The selfish, me-first attitude is the attitude of those living in the lie and worshipping demons. The call to take the easy way, to self-protect, to be safe, is the call of our lower, unhealed natures.

The Mind of Christ

When we worship our God and Creator, we connect ourselves with the only source of life and power in the universe. We can have the mind and heart of Christ in us. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5). Imagine it: we can be so connected to Him that our natural response is to love as He loves, to uplift and ennoble everyone we are in contact with. Everyone in our sphere of influence will feel the flow of Love coming down from Christ and flowing through us.

This is the mind of Christ. We are joined to Him when we worship Him by choosing to love others above ourselves.

A quick note: if you received several emails from me yesterday, I’m sorry for the flood, and no, I haven’t been hacked! I’m rewriting my herbal formula posts so they teach each formula in full, with the herbs, proportions and how to make them at home. The rest will be added quietly, and you can find them all in the new Herbal Formulas section of my Herbal Healing Index.

Oct 2, 2026 · @Dara Dietz

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