Dennis Tuuri

# SERMON TRANSCRIPT – REFORMATION COVENANT CHURCH
**Pastor Dennis Tuuri**

body that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.

Going through our series on the seven deadly sins and hopefully you’re reviewing some of these sins in your family devotion times that we’ve been doing, reviewing the ones we’ve spoken about. Today is our 21st message if I’m counting correctly going through these.

We’ll do two more as I said last week on gluttony. Next week we’ll deal with Hebrews 13:9 and talk about undue attention to food. And then the following week we’ll try to give a pattern for good biblical eating and practical stuff to put into our families in a concise way to help us remember what eating is all about. And then we’ll deal with lust, the last of the seven deadly sins. And probably in about six weeks then we’ll be done with this series.

So we began last week the sin of gluttony by kind of doing somewhat of an overview. And I want to just review real quickly for those of you who weren’t here and just to remind ourselves. These are very teachable things. If you remember these basic points, I try to do this intentionally to make it easy to learn and also easy for you then to communicate to your children and teach them.

Well, we said last week there were three points to our outline. First, we said what gluttony is and we said that gluttony is a serious charge. It was a charge made against our savior—the only one of the seven deadly sins he was directly charged with—and the Pharisees accused him of being a drunkard and a glutton. So it’s a serious charge. It’s a capital crime. Remember, we went to Deuteronomy 21 as our central text last week. The stubborn son, not the stubborn child, the stubborn son.

The son is evidenced as being one who is a drunkard and a glutton. And of course, being a drunkard requires some degree of age—the child, that is, the son. And we said there that the serious charge that they leveled against Jesus really was tantamount to accusing him of Deuteronomy 21—of not hearing the voice of his parents and being among people that weren’t good, the disciples, and being a drunkard and a glutton.

And so they were really trying to get him executed. But in any event, gluttony is one of the elements of capital crime—of rebellion against the established authorities in our homes. We said that parents, that means we’ve got to teach our children not to be gluttonous as well as not to be a drunkard. We said also that gluttony essentially is excess food and drink and gluttony refers to food, but it can also refer to drink.

And those things are normally linked together in the scriptures. Gluttony and wine beverage, just like they were in Proverbs 23. We just read that responsibly. Throughout the scriptures, you see these things linked together. Excess eating of food, excess drinking of beverages is gluttony.

Then we said what gluttony isn’t. Gluttony is not non-utilitarian eating. In other words, eating is not to have as its only purpose utility—strength for the body. That’s not the only purpose for eating. We looked at passages that say that God gives us these wonderful symbols that we have a picture of here. Wine and bread certainly for strength, but he also gives us and calls us to rejoice at specific times. And the primary function of some eating and some meals is rejoicing before God. And the picture of that, of course, is our agape or love feast every Sunday. That is emblematic or points back to the Old Testament rejoicing times—book of Nehemiah and Deuteronomy 14.

And so it’s okay to eat for purposes other than simply getting bodily strength. It’s okay to eat sweet things. The book of Nehemiah says that on that day of rejoicing, you’re supposed to eat the fat things of the land and drink the sweet things. The land was flowing with milk and honey. It’s important to keep that image in our mind. Too much honey makes you sick. But absence from honey and abstinence from the things that God gives us to cause our hearts to rejoice isn’t good either.

You have to be very careful since it’s such a serious charge. You don’t want to accuse somebody of being a glutton because they have something sweet to eat or because they have alcoholic beverages to drink. You can’t call what God says is good evil in and of itself. It can be overdone, but it is not an evil in and of itself. Non-utilitarian eating and drinking are okay according to the scriptures. That’s not the only purpose of those elements. There are some other purposes as well, including rejoicing.

Now, we said that drinking—pleasurable drink—is a good thing in the scriptures. Alcoholic beverages are not totally prohibited. And for you to assert that all alcoholic beverages are wrong or to teach your children that I think is going against the word of God. Remember we said that little chorus we teach our kids: “He takes you to the banqueting table. His banner over me is love.” The banqueting house there out of the Song of Solomon is really the place where wine is drunk. And the word is talked about in terms of wine drinkers and other places. So that’s where people could go to excess and overdo wine. Wine is a particular use to it. And one of the uses of course is for holy communion. And also God it says gave us wine to make our hearts glad. It’s a gift of his.

Okay. So that’s what gluttony isn’t. And then we said a little deeper definition or a broader definition with more girth—to use a gluttony phrase—in terms of gluttony would be this. And I came up with this wording last week: Gluttony is the result of seeking in food and/or drink what God provides only through what these gifts of his point us to. Namely, the value and desirability of four things. And it’s easy to remember those four things.

The first is the word of God. And the other three things are the three persons of the Trinity. The Bible says the word of God is supposed to be sweeter to us than honey, more valuable than fine gold. And the Bible says that also the Trinity is to be thought of when we eat our food. Jesus is the man that came down from heaven. He’s the true spiritual food and he’s the true spiritual drink. He’s what these things point to.

And to ascribe value to those things and not realize behind that value is the things that they point us to—the value of Jesus Christ—leads us into gluttony. But additionally, the Father himself—Jesus said, “I have meat. My meat is to do the will of the Father.” And so when we eat, we should remember that our food is to do the will of the Father. And those things point us and should be reminders in our mind based on the holy scriptures when we eat to remember that our true food is to do the will of our Father in heaven.

And then third, we looked at the Holy Spirit’s influence in, or pictures as it were, in food. And Jesus again in the New Testament it reads that the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking but it’s peace, joy and righteousness of the Holy Spirit. And so there when we eat again, we’re supposed to be thinking of the joy of the Holy Spirit, the peace that he gives to us, the righteousness and the joy that we have in the Holy Spirit.

“Don’t be drunk wherein is emptiness, dissipation. You can’t get full of anything good by getting drunk, but be filled with the Spirit.” The wine again is a picture of the Holy Spirit. It’s where to be influenced, controlled by the spirit, and we’re to seek comfort and counsel from the Holy Spirit, not from our food. Remember we said that when the going gets tough, the gluttonous start eating. And all too often that’s true of us.

When we want to have be comforted about something, we’ll pig out sometimes or buy something that’s nice and make us feel better by—if we’re nervous, for instance—instead of turning to the word of God for comfort and turning to the word of God for counsel over a difficult situation, instead of turning to the word of God to have our nerves eased by looking at his sovereignty described in the word, we turn to eating.

And that’s what leads into gluttony.

Now, we started last week with that and now we’re going to turn to a verse specifically that I think links gluttony to idolatry. We really pointed at it with that last of the three points from last week, but now we’re going to look specifically at Philippians 3 and look at gluttony as idolatry.

Now, I’m going to spend some time here doing something that some people don’t think you should do a lot of and hopefully I won’t spend too much time at this, but I think it’s important. I think it’s important that you know that there is relevance to this text we just read from the book of Philippians chapter 3 to the sin of gluttony. and I want to talk a little bit about the context of the passage. We’re going to be focusing primarily on verse 19 out of Philippians 3 where we read about those whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, who glory in their shame, and who are earthly minded.

We’re going to be focusing on that verse specifically. But I want to look at the context first and show you that it’s appropriate to turn to that verse for talking about the sin of gluttony. It’s very important we don’t fall into the error of proof texting from the scriptures or using verses not to speak about what they’re specifically speaking of, not to use them improperly. And I want to spend a little bit of time here.

I want to first look at the immediate context of these verses. This verse specifically, verse 19. What’s Paul talking about in this letter to the Philippians? And what he’s talking about is he’s encouraging them to personal holiness. He gives them two markings as it were. He tells them first to mark men who have the picture, the model, the example that I give to you—the other men in the context of your local church. Note those men and follow their example in terms of personal holiness.

So he’s telling them that there’s a good marking. And then he gets off in this little side trip for two verses, verses 18 and 19, where he says that the reason why you’ve got to stay focused on those guys is there’s lots of other people around who are bad models. And those bad models of what the Christian life is all about can lead you to destruction.

So there are two markings going on here essentially. First a positive one he exhorts them to and then the negative one giving them examples of people that aren’t worthy to be imitated. So Paul is very concerned in these passages to have them be minded like he is minded and to be thus minded with him. In verse 15, he talks about and in verse 16, “Let us walk by the same rule. Let us mind the same thing.”

So he wants to—he’s stressing throughout the book of Philippians—unity, unity based upon the example that he is to them and the example that Christ is to us as well. And that’s the immediate context for these verses.

Now, a little earlier up in the—I’m going to cite this because some people have a tough time recognizing that Paul is very strong in his language here about these people whom I think have application to those who are gluttonous. In verse two of Philippians 3, Paul tells them to beware of the dogs, beware of evil workers, and beware of the concision—the false circumcision as it were, the mutilation—he says. And you have to know that Paul’s using some very strong language there. And he’s using strong language again here in verse 19. And again, one of the reasons I want to show you this is that it’s very important that we get over this problem of thinking that eating is no big deal.

Eating improperly, gluttonous eating is a big deal and it’s very strongly spoken against. I’m going to read a commentary here from a guy named Hawthorne in Word Commentary just about the use of the terms used here. He says that as in verse two, in verse 19 where Paul goes through this list, the apostle breaks out into the harshest kind of language to describe these persons—these enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction. Their god is their belly. Their glory is in their shame. Their mindset fixed on the world. Once again, his passionate feelings against them are registered in his rhetoric. Its features are short verbless sentences, constructions that are broken off without proper completion, clip phrases whose meaning defies precise explanation, strong words whose force lies not in lexical definitions, but in the sound and suddenness with which they come. Once again, he writes furiously about people whom he does not name.

And you see that last thing there: he writes furiously about people that he does not name. That’s kind of the problem is he doesn’t name them for us. And there’s a lot of contention about who these people are. But again, by way of introduction, I’m going to read a paraphrase of this text from Moisés Silva and I may be pronouncing his first name incorrectly, and a new commentary published in 1988.

His paraphrase, which I think is pretty good, reads the following. Just to give you the flow of the passage again:

“Brothers, be united in imitating me and also watch for those whose conduct conforms to the pattern you have in us. I need to stress this point because you’re faced with many whose conduct—well, I’ve often told you about them, but now I repeat with tears in my eyes—that they are enemies of what the cross of Christ stands for. These people who think they have arrived, their true destination is destruction. Though they claim to serve God, they worship their visceral impulses. While that in which they glory will prove to be their disgrace. In short, their frame of mind is not what we should have in Christ Jesus, but is molded by earthly things.”

So Paul is really giving him a strong warning here. The word for tears means strong lamentation on his part because of these people within the church. And it’s important we recognize then these are very important verses for us to get down.

Now the problem is who is he talking about? And there are lots of things that people came up with, but there are two essential, two main things that most common scholarship agrees are one or the other. The first thing some people think this is referring to is a Judaizing element within the church. In other words, those within the church who are trying to get Christians to be circumcised, to keep the dietary laws as a way to salvation. Judaizers within the church is one possibility.

The other possibility is that Paul is talking about libertines, antinomian Christians—Christians who have rejected any sense of law and who can just do whatever they think they want to do. And so they get gluttonous and they fall into sexual immorality and this sort of thing and it’s no big deal because there’s no laws, it’s only grace. Those are the two main schools of thought as to what these refer to.

Now, as I said, part of the problem here in determining what the actual application is. If he only refers to Judaizers, we probably couldn’t use this verse for gluttony. But I don’t think it does only refer to Judaizers. But I want some time here to help you see why I think it refers to gluttonous people as well.

Romans 16:17 and 18 is sort of a parallel passage to Philippians 3:19. And he uses the same phrase. He says in verse 17, “I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which you have learned and avoid them. For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly, and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.”

So, same thing. Book of Romans, Paul says they serve their own bellies and he warns them to mark those people. It’s interesting—in Romans 16 he says to mark the negative guys. In Philippians 3 he says mark the positive ones and then he makes reference to the negative ones as well. So there’s some parallel stuff going on here.

Now what was the problem in the Romans church? The problem in the Romans church was they had a Judaizing element within the church but they were also concerned about antinomian Christians. Also, the Corinth church. Remember the Corinth church where they had people doing terrible things. They were libertines. They were being gluttonous at the Lord’s supper for instance. And they had sexual immorality going on. And so you had that element as well.

What I’m saying is the early church had a couple of different attacks upon it from within the church. One was the Judaizing element. The other was the antinomian element. Both those things are going on.

Now in Philippians 3, the immediate context as I read from verse two, he says, “Of the dogs who are of the false circumcision.” Obvious a reference there to the Judaizing element. So people say he’s either carrying on that thought in verse 19 referring to the Judaizers or he’s now attacking the second branch which would attack the Philippian church—the antinomians—one of the two.

Well, the problem with that second one is that he doesn’t give an introduction to it. He doesn’t seem as—one as Silva says that interpretation seems to come from nowhere and go to nowhere. In other words, Paul doesn’t mention antinomian Christians any place else in the book. He doesn’t pick it up again in the next chapter of Philippians chapter 4. So it doesn’t seem like that’s what he’s saying. And I agree with Silva.

I think that the primary application, the initial application was to the Judaizing element. And when we go through these specific terms and talk about them, I’ll show you how it was used that way, but then also how it has a broader application. A broader application. In fact, I think what Paul is doing here is he’s referring to the Judaizing element, but he is comparing them in the language that he uses to the antinomian or libertine element either within or without the church.

Okay? He’s taking their high-minded asceticism and obedience and what they think is such an honorable walk in terms of obeying the laws of circumcision, the dietary laws for salvation instead of the pure gospel of Christ—they, he’s taking that high walk of theirs and he’s saying you’re no better than gluttons whose god is their belly and you’re no better than those Corinthian Christians. It wasn’t using the specific reference but then Christians who would use the grace supposedly as a covering for sexual immorality.

He’s saying that really it’s two sides of the same coin. You can use the phrases true of both. So I think he’s actually talking about both. We’re not going to look at it now because we don’t have time but Hosea 4:7. Write that reference down. Hosea 4:7 is a parallel passage again to this passage. In this passage, he says they glory and what is their shame. In Hosea 4:7, God says that he’s going to turn their glorying into shame.

Same thing. And he’s talking about those elements of the church—the pre-Christian church—who had denied God and his laws. His laws specifically in verse 6 is said to have been ignored by them. And so I think that Hosea 4 really refers to either way too—those of a different method of salvation, those who use their supposed salvation as a covering for antinomianism. Both things are true.

Now, I want to read a quote here from Lenski about that Romans passage that I said is a parallel passage, and this will help you. I’m going to be repeating this several times, but if you haven’t quite got it yet, don’t worry. I’m going to keep repeating this.

Lenski said talking about the passage in Romans 16 where he again said that these people their god is their belly:

“Paul’s admonition is devitalized in its application to us today by a specious use of the historical principle of interpretation. Who were those causing the divisions etc? In the first place the well-known Judaizers who mix law with gospel. Then as First Corinthians shows a number of others—some with philosophical, some with false moral teaching. Now God is insisted by some that Paul’s words can be applied only to these errors and that today we cannot invoke Paul’s admonition unless we are able to point to exact duplicates of these errors.”

So he’s saying that some people who stress historical context really go too far—say that unless we have the specific errors he was addressing we can’t use these admonitions today to modern day problems.

But then he goes on to say that Paul’s injunction actually is to keep away from believers who are errorists and teach falsely. Keep away from believers whose walk or whose profession, whose teaching doesn’t conform with the scriptures. That’s the general point Paul is making here. Not only the exact duplicates of the errorists of Paul’s day are today to be shunned as though no new ones should, could arise. As though new ones do not divide, tear and set traps. As though all errorists—new and old, great and small—are not related all in the same class. But according to Paul himself:

“Whatever things were written before for our instruction were they written.”

Remember 1 Corinthians—we talked about it—whatever these things were written before they were written for our instruction upon whom the ends of the world have come.

And so Philippians 3:19, Romans 16:17-18 are written for our instruction and will have application to our life today. Even maybe not directly but certainly by way of application. These are to be fully applied and not devitalized or evaded.

Karl Barth, not a source I would normally quote, but in his commentary on Philippians, I think he does a good job by showing this correlation between the Pharisee, the rebuke to the Pharisees as well as to the libertines. Barth says:

“What makes this passage so pregnant is precisely the fact that Paul takes the most exalted religious and ethical austerity of those he would warn against and describes it in terms which in fact if they were found in any other context would have to be understood as a description of common fleshly sins. That however is intentional by Paul. That is how Jewish Christian piety really does look seen from the standpoint of the preaching of the cross.

And this joint view of the most exalted righteousness and base sin must not be obliterated by adopting the usual interpretation that Paul is here speaking of depravity. Of course, he’s speaking of depravity. But the fact that he brands as depraved those who bypassing the cross of Christ and bypassing faith in its righteousness call for holiness and cleanness that he drags their glory into the mire. That is the bitter point of these verses.”

So he takes the Judaizing element who think themselves so high and holy and says you’re no better than gluttons, no better than libertines, no better than antinomian Christians who think they can exalt themselves in sexual and sensual delights and suffer no rebuke from God. And that’s what he’s doing. I think that’s correct. Moisés Silva agrees. He says:

“This whole section there are strong characterizations of the fleshy mind and are thus applicable to a wide variety of situations. You see their phariseism, the Judaizing element came from the flesh, the world, a devotion to things—these things—instead of the symbols behind these things who is the person of God and attempting to achieve salvation through the God-given sacraments of the old covenant even—circumcision, the dietary laws—that were never intended to be obeyed and as a result salvation being earned when salvation comes as a free gift of God through Jesus Christ. And their focusing on the flesh led them into that error. Other people by focusing on the flesh get thrown into the libertine antinomian error.”

And that’s the side of what we’re going to address for the rest of this time. We’re going to focus now on discussions of the implications of this passage in terms of gluttony. It is legitimate to do so because Paul’s language does just that. He compares them to these baser people as it were—the antinomian, the libertines—either inside or outside the church. Okay, so now to the text.

Hopefully you’ve caught some of that. I’m trying to show you it’s legitimate to use this text in terms of gluttony. In fact, it’s very appropriate as we’ll see as we go through some of these terms.

Okay. Paul says that gluttony—when it is idolatry—okay, as an application what Paul is saying here, when gluttony is idolatrous, its eschatology, its end is destruction. First phrase in verse 19: whose end is destruction. That destruction is both temporal as well as eternal.

Proverbs 23:20 that we just read responsibly said don’t be among rotters of the flesh. Why? Because the glutton shall come to poverty. Drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags. He will suffer temporally for his sin. He will suffer temporally if the civil magistrate is doing his job and he is a glutton and a drunkard and rebelling against his parents—because he will be executed. He will suffer temporal problems here.

Now, it’s important to recognize that the context of this was the Roman Empire and the Roman Empire suffered temporally because of its gluttony, its reliance upon alcoholic highs and upon its sexual immorality. The Roman disaster has been said that it was gluttony, drunkenness or immorality that did them in. One writer saying that they dug graves with their teeth, they killed themselves by illicit indulgence and imbalmed themselves with alcohol.

There was temporal judgment. So happens there was a guy who lived in the 1st century AD when this epistle was written. Name is Marcus Gabius Apicius, a Roman epicure. He squandered his entire fortune, the equivalent of about $4 million apparently on rare foods from all over the world. And when his money ran out and he could no longer buy food, he hung himself. He suffered the end of his gluttony, a temporal judgment, destruction.

But this destruction isn’t just temporal. It is eternal. Now again, you’ve got to understand, we’re trying to give you motivation here. That’s what Paul is doing to avoid this error in your lives and avoid imitating people who have this error in their lives. Be warned that the end of gluttonous, idolatrous gluttony is eternal destruction.

Galatians 5:21—remember we talked about that list last week where we have drunkenness and revelings hooked together. And revelings were these food feasts that they would have along with the wine feast, drunkenness, revelings linked together. And we pointed that out in Galatians 5:21 last week. But the thing you need to know is that verse goes on to say, Paul says, “I told you before, I’ll tell you again in time past that they who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”

They don’t inherit the kingdom of God. Their end is destruction. Now, the end—I point out this temporal as well as the eternal end because they’re linked. The word that’s used has the connotation that the end is not simply what when this activity ceases. As one writer put it—Ararat beat was his name and commenting on the Corinthians book—he said that the end is not simply the point at which something ceases but the goal toward which it tends and in which existing forces find their full outworking and the whole its consummation.

So the end is not just the end point. It’s the process that takes you to that end point. And gluttony has a process that is harmful to your body physically. It’s harmful to society. It’s harmful to the church. It is destruction to those elements. And finally, its goal is worked out fully in the glutton being denied the kingdom of heaven.

Idolatrous gluttony has its end point prediction, destruction, damnation, and it has a working toward that as well. The losses I said of physical health, religious health, etc. along the road are simply signposts saying you’re going toward that end, that final destruction, which is eternal damnation.

So overeating is not a laughing matter. It is not something to be taken lightly. It is something to be avoided. And if we’re going to err, we should err on the side of not eating.

I mentioned last week, we started very deliberately by telling you what gluttony wasn’t. And I want you to be sure that you don’t call God’s good things bad. We said that you can’t even tell by physical size who a glutton is many times. Sometimes physical size is not an indication that all is true. But it’s also true—as we pointed out in the debt series and as I was talking to one of you during the week who pointed out to me—we may not be able to get an exact picture of what debt is all the time but we know usually when we’re in debt we know we should get out of it. Most of us know when we are tending toward gluttony and tending toward eating too much we should get out of it. We should discipline ourselves. It is a bad thing.

Now Dante, in his purgatorial—remember we’ve talked about that many times during this series. Dante speaks of this end at several points, this destruction. I’ll read a couple of lines from Purgatorio, the sixth cornice, which is the cornice of gluttony. He says:

“The sockets of their eyes were caves agape, their faces death pale, and their skin so wasted that nothing but the gnarled bones gave it shape. I doubt that even Erysichthon’s skin, even when he most feared that he would starve, had drawn so tight to the bone or worn so thin. Behold, I thought, although I did not speak, the face of those who lost Jerusalem when Miriam ripped her son with her own beak.”

Now what’s he talking about? He’s saying that in gluttony, in the cornices of gluttony, the gluttons are pictured as being completely emaciated—bones essentially, just skin and bones and very little skin. And he mentions two things there: he mentions Erysichthon and I need an interpreter for Dante’s Purgatorio as probably many of you would not being as well trained in history as we should be. And the interpretation of this was that Erysichthon in Greek mythology apparently mocked the goddess Ceres by felling an oak in her sacred grove. Ceres visited an insatiable hunger upon him. He ate up all of his own substance and his daughter in order to buy more food. He consumed that food and finally devoured his own limbs.

Gluttony consumes its own soul. And that’s a picture of the end of gluttony, the destruction we’re talking about, and the process that leads toward that end.

The Miriam reference to the fall of Jerusalem was based upon the supposedly historical account of a woman named Miriam who during the Roman siege of Jerusalem got hungry, boiled her own child, and ate half of it. Terrible pictures, but pictures to help us remember that gluttony has a final price to pay.

Okay. Its end is destruction. Its theology—the belly is its god. Whose god is their belly. Now, I said before that some people think there are two different ways to look at this. First of all, you need to know the belly—the term used for belly here is used in the scriptures on occasion for the actual belly. Remember we said last week Matthew 15:17 where Jesus said, “Hey, food just comes in, goes into the belly and goes out in the draft.” Well, that word belly is what’s used here. Same word. So it does refer to the belly, although over half the references are to the womb. It refers to the lower body cavities, but usually it’s used also as a term of the belly.

And if you think this passage is primarily oriented to the Judaizing element, their god is their belly because of the reference to and the insistence upon dietary laws as a means of salvation. And so that’s why he says it there. On the other hand, the libertines of course—the actual appetite itself, the sensual appetite of the belly—is what becomes their god.

Now, it’s interesting here again to remember the context. And in Roman mythology again, Euripides wrote of the Cyclops. Remember the Cyclops, the big one-eyed monster. The Cyclops said this in Euripides’ account. Obviously, he’s mythical, right? But anyway, the Cyclops said, “My flocks which I sacrifice to no one but to myself and not to the gods and to this my belly, the greatest of the gods. For to eat and drink each day and to give oneself no trouble. This is the god for wise men.”

So Euripides wrote of Cyclops that actually his god was literally his belly. And he actually said he kept tended these sheep and sacrificed them nothing but to his belly, his physical appetite.

Now, we said last week, what does a god do? A god is a source of comfort and joy. And some people turn to food and turn to the satisfaction of their belly for comfort and joy. We won’t go over that again. Look at your outlines from last week. And the final point—those four ways that you can abuse the good gifts of God’s food by looking at them for ultimate comfort and joy. But I do want to make a couple of other points about the god being their belly, being their god.

And that is that their belly becomes the source and food becomes the source of eternal value, of ultimate value. And this is really the idolatrous nature of gluttony. Again, there’s a Roman example of this. The Roman satirist Juvenal wrote that in their all-engrossing care for their bellies and their amusements, the Romans—after they were taken over—they asked no other favors of their emperor than bread and circuses. That’s all they cared about was bread and circuses. That was their source of ultimate value—was satisfying their flesh and satisfying their desires.

Now, I want us to turn briefly here to Matthew 23:16 and following. Please turn that in your Bibles. Matthew 23. We looked at this a couple of weeks ago in terms of greed. And remember, he talks in here about the Pharisees—the blind guides, the blind leading the blind, as it were. And in verse 16, he says, “Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing. But whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor.”

In other words, they place more value in the gold of the temple than the temple itself. Remember, we said that you’ve got God in the throne room of the temple essentially and then the temple is a picture of the beauty of the approach toward God signifying God’s beauty and desirability. And they got hung up on the gold instead of getting inside the temple to where God was. So they were greedy. And the greedy man in his fully developed sense—full-blown idolatrous greed—values physical items more than he values the God who created them. He worships the creature instead of the creator.

And what’s interesting here is Jesus goes on then to link greed and what I believe is—He says in verse 18, “Whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing. But whosoever sweareth by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty. Ye fools and blind, for whether is greater the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift. Whoso therefore shall swear by the altar sweareth by it, and by all things thereon.”

Okay, what’s Jesus talking about? Well, he’s saying that just like they swore by the gold of the temple, thinking that more important, they swore by what was ever placed on the altar. So you bring an ox or a sheep, whatever it is, it’s placed upon the altar and you swear by that instead of by the altar.

Now remember when we talked about the altar—the family altar—that the altar was essentially a table and the table is where food was sacrificed. But the altar is a picture of God and it is God’s presence that gives value to whatever is placed on that altar. You take that same food to a different altar and it didn’t have any value because it’s not God’s altar. The altar is a picture of God.

They placed ultimate value, however, not in God but on the thing that was sitting on God’s table, the food. And you remember that the offerings—we talked about the family altar—the offerings in the old covenant, some of them were eaten by people. They place more value on this food that was laid on there, which they then could consume, than they did the altar.

And so the gluttonous man does the same thing. You’ve got value here from God. And God shows his value through the created order. And the greedy man is idolatrous because he places more value in the created order than the creator. The gluttonous man is even worse in a way. He brings it even closer to home, so to speak. He places more value in his own body—its desires, its stomach, and the food that feeds it—than in the God who created him or created the food.

And so it’s idolatry. It’s getting hung up at the pictures of things that God gives us to show us true value in himself. It’s getting hung up on the food on the altar instead of the altar itself. And when we come to have dinner together, for instance, in our homes, if we place ultimate value on the dinner and the food instead of remembering behind it the God who makes the altar that isn’t made by human hands—it’s made by God that represents him, represents Jesus Christ, the stone cut without human hands—then we’ve slipped into this thinking that is essentially idolatrous.

Now, we’re going to do that a lot. I’ll bet you everybody here does it all the time. Why is that? Because, again, we were raised good secularists. We were raised to think there is only value in what we can see and touch and feel with our eyes and in the longings in our stomach. It is work for us to get rid of those idolatrous notions from our head. And it’s work that this passage should encourage you to do in your homes and in your life.

Because if you don’t rid them, eventually you’ll fall into that idolatrous thinking and reject the gospel of Christ. You’re going for eternal damnation. And alongside the road, God is going to give you pictures of that through your girth and through other things we’re going to mention here as we get toward the end to evaluate your own relationship to food.

Okay. So his god is his belly and that’s all he cares about is what he eats. He places his ultimate value, he gets comfort and joy from eating, he places his ultimate value in his food—the food on the altar instead of the altar itself. Romans 1 worships the created things rather than the creator.

Dante understood this. He, in the first reign of gluttony—the thing given to drive home the sin of gluttony to the people—the first reign of gluttony he had a reference to Eve. And again I’m going to read from the commentary on Dante’s Purgatorio that I have available to me:

“Gluttony in Dante’s view is sinful because it rejects God in favor of appetite. The glutton thinks of his belly rather than of his soul. Eve’s act is therefore the supreme gluttony in that it lost God to all mankind until the coming of Christ.”

And so the picture of Eve is another one we talked about last week. It’s a picture of placing ultimate value in our appetites instead of the God whose presence she lost as a result of her gluttonous sin.

Third, a God exercises mastery over people. Mastery. 1 Corinthians 6:12: “All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. Meats for the belly, belly for meats, but God shall destroy both it and them.”

Very important. Some people say, “Do you live to eat or do you eat to live?” Do you have a belly so you can eat or do you have food so you can have a belly? Meats for the belly or belly for meats? Neither. Neither. God’s going to destroy both. You eat—remember reminding yourself of the ultimate value in God. And if you allow your stomach or the food of your environment to have ultimate control over you, you have fallen into the temptation, the tendency to move toward idolatrous gluttony.

When food begins to exercise a mastery over us, that is when gluttony begins to set in. When it starts to control our lives, and I’m going to give you some real pointed examples of that toward the end of the sermon.

Chrysostom said this: “Thou hast received a belly that thou mayest feed, not distend it, that thou mayest have the mastery over it, not have it a mistress over thee, so that it may minister to thee for the nourishment of the other parts, not that thou mayest minister to it, not that thou mayest exceed limits. The sea, when it passes its bounds, does not work so many evils as the belly doth to our body together with our soul when we let it pass its bounds.”

So Chrysostom understood that behind the sin of gluttony is letting the body have mastery over us. Chrysostom, by the way, was very insistent upon helping the poor. And that’s probably one of the reasons why He wrote so specifically and strongly in many places against the sin of gluttony because gluttony denies social responsibilities. It’s focused totally on oneself. It’s a collapsing inward as it were.

Gregory the Great wrote of five manifestations of the sin of gluttony to watch for and avoid. These manifestations indicate that food is beginning to have mastery over you. I’ll try to read them fairly slowly.

One, eating before it’s time. Gregory said that’s an indication. You eat before time. It’s time to eat—beginning to give in to the mastery of food.

Two, getting too delicate food or drink. Being too careful in terms of getting the stuff that just tastes wonderful to us all the time. Again, it’s giving into this instead of being satisfied with the daily bread.

Three, eating too much and beyond measure. Eating too much and beyond measure.

Four, fidiousness. With great attention paid to the preparation and dressing of food. So undue preparation in terms of your food also can be a sign of gluttony.

And fifth, to eat too greedily. Gregory wrote that these are the five fingers in the devil’s hand wherewith he draws folks into sin.

Okay, so the gluttonous man—his stomach exercises mastery, control over him. His stomach is seen as the source of comfort and joy satisfying those desires and his stomach is seen—the food is seen as the ultimate value in the world instead of the value that ultimately lies in God who gives us food as a picture of his value.

So his God is his belly.

Third, it says that his end is destruction, his God is his belly, and whose glory is in their shame. Now, I mentioned the Judaizing element. The Judaizers thought that through circumcision is a way of salvation. They were glorying in their circumcision. There’s lots of passages that talk about that. In fact, in the book of Galatians, he talks about them wanting to circumcise the Galatians. They could boast in the Galatians’ flesh.

And one of the things Paul is doing here, I think, is that he’s saying that you glory and shame things. You glory in that part of the body which certainly created by God and good is nonetheless something to be hidden and not to be gloried in. Okay, it’s spoken of in some passages of scriptures as being, you know, more of the private parts of the body and those are the very things you glory in.

He says it’s just as bad as the glutton who glory in their physical appetites and glutting themselves, or in the sensualists who delight themselves in sexual immorality. Remember the Corinthians were really proud of the fact that they had that kind of sensuality going on in their church and they seem to be proud almost of the fact that they had gluttony at the Lord’s table. Isn’t this a great thing? These people are such recipients of grace because they sin so much. They gloried in what was wrong. They gloried in things that really would be brought to judgment by God.

From Jude 13, we talked about Jude last week and the gluttonous eaters, the revelings and the specific correlation there as to the love feast. He’s talking about those people that really hurt your love feast. And in verse 13, we read—well, let’s see, verse 12 and following:

“These men are those who are hidden reefs in your love feast. Remember, that’s one of the few references in the New Testament to the agape, the rejoicing feast, the love feast together. These guys are at the agape. They feast with you without fear. Mentioned that last week. Caring for themselves. Clouds without water, carried along by winds, autumn trees without fruit, doubly dead, uprooted, wild waves of the sea casting up their own shame like foam, wandering stars, casting up their own shame like foam.”

They seem to almost glory in these revelings, these daily occurrences of gluttony that they would indulge themselves in and particularly in the gluttony they would indulge themselves in during the agape or the love feast together. And so gluttons do that.

Another interesting thing to think about here—we’ve talked about this before. I say that their doxology is in painful things because the word for glory here is doxa. The basic word in the New Testament for glory—it means honor. And you remember we said that the Old Testament the word that is essentially the word for glory meant weight. And to have glory is to have weight or substance to it. That’s the physical indicator that God gives us of something glorious. And so we said that gold coins are better than plastic money or paper money because they have weight to them. They have some glory to them, honor.

Well, the glutton thinks that his larger girth is more glorious. He takes pride in the very fact of his own weight. That’s the word play I think that Paul is doing here, the reference that he’s making. And so he glories in his own what should be his own shame—that he has so much weight because he has not mastered his body and he has become idolatrous because of it.

Okay? And all this stems from their worldview. Their worldview, Paul says, they mind who mind earthly things as opposed to the heavenly things. They mind earthly things. That word for mind means to pay attention to. In Matthew 16:23, Jesus says to Peter, “Get thee behind me, Satan. Thou art an offense unto me. For thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.” Savorest thou—mind the things that are of God, not the things of God, but the things of men.

The same word being used there. Then in Romans 8, we read, “They that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh. They that are after the spirit, the things of the spirit.” Their worldview had become fleshly as it were—instead of the spirit, disassociated from God and his good graces and from heaven in that sense and totally given over to the base or lower impulses of the physical created order.

Remember when Richard preached on wisdom—from below, a reference in James 3:15. This wisdom, the wisdom from below, descendeth not from above. It is earthly. It’s bound to this idea of satisfying sensual lust etc. And it goes on to say it