The Lordship of Christ and the Babble of Idols Text: 1 Corinthians 12:1-3
Introduction: The War for Your Voice
We live in an age drowning in chatter. Everyone has a platform, everyone has a voice, and everyone is speaking. From the endless scroll of social media to the talking heads on the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the air is thick with opinions, declarations, curses, and confessions. But in all this noise, a fundamental question is almost entirely ignored: who is speaking? Or, more to the point, what spirit is speaking through whom?
The modern world, in its sophisticated secularism, believes it has moved beyond spirits and spiritual realities. We are told that we are autonomous individuals, masters of our own words, driven by reason and personal preference. But this is a profound self-deception. The Bible teaches that there are fundamentally only two sources of speech in the world: the Spirit of God and the spirit of the age. There is no neutral ground. You are either a mouthpiece for the living God or a ventriloquist's dummy for a dumb idol.
The Corinthian church was a messy church, but it was a gifted church. Paul tells us at the beginning of this letter that they were not lacking in any spiritual gift (1 Cor. 1:7). Yet, for all their giftedness, they were profoundly ignorant. They were spiritual, but in many ways unspiritual. They were fascinated with the more spectacular manifestations of the Spirit, but they were failing to make the most basic and necessary distinctions. They were like children who had been given a chest full of sharp, powerful tools but had not been taught how to tell the difference between a chisel and a hammer, or worse, between a tool and a weapon. Their ignorance was creating chaos, division, and arrogance.
Paul begins this crucial section on spiritual gifts not by listing the gifts, but by laying a foundation. Before you can understand the charismata, the gifts of grace, you must understand the Lord who gives them and the Spirit who distributes them. Before you can properly evaluate the various utterances in the church, you must have a clear, non-negotiable test. And that test is profoundly simple. It all comes down to what a person says about Jesus. This is the spiritual litmus test for all time. It cuts through all the fog, all the religious experience, all the pious-sounding babble, and it gets right to the heart of the matter: Who is Jesus?
The Text
Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant. You know that when you were pagans, you were being led astray to the mute idols, however you were led. Therefore I make known to you that no one speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus is accursed,” and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit.
(1 Corinthians 12:1-3 LSB)
Ignorance is Not an Option (v. 1)
Paul opens with a direct and necessary exhortation.
"Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant." (1 Corinthians 12:1)
The phrase "now concerning" is a formula Paul uses throughout this letter to address specific questions the Corinthians had asked him. They wanted to know about the spiritual things, the pneumatikon. This word refers to the whole realm of the Spirit's activity and manifestations. The Corinthians were not ignorant in the sense of being unaware of these things; they were swimming in them. Their problem was a lack of discernment. They were ignorant of the principles that govern the right use of these gifts. They were like a man who knows how to turn on every appliance in his house at once but doesn't understand what a circuit breaker is for.
Paul's desire that they not be ignorant is a standing rebuke to much of the church today. One part of the church, in a reaction against charismatic excess, has decided that the safest course is to be willfully ignorant. They have boxed up the Holy Spirit, put Him on a shelf labeled "For Apostolic Use Only," and settled down for a quiet, orderly, and powerless existence. Another part of the church has thrown open the doors to every spiritual manifestation without any doctrinal discernment whatever, resulting in chaos, emotionalism, and outright heresy. Both are forms of ignorance, and Paul will not have it.
We are commanded to understand these things. We are to be mature, discerning Christians who know how to test the spirits (1 John 4:1). Ignorance about our gifts and callings, as Paul will show, stems from a fundamental ignorance about Christ's total lordship. If you don't know who is in charge, you will not know how the household is supposed to be run.
Your Pagan Voicelessness (v. 2)
Before explaining the work of the Holy Spirit, Paul reminds them of their past. To understand where you are, you must remember where you came from.
"You know that when you were pagans, you were being led astray to the mute idols, however you were led." (1 Corinthians 12:2 LSB)
This is a devastating critique of their former lives. Before Christ, they were pagans, Gentiles, outside the covenant. And what characterized their paganism? They were "led astray." The verb here is in the passive voice. They were not in control. They were being carried along, swept away by cultural currents, demonic influences, and ecstatic frenzies. Pagan worship, particularly in places like Corinth, often involved frenzied states, ecstatic utterances, and a loss of self-control. They thought they were having a profound spiritual experience, but in reality, they were being manipulated.
And where were they being led? "To the mute idols." This is the great biblical punchline about paganism. The idols, for all the frenzy and noise they inspire in their worshippers, are themselves dumb. They are silent. They have mouths, but they cannot speak (Psalm 115:5). They are dead blocks of wood and stone. The irony is sharp: the noisy, ecstatic pagans were being led astray to worship things that could not say a word. Their worship was a frantic attempt to fill a deafening silence.
This is the state of every unbeliever. You are being led, whether you know it or not. You are being carried along by the spirit of the age to worship mute idols, whether it is the idol of the state, the idol of sex, the idol of self, or the idol of mammon. And these idols cannot speak. They cannot give life. They cannot forgive. They cannot guide. They can only receive your worship and leave you empty, exhausted, and enslaved. Paul is reminding the Corinthians, "Don't mistake spiritual frenzy for the work of the Holy Spirit. You had plenty of that when you were pagans. The Spirit of God brings order, clarity, and a specific, articulate confession."
The Great Divide (v. 3)
Having reminded them of their silent past, Paul now gives them the foundational test for all true spiritual speech.
"Therefore I make known to you that no one speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus is accursed,” and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit." (1 Corinthians 12:3 LSB)
Here is the dividing line of the universe. It is a stark, binary distinction. There are two and only two possible confessions concerning Jesus. Every spiritual utterance, every sermon, every book, every song, every prophecy falls on one side of this line or the other.
First, the negative test. "No one speaking by the Spirit of God says, 'Jesus is accursed.'" The word for accursed is anathema. It means to be devoted to destruction, under a divine curse. It is what Paul wished he could be for the sake of his Jewish kinsmen (Rom. 9:3). It is what he declares anyone who preaches another gospel to be (Gal. 1:8-9). To say "Jesus is anathema" is the ultimate blasphemy. It is to say that the one who hung on the tree, who was made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13), deserved to be there for His own sin. It is the confession of hell. No matter how spiritual someone seems, no matter how many "miracles" they perform, if their teaching and their life lead to the conclusion that Jesus is anything less than the glorious Son of God, they are not speaking by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, and His central mission is to glorify Christ (John 16:14). He will never, ever lead anyone to curse the one He has been sent to exalt.
Then, the positive test. "No one can say, 'Jesus is Lord,' except by the Holy Spirit." This is one of the most potent statements in all of Scripture about the nature of salvation. To say "Jesus is Lord" is not merely to mouth a few syllables. The demons know who Jesus is, but they do not confess Him as Lord. In the context of the Roman Empire, the ultimate political and religious confession was Kaiser Kyrios, Caesar is Lord. To declare Iesous Kyrios, Jesus is Lord, was a direct act of treason against the empire and its gods. It was to declare that your ultimate allegiance was not to Rome, not to any human authority, but to the risen Christ who is enthroned at the right hand of God, ruling over all things.
To say this and mean it, to confess it from the heart, is not something a man can do on his own. It is not a product of human reason, emotional decision, or moral effort. It is a supernatural act. It is the direct result of the Holy Spirit performing a miracle of regeneration in the human heart. The ability to look at the crucified Nazarene and declare Him to be the sovereign ruler of the cosmos is a gift of pure grace, worked in us by the Spirit of God. This confession is the foundational gift of the Spirit, from which all other gifts flow. Without this, all other "gifts" are just noise, the clanging cymbal of pagan frenzy.
Conclusion: Whose Mouthpiece Are You?
This passage forces a question upon every one of us. What is the basic confession of your life? I am not asking what you say in church on Sunday morning. I am asking what your life says on Tuesday afternoon. Your words, your actions, your ambitions, your fears, your loves, they are all making a confession. They are either saying, in a thousand different ways, "Jesus is Lord," or they are saying, by default, "Jesus is accursed." There is no middle ground.
If you have never confessed that Jesus is Lord, it is because you cannot. You are, like the pagans at Corinth, being led astray to mute idols, and you are spiritually dead. The only remedy is for the Spirit of God to invade your heart, just as He invaded the dark, formless void at creation, and speak light. He must grant you the gift of repentance and faith, so that you might make the true confession.
And for those of us who have made this confession, we must understand that it is the bedrock of everything else. Our unity in the church is not based on having the same secondary gifts, but on confessing the same Lord. Our discernment is not based on a feeling or an experience, but on whether or not a teaching or a spirit glorifies Jesus as Lord. And our purpose in exercising any gift is not to draw attention to ourselves, but to build up the body of the one we call Lord.
The world is full of voices, all clamoring for our allegiance. But only one voice gives life. The Holy Spirit does not babble. He does not lead to ecstatic confusion. He speaks, and He says one thing, over and over, in a thousand different ways, through a million different redeemed lives: Jesus is Lord.