Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church, but now an Orthodox priest,

serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

So we'll go ahead and get started.

When we get started in just a minute, we'll be picking up,

we'll stop sort of in the middle of a chapter.

So we'll be picking up in St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians,

chapter 3, verse 18, which is where we left off last time.

Just to sort of quickly review, St. Paul is writing this letter to the Corinthians,

and he's going to write several more, because there are a lot of problems in the community in Corinth.

We've already been tipped off to some of them, even in these first couple of chapters.

The first one that St. Paul has been dealing with

has been that the sort of factions had arisen, where different people had formed sort of fan

clubs of different apostles. Some people were saying that they were, oh, we're Pauline, and then

other people were saying they're Petrine, St. Peter or Apollos or someone else,

and St. Paul has been very quick and deliberate to refute that. He's pointed out that it's only

Christ who died for them, it's only Christ they should follow, and that they as Christians

have the opportunity to build on the foundation that St. Paul laid in their life in order to produce something beautiful and something that will last forever.

And he's been doing sort of a comparative, the other major theme that he's introduced in these first couple of chapters that we're definitely going to get more

into later is he's already been by playing with the vocabulary, been talking about paganism

that Corinth was, of course, rife with, right, the Roman religion, with the mysteries of Demeter

and how the pagans sort of seek wisdom through initiation into these mysteries

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