It begins with a truth so large that we forget to live by it. Before Psalm 24 ever reaches its famous gates and its King of glory, it plants that one flag in the ground — the words at the head of this page: the earth, and all its fulness, is the Lord’s. Not some of it. Not the religious parts of it. All of it — the soil and the seas, the harvest and the herds, and the very people who walk upon it. Everything He made He called good (Genesis 1:31). This is the doorstep of a great and freeing truth, and most of us cross it every day without noticing that we are standing on holy ground.
It all belongs to God
For if the earth is the Lord’s, then nothing in it is unclean in itself. And that single truth is the foundation of Christian liberty. Here is the whole matter in one sentence, and every line that follows is only this sentence walking into a different room: because the earth is the Lord’s, the believer is free — and because he loves, he lays that freedom down.
That one sentence reaches further than it looks. It settled the fiercest argument of the early church — whether to eat meat that had been offered to idols — and it still quietly settles ours: the Christmas tree, the wine glass, the film, the hundred “may I, or mustn’t I?” questions of an ordinary believing week — the very debates almost everyone has heard argued, sometimes heatedly, and most of us have argued ourselves. The surprising thing is that the Bible settles them all with a single key, and the key is not a rule but a truth. What follows traces that one key from the idol’s altar of the first century down to the modern table, and watches it open every one of those doors — while never once unlocking the door marked sin.
Jesus cleared the ground
Jesus settled the deepest layer first. Against long centuries of anxious rules about clean and unclean food, He said, “There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man” (Mark 7:15). Mark adds the quiet thunderclap in three words — “purging all meats” (7:19). Defilement, Jesus taught, is not a property that clings to things; it rises out of the heart. The food on the table is innocent. The question was never really about the object on the table. It is about the person seated at it.
The test case: meat offered to idols
That is why Paul could settle the fiercest controversy of his day with Psalm 24 in his hand. In Corinth almost every cut of meat in the market had first been offered to an idol in a pagan temple and then sold at the butcher’s stall. Tender believers agonized: does eating it make me a partner in idolatry? Paul’s answer was startlingly free:
“Whatsoever is sold in the shambles (meat market), that eat, asking no question for conscience sake: for the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” — 1 Corinthians 10:25-26
An idol is nothing. The meat is God’s good gift. Receive it with thanksgiving and eat, and do not go hunting for problems where God has left you at liberty. And then, in the very next breath, he bent that liberty beneath a greater law. If someone points to the meat and says, “This was offered unto idols,” then do not eat — “for his sake that shewed it, and for conscience sake: Conscience, I say, not thine own, but of the other” (10:28-29). Not because the meat had become defiled; it had not. But for love. “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth” (8:1). Your freedom is real, yet it is not the highest thing in the room; your brother is. “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient… all things edify not” (10:23).
The fence beside the open gate
So the two rails are laid down: liberty, because it is all God’s; and love, which will gladly set that liberty aside. But before we leave Corinth, notice the fence Paul builds right beside the open gate. The same chapter that frees you to buy idol-meat in the market also says, “Flee from idolatry” (10:14). You may eat the meat; you may not sit and worship at the idol’s table. Liberty is not license. It covers things indifferent — never sin itself. Keep that fence in view, and the whole matter stays honest.
The same key fits your front room
Paul did not leave the principle in the meat market. He handed us the key and told us plainly that it fits other doors: “One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind” (Romans 14:5); “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday” (Colossians 2:16). The truth was always larger than dinner. Which brings it, at last, into our own front rooms.
Consider the Christmas tree. Its customs carry a tangle of old pre-Christian threads — midwinter feasts, evergreen boughs, the light kindled against the longest night. Does that pedigree defile it? By the very key Paul used, no: an old solstice is nothing, and the earth is the Lord’s; a thing with a pagan past can be received and re-aimed, kept unto the Lord in faith and thanksgiving, made to point at the coming of Christ. And if that unsettles you, notice that you already live this way without a flicker of alarm — you say Thursday, which is Thor’s day, and January, named for the god Janus, and never once suppose you are bowing to idols. Those were reclaimed long ago. The earth, and even its calendar, is the Lord’s. Yet the believer who cannot keep such a day in faith should not keep it, “for whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Romans 14:23); and the one who keeps it must not despise the one who abstains, nor the one who abstains judge the one who keeps it (14:3-4). Two consciences, one Lord, and love forbidding either to sneer.
“But Jesus drank wine”
Consider the glass. Someone always says, “But Jesus drank wine” — and it is true; He made it at Cana, and was slandered as a “winebibber” for eating and drinking with sinners (Matthew 11:19). Scripture nowhere condemns wine itself — it can even speak of it kindly, as a gift that “maketh glad the heart of man” (Psalm 104:15). What it condemns, everywhere and without exception, is drunkenness: “be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess” (Ephesians 5:18). But that fact settles far less than it seems, for it proves only liberty, never obligation. And here the modern road turns dark in a way the ancient one did not. Diluted wine at a table, in a world where the water itself could kill you, was food. The reigning motive of modern drinking, and the whole trajectory of a drinking culture, is the effect itself — the buzz, the numbing, the high. And the moment the aim becomes the intoxication, a man has reached past the thing Scripture allows and closed his hand around the very thing it forbids. The question, as always, was never the liquid; it was the longing.
Free to abstain — without judging
So a believer may abstain — as John the Baptist did, as the Nazarite vowed, as the Rechabites were honored by God for doing (Jeremiah 35) — and call it not law but consecration and love. He may guard his eyes from what he once watched, saying with David, “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes” (Psalm 101:3), for the same reason and by the same freedom. He holds his standard for himself, keeps it before God with a clear conscience, and prays for — never looks down upon — the brother who has not yet seen as he sees. That is the hardest and most Christlike balance of all: a firm conviction and an open heart, held at the same time, in the same hand.
Do all to the glory of God
And so it returns to where it began, higher than any rule can reach. The earth is the Lord’s — so the believer walks in freedom and gratitude rather than superstition; he holds his own convictions with a settled and untroubled conscience; he refuses to judge or to despise the brother who reckons differently; and through all of it, whether he eats or abstains, keeps the day or keeps it not, he does one single thing:
“Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” — 1 Corinthians 10:31
Freedom, held by love, and spent for glory — on ground that was His the whole time. The fulness of the earth was never ours to own, and never ours to fear. It was His. It still is. And that is the truth that sets the table, and the conscience, free.