The symbols themselves are nothing. Days of the week are pagan, owning a black cat is pagan, covering your mouth when you yawn is pagan. Things left over from pagan times saturate our lives, including yours.
Lucky for us pagans own none of it, God does. A pagan symbol is nothing and less than nothing. It only means something when you imbue it with meaning.
Read over 1 Corinthians 8.
What was important, wasn't avoiding food sacrificed to idols but rather your faith and how it relates to others.
4 So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that “An idol is nothing at all in the world” and that “There is no God but one.”
Establishes that the idol is nothing and that there is but one God.
7 But not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled.
Due to the level of faith and maturity the person has within themselves, the idol and food sacrificed to it feels sinful. This is not based upon the idol itself since it is as meaningful as yesterdays tossed away banana peal. But until the person truly sees and feels this within themselves the idol continues to hold meaning to them. Even if this is sinful meaning. It would make them feel unclean.
9 Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak.
But if we are mature enough in faith so that we can eat such food without feeling sin or unclean or anything other than grateful for normal food, then what we need to be is careful that our faith is not a stumbling block to the person who is not so far along their walk with God.
11 So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. 12 When you sin against them in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. 13 Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause them to fall.
This is what the mature Christian needs to be concerned about, not the idol or symbol itself but the weaker brother with him. It is causing someone else to fall that should occupy our thoughts. That is serious the symbol itself is not.
What God disproves of is idol worship and causing a weaker brother to stumble. But idol worship can be anything, it doesn't have to be a pagan symbol it could be money, it could be self it could be materialism.
I think it's too easy for a new Christian to focus on some pagan symbol like an Celtic Cross in a shop window while completely missing the fact that their own idol is the car sitting in their garage that they shine up daily.
Romans 14
“I am convinced, being fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for that person it is unclean. If your brother or sister is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love.
For those who can eat or touch or use something with a clear conscious really for them it should be about being aware of how what they do affects a weaker brother or sister not about the symbol or idol itself.
A church should never use pagan symbols because the world is made up of non Christians and weak Christians and if a church uses them anyway there is the issue. We have become a stumbling block to the weak and are not acting in love.
