1 Corinthians 10:1-5: in context

Paul is warning the Corinthians against a dangerous presumption, and he does it by pointing back to the exodus generation. Notice how many times he uses the word all. Our fathers, he says, were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ. Everyone in that generation shared the same experiences. They all walked through the parted sea, all lived under the guiding cloud, all ate the manna, all drank the miraculous water. By every measure they were a privileged, sacramentally saturated people, all of them together.

And then comes the hinge word, and it falls like a hammer. Nevertheless, Paul says, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were struck down in the wilderness. Most. Of a generation that had every spiritual privilege, that had literally been fed and led by God in visible ways day after day, most did not make it to the promised land. They died in the desert through unfaithfulness. The shared experiences, the miracles they had all witnessed, the spiritual food they had all eaten, did not carry them across. Participation turned out to be a very different thing from perseverance, and belonging to the privileged group was no guarantee at all.

That is a pointed warning against a comfortable assumption. It is easy to lean on my religious belonging, that I was baptized, that I am part of the community, that I have had real spiritual experiences, and to treat those as a settled guarantee. Paul says a whole generation had all of that, every bit of it, and most still fell in the wilderness. Am I quietly presuming that my experiences and my belonging secure me, when the thing they did not secure, for most of the exodus generation, was actually following God to the end?