BIG IDEA:
EIGHT GUIDELINES TO ENCOURAGE BELIEVERS TO GLORIFY GOD IN OUR PHYSICAL BODY
INTRODUCTION:
Paul has been talking about the subject of avoiding sexual immorality; but this passage has a much wider application to how believers should view the physical body which the Lord has provided. Sometimes we get so caught up with the discussion of what happens with our spirit that we act as though the body is inconsequential. When you see the importance that God places on the resurrection it is evident that the physical body is quite important indeed. We have the opportunity to yield the members of our body as instruments to sin or as instruments of righteousness to glorify the Creator who has redeemed us with the precious price of the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ understood the importance of His physical body:
“But a body you have prepared for Me . . . behold, I have come (in the scroll of the book it is written of Me) to do your will, O God.” We need to actively harness our physical body to be the instrument by which we carry out the will of God here on this earth.
Adewuya: What is freedom, and how does it relate to sexual purity and the believer’s use of his or her body? These are the issues Paul is about to address in this section. First Corinthians 6:12–20 addresses a case of fornication (a broad term used for all forms of sexual impurity) in the Corinthian Church. The Corinthians have failed to exercise sexual purity (6:13–20), once again thinking that their freedom in Christ meant license to sin (6:12). But since they had been bought at great cost, and their bodies were the temple of the Holy Spirit, they ought not to go beyond the bounds of true grace.
Anthony Thiselton: Paul chooses to elaborate on how freedom and self-discipline relate to each other to anticipate how his readers might seek to sidestep his warnings about manipulative and immoral conduct: “We are free from the law, Paul!” But, he insists, such license contradicts what it is to be “in Christ.” “Freedom” is not unqualified license to gratify the desires of the self, not least because the new Christian self has a new identity as a new creation “in Christ.”
Gordon Fee: The net result is one of the more important theological passages in the NT about the human body. It should forever lay to rest the implicit dualism of so much that has been passed off as Christian, where the body is rejected, subdued, or indulged because it is of no significance for — or is even a hindrance to — “real salvation,” which has to do with the “soul.” At the same time in the current self-centeredness of so much of Western culture, Paul’s emphasis could stand to get a radical new hearing: that our individual bodies do not belong to us alone in a selfish, self-centered way; rather they belong to Christ, purchased by him through redemption and now indwelt by the Spirit so as to be God’s own sanctuary. Thus Paul here individualizes the metaphor used earlier regarding the church (3:16–17). There, the body of believers gathered in Christ’s name was seen as God’s temple, God’s dwelling place by the Spirit. Here, Paul reenvisions that reality for individual believers.
Paul Gardner: Main Idea: Christians belong to the Lord who bought them at a price. They must recognize that they have been incorporated into one body with Christ. Therefore, what they do with their bodies matters before the Lord. Any form of sexual immorality indicates an abuse of the body and an obscuring of community holiness.
Immorality Is Incompatible with Union with Christ (6:12–17)
- Christian Freedom Has Its Boundaries (6:12–13)
- The Body is Not for Sexual Immorality but for the Lord (6:13–17)
- The Body Is for the Lord (6:13)
- The Lord Will Raise the Body (6:14)
- Bodies Are Members of Christ and Not to Be Joined to Another (6:15–17)
Community Identity Requires Holiness (6:18–20)
- Sexual Sin Is Sin against the Body (6:18)
- The Body Is the Temple of the Holy Spirit (6:19)
- The Body Is to Glorify God (6:20)
I. (:12a) PURSUE WHAT IS PROFITABLE, NOT JUST ALLOWABLE – IN THE CONTEXT OF OUR NEW CHRISTIAN LIBERTIES
“All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable.”
Richard Hays: The idea of giving up their personal prerogatives was objectionable to many of the Corinthians. Indeed, their conception of “wisdom” placed great emphasis on personal freedom. Their watchword was, “I am free to do anything.” This was their justification for numerous practices that Paul found troubling. In the final part of chapter 6, therefore, he attacks the roots of their community-destroying insistence upon autonomy. The argument is a little difficult to follow, because Paul here adopts the diatribe style, in which he constructs an imaginary dialogue between himself and his Corinthian hearers. To understand the line of argument, we must reconstruct the different voices in this imaginary conversation. . .
The case of the incestuous man (1 Cor. 5:1–13) may have represented an extreme instance of such thinking, but Paul’s forceful argument in 6.12–20 suggests that he has heard reports of a similar attitude among many of the Corinthians with regard to matters of sexual conduct. Apparently some of them were going to prostitutes and contending that such conduct was harmless. To the modern reader, this may seem surprising, but we must remember that the social world of the ancient Corinthians differed greatly from ours. Prostitution was not only legal; it was a widely accepted social convention. “The sexual latitude allowed to men by Greek public opinion was virtually unrestricted. Sexual relations of males with both boys and harlots were generally tolerated” (Talbert, 32). Thus, the Corinthian men who frequented prostitutes were not asserting some unheard-of new freedom; they were merely insisting on their right to continue participating in a pleasurable activity that was entirely normal within their own culture.
In order to counter this attitude, Paul opens the next section of the argument by quoting a series of three Corinthian slogans, each followed by his own counterslogan in rebuttal (6:12–14).
Corinthians: Paul:
1) “All things are lawful for me.” But not all things are beneficial.
2) “All things are lawful for me.” But I will not be dominated by anything.
3) “Food is meant for the stomach The body is meant . .. for the Lord,
and the stomach for food. and the Lord for the body
And God will destroy And God raised
both one and the other.” the Lord and will also raise us by his power.
There is some guesswork involved in reconstructing this dialogue, because the ancient Greek manuscripts do not use quotation marks. The translator must decide where Paul is quoting a slogan and where he is offering his own rejoinder.
A. What Things are Now Lawful that were not previously lawful under the OT Mosaic economy? What truly are our Liberties in Jesus Christ?
B. What Things May Not Be Profitable even though Lawful? And Why?
II. (:12b) AVOID ANY ADDICTIONS (MASTERIES) THAT WOULD COMPROMISE OUR FREEDOM TO GLORIFY GOD IN OUR BODY
“All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything.”
A. How can what is Good or Pleasurable or Allowable or Lawful actually become Bad for Me?
B. Is Jesus Christ the Lord over every area in my life and every appetite of my being?
III. (:13) AVOID ANY IMMORALITY – RESPECTING THE HOLY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE BODY AND THE LORD
“Food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, but God will do away with
both of them. Yet the body is not for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord
is for the body.”
A. Certain Physical Appetites are Only Temporary (for this life)
Paul Gardner: Paul’s concern is that the relationship of stomach to food and vice versa is not the same as the relationship between the body and sexual immorality (“the body is not for sexual immorality”; v. 13c). The stomach and food work together for a specific purpose until God destroys both at the end of life. But the body also works for a specific purpose within God’s creative order and that is “for the Lord.” The body has been created with a special relationship that is as close to the Lord as the stomach’s relationship is close to food. As Wright says, “In the present time the ‘body’ is the locus and means of obedience, and as such is to be ‘presented’ to God the creator for his service.” What God has created should be used for the purpose given by God. Most definitely, the body was not created for sexual immorality (πορνεία).
Paul’s teaching at this point is broad. The body is truly significant in the purposes of God; therefore, any sexually immoral act involving the body is wrong. There can be no dualism in which the body, as matter, has no existence or significance beyond the phenomenal. This is not the worldview with which Paul works. In chapter 15 he will speak of the present body and the future body, to which he also refers here in v. 14. There is both continuity and discontinuity. One is described as perishable and the other as imperishable (15:42), yet both are “body.” It is the Lord who was raised by God, and so it is truly we who shall be raised in the future “by his power,” that is, God’s power (v. 14). It is the body that must put on the imperishable and the immortal. It does not become something other than “body.”
Nonetheless, Paul speaks here about more than just continuity with the future and that the body will not be destroyed. He says that it is for the Lord. That is, just as the body is not designed for immorality, it is designed for union with Christ and for being joined to the Lord (v. 17) and for bringing God glory (v. 20). The Lord is for the body in the sense that Paul develops in the next few verses, that is, that the Spirit indwells the body (v. 19) and that the Lord unites it with himself so that the person is “joined” to him (v. 17).
David Prior: Before giving his rich exposition of a truly Christ-centred attitude to the body (sōma), Paul dismisses a diversionary tactic about the stomach (koilia) – probably presented in the form of another catchphrase bandied about by those who were attempting to justify each and every physical indulgence. He deals abruptly with their slogan by making it plain that he is not thinking about stomachs or bellies at all. There is all the difference in the world between food, which is digested by the stomach and passed out through the bowels, and sexual intercourse, which affects the whole person and cannot be dismissed flippantly as a purely physiological phenomenon.
B. Our Body is Designed as an Instrument to Glorify God for All Eternity
Warren Wiersbe: Sensuality is to sex what gluttony is to eating; both are sinful and both bring disastrous consequences. . . . Sex outside of [heterosexual] marriage is destructive, while sex in marriage can be creative and beautiful. (Be Wise, 71)
C. Therefore Immoral Sexual Union has far-reaching implications
David Roper: “Food is for the stomach and the stomach for food“–another contemporary saying in Corinth. They were saying that nature demands satisfaction. If you’re hungry, you go buy a hamburger. That is a perfectly legitimate position. But you cannot infer from it that because you have a sexual drive you must immediately fulfill it. Because both food and the stomach are temporary, but the body is not. The body is not for immorality. God has a higher purpose for it. “The body is for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body.” Just as a perfect body was created for Jesus Christ and became an instrument through which he displayed the character of the Father, so a body is given to us to be used not as a plaything, not as an object for self-gratification, but as an eternal instrument through which we can declare the glory of Jesus Christ.
IV. (:14) LIVE A TRANSFORMED LIFE – CONSISTENT WITH THE RESURRECTION PROGRAM GOD HAS REVEALED
“Now God has not only raised the Lord, but will also raise us up through His power.”
A. The Resurrection of the Physical Body of Christ has Significance for Us
Mark Taylor: The fact that the body will be raised from the dead has enormous implications for present behavior. God will do away with food and the stomach, but God raised up Jesus and he will also raise believers by his power (cf. 15:43). The destiny of the body stands in direct contrast to the destiny of “food and the stomach.” The latter will be destroyed, but the body will be raised from the dead. The body was not meant for dishonorable purposes but rather for God’s glory (6:20). As the argument continues, Paul shows that there is the closest possible correlation between Christ and those who belong to him. What happens to Christ, happens to those incorporated into Christ (cf. Rom 6:4; 8:11; 1 Cor 15:20).
B. Our Resurrection Will be Accomplished by the Same Power and is Therefore Certain
C. Therefore How we Use our Bodies Matters to God
V. (:15-17) AVOID SPIRITUAL ADULTERY (SEXUAL IMMORALITY) – RESPECTING THE PRECIOUS UNION WE HAVE WITH CHRIST
“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take
away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it
never be! Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is
one body with her? For He says, ‘The two shall become one flesh.’ But the one
who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him.”
Craig Blomberg: Verses 15–17 form a syllogism (a three-part argument with two premises and a conclusion that necessarily follows):
(1) The bodies of Christians are members of Christ himself.
(2) Sexual intercourse unites two human beings (as taught already in Gen. 2:24).
(3) Sexual intercourse with a prostitute, therefore, unites the members of Christ with that prostitute.
A. Our Union with Christ Extends to Our Physical Bodies
B. Defiling Our Physical Bodies (Via Sexual Immorality) Should be Unthinkable
Os Guinness: This [the one-flesh relationship in marriage] is the ideal that judges all the rest of Christian sexual ethics in the Scriptures. That is what is behind every prohibition in this area. Why should not men sleep with animals? Why is adultery wrong? Why are homosexual practices wrong? Why is pre-marital intercourse wrong? Simply because there is no true oneness and therefore there should be no one-flesh either. And that is precisely what Paul is arguing here. The point is not that some Corinthian Christian was sleeping with a prostitute; Paul could just as easily have said, ‘He who joins himself to the good-looking housewife down the street’ or ‘She who joins herself to the good-looking athlete down the stairs.’ He says ‘he’ because in Corinth it was men who tended to have double standards; and he says ‘prostitute’ because in Corinth that was the particular problem. But the true problem was that there was intimacy without intention, and there was communion without commitment.
C. The One Flesh Relationship of Sexual Union Has Spiritual Implications
Richard Hays: The whole argument presupposes that sexual intercourse cannot be understood merely as a momentary act that satisfies a transient natural urge. Instead, it creates a mysterious but real and enduring union between man and woman. In support of this claim, Paul cites Genesis 2:24: “The two shall be one flesh.” The union of a member of the church with a prostitute is disastrous for the Christian community precisely because it creates a real bonding with her; therefore it creates an unholy bond between the Lord’s members and the sinful world. The result is both defilement and confusion.
VI. (:18) FLEE IMMORALITY IN LIGHT OF THE UNIQUE DANGER AND DEFILEMENT IT POSES
“Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but
the immoral man sins against his own body.”
A. There is Only One Way to Fight Sexual Immorality = Flee It
Paul Gardner: The only way of dealing with this immorality is to run in the other direction as if fleeing an enemy. Immorality is the domain of a different lord, and it is dangerous to go there since it leads to judgment. Perhaps Paul recalled Joseph’s flight from Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39:12; leaving his coat in her hand, Joseph “fled and went outside” (ἔφυγεν καὶ ἐξῆλθεν ἔξω).
B. Sexual Immorality Presents Unique Dangers and Defilement
David Roper: I think it is because in sexual sin we prostitute our bodies by using them for a purpose other than that for which they were intended. So such sin defiles the body in a way that no other sins can.
Ray Stedman: That is why fornication is different from other sins. Here again Paul is reflecting on what we have just commented on that human nature is different than animal nature. It has a unique capacity: it is this marvelous capacity to hold God, to be intimately related to the greatness and the majesty and the glory of God, to have God in you. That is the temple — God dwelling in something transforms it into a temple. But fornication defiles that temple. It offers the temple to another. It brings the body of that person who is the temple into a wrong union and therefore, it is basically the sin of idolatry. That is why in Colossians and other places the apostle links together “covetousness, which is idolatry.” He means sexual covetousness, the desire for another person’s body, is a form of idolatry.
Now only idolatry, the worship of another god, the substitution of a rival god, defiles the temple. That is why fornication has an immediate and profound but subtle effect upon the human psyche. It dehumanizes us. It animalizes us. It brutalizes us. Those who indulge in it grow continually more coarse, less sensitive, have less regard for the welfare of another, more self-centered, more desirous of having only their own needs met — “To hell with the rest.” That is what fornication does.
Bob Deffinbaugh: How is sexual sin uniquely a sin against the body, while other sins are just sins we commit in the body? Let me seek to illustrate this by using the analogy of a fine automobile. If I owned a magnificent Rolls Royce, there are many ways I could sin in that car. I could, for example, exceed the speed limit. I would be sinning in the car, but not sinning against it. If I were to rob a bank and use the Rolls for a getaway car, I would once again be sinning in the car. But if I needed a load of cow manure for our flower garden, and I opened the doors and shoveled that manure into the car to transport it from the barnyard to my home, that, my friend, would be sinning against the Rolls Royce.
Anthony Thiselton: In what sense is inappropriate sexual union more clearly a sin against one’s own body than, for example, drunkenness, gluttony, or suicide? At first sight this appears to corroborate suspicions that the Christian and Pauline traditions are harsher about sex than other aspects of life. But this is not the case
First, the comment that every other sin … is done outside the body might well pick up the misleading theological slogan used, as we have noted, in Corinth to suggest that Christian conduct is really a “private” and “inner” affair relating to the soul or spirit, not to the body. This verse addresses and rejects this suggestion.
Second, body (sōma), unlike the term flesh, denotes the human self in its wholeness and its relation to other selves. So it is arguable that in sexual acts the mind, body, and whole person are involved, and the self shapes its identity not in isolation but in relation to another self with which it interacts in mutuality. In twenty-first-century idiom, we might say that this area involves higher stakes at a more “personal” level than many other examples from the list involve.
Third, William Loader has recently explained this difficult phrase on the basis of the tradition of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) that sexual intercourse “brings into being a new reality” (i.e., that of one flesh). “Sexual intercourse actually changes people by creating a new reality: oneness with another person, as Gen. 2:23 is understood” (The Septuagint, Sexuality, and the New Testament, pp. 90-92). This LXX text, he observes, forms the basis of Paul’s argument in vv. 12-20.
VII. (:19a) LIVE A CONSECRATED LIFE – CONSISTENT WITH THE PRESENCE OF THE INDWELLING HOLY SPIRIT WHO MAKES OUR BODY A TEMPLE (AND EMPOWERS US)
“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you,
whom you have from God”
A. Our Physical Body Has become a Sacred Temple Housing the Very Presence of God
Gordon Fee: What Paul seems to be doing is taking over their own theological starting point, namely that they are “spiritual” because they have the Spirit, and, probably to their dismay, is redirecting it to include the sanctity of the body. The reality of the indwelling Spirit is now turned against them. They thought the presence of the Spirit meant a negation of the body; Paul argues the exact opposite: The presence of the Spirit in their present bodily existence is God’s affirmation of the body.
B. Do Nothing to Grieve the Indwelling Holy Spirit Who has been given as a Gift from God
VIII. (:19b-20) GLORIFY GOD IN OUR BODY BECAUSE WE HAVE BEEN REDEEMED SO THAT WE BELONG TO GOD
“and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price:
therefore glorify God in your body.”
A. We Belong to God
Richard Hays: The key idea for Paul’s argument at the end of chapter 6 is not a particular theory about the mechanism of atonement, but the affirmation that we belong to God and not to ourselves (cf. Rom. 14:7–9). From this fundamental theological truth follows the closing exhortation: “Therefore glorify God in your body.” That is Paul’s climactic argument against fornication with prostitutes: our bodies, which belong to God, should be used in ways that bring glory to God, not disrepute. It is by no means a question of individual freedom, as the Corinthian slogan asserted. The distance between the Corinthian sophoi and Paul may be measured precisely by the distance between 6:12 and 6:20. They say “I am free to do anything”; Paul says “Glorify God in your body.” Their argument focuses on the rights and freedoms of the individual; Paul’s focuses on the devotion and service owed to God.
B. We Have Been Redeemed with a Precious Price
Anthony Thiselton: The final master-stroke comes in v. 20: For you were bought with a price. This verse alone would question the conventional notion of being redeemed as a slave in order to be free. Deissmann commended and popularized this unduly influential view for too long. Dale Martin and others rightly argue that purchase by another, or being bought with a price, signifies transference of ownership from one master or “lord” to another. The Christian is not purchased out of slavery simply to gain some new autonomous “freedom” in which he or she faces the world on their own. In such a situation they face every hazard alone, and might even face becoming enslaved again to a worse master. Christ purchases or redeems men and women as his. Henceforth it is he who has them in his care. They belong to Christ.
C. We Need to Glorify God in Our Body
Paul Gardner: Paul has put forward five arguments against Christian toleration of sexual immorality, and he has done so by showing the significance and purpose of the body:
(1) the body is for the Lord,
(2) our bodies are members of Christ,
(3) we are one spirit with him,
(4) our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and
(5) we were bought with a price.
The final command is thus virtually inevitable. To “glorify God” (δοξάσατε, an aorist imperative) means to draw attention to God so that honor may accrue to him. However, Paul adds “in your body” (ἐν τῷ σώματι ὑμῶν). Here “in” (ἐν) may be taken instrumentally, “with your body.” This imperative contrasts with the previous “flee sexual immorality” (v. 18). The use of the body for immoral purposes serves one lord, while the Christian should use his or her body in the service of the one who bought them with a price. Setting the glory of God as the goal of all the body’s activity would have prevented this church from tolerating any form of immorality, whether the case of incest, homosexuality, prostitution, or other. The first step for the Corinthians was to remember the place of the body in God’s redemptive purposes. God will raise his people bodily through his power, for the body is a member that belongs to Christ. Meanwhile, the body is indwelt by the Holy Spirit.