Dear friends,
The commandments of 1 Corinthians 6:15-20 are obvious: flee sexual immorality and glorify God in your body. However, Paul does not simply give commandments; he gives the rationale behind them. The rationale has to do with the meaning of the body in his thinking in terms of our creation, our resurrection, and our marital union with Christ. This densely argued paragraph provides for us a Christian understanding of ourselves as well as our motivation to live Christianly. I hope you enjoy hearing Peter and I struggling to grasp Paul’s reasoning.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: Today, we’re going to focus on the last part of 1 Corinthians 6. 1 Corinthians 6:15–20
Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
It’s interesting that 3 times, Paul asks, “Do you not know?” He’s appealing to the Christian knowledge that this church, caught up in immorality, is supposed to have. But there are many twists and turns in this passage.
Peter Jensen: Yes, it’s like listening to someone talking on the phone, and only knowing what the person on one end is saying. It’s no wonder that, according to the experts, this is one of the most difficult passages of Paul’s writings. Even the Apostle Peter says, in 2 Peter 3, that there were some things in Paul’s letters which were hard to understand. If the Apostle Peter found them hard, then it’s not surprising that we do too. But in fact, this passage is filled with significance and richness, so let’s continue to unpack it as far as we are able.
Phillip: Well, in the last episode, we discussed the importance of context. In that instance, the context was that despite their sinful old culture, the Corinthians were now washed, sanctified, justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. In a theological fashion, you pointed out that in addressing their problems, Paul appeals to the context of the biblical teaching as a whole: creation, sin, redemption, and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The two words you used last week were ‘Christology’ and ‘anthropology’. How does that all work here in verses 15–20?
Peter: Let’s begin by thinking about the body, because that turns up repeatedly here. In the part of the passage we looked at previously, Paul reminds us that God created all things to be good, which includes food and the body. Even though they pass away, the resurrection of Jesus shows us that our future is embodied. In the resurrection of Jesus, our future has arrived.
Phillip: He’s still embodied, which I believe many people don’t grasp. But it wasn’t that he just became bodily for a few days to show his disciples, for the Ascension of Jesus is the ascension of a body.
Peter: Indeed, and Acts 17 tells us that the judgement will be conducted by a man whom God has appointed by raising him from the dead. This therefore tells us that our future is embodied, not merely spiritual. But we’re also told that our bodies are the domain of Christ. In other words, he rules over us: body, soul, and spirit, if you like. Our bodies belong to him, and of course, that is where we find true peace, true assurance, and true freedom. But the ongoing language of the body is quite puzzling.
Phillip: The body is more than just your physical organs: it’s you. You just mentioned “body, soul and spirit,” but the New Testament doesn’t differentiate those in any consistent pattern. The 3 go together as one person, and the language of ‘body’ is present throughout the Scriptures. It’s not just that the spirit is meant for the Lord; your body is also meant for the Lord. Christ made you in body, that you will serve him, that you will be his. But the Bible’s view of the body then is creational and resurrectional.
We’re not a spirit without a body, but a spirit-animated body. We believe in the resurrection of the body. Jesus still has bodily existence in heaven and we too, with our bodies, will be with him. What we do with our bodies, therefore, is what we do with ourselves. But there’s more to it than that in the Bible. For in marriage, a husband and wife become one flesh with each other, so that Paul speaks in Ephesians of a man’s wife as his body. It’s in this way of thinking that Paul speaks of the church as the body of Christ, because the church is the bride of Christ. We are united to him as his bride, which he purchased by his blood that was shed for us. These days, we don’t like thinking of brides being purchased, but that is part of the idea that, by his death on the cross, Christ purchased his bride. As such, we are individually members of his body.
But our unity with him is not in sex, but in having his Holy Spirit within us, animating us. So our bodies are the temple, or the home of the Holy Spirit. So, given that background, we come to the context of marriage that Paul is writing about: the issue of sexual immorality, particularly the problem of joining our bodies to a prostitute. For to unite yourself to a prostitute is to unite a member of Christ’s body to a prostitute, which is to unite the temple of the Holy Spirit to a prostitute. To do such an action is to sin against your own body, the body that is for the Lord. Instead, we are to glorify God not only in our spirits, but also in our body. I would like to note here—because our society is today very worried about the demonisation of prostitutes—that what is being spoken of here is sexual immorality in a broader sense. I think that the same would be said by Paul if the issue was of fornication rather than joining with a prostitute. But here, he is speaking of the uniting of your body, a member of Christ and the vessel of the Holy Spirit, with someone who is in an inappropriate relationship for you to unite yourself to them.
Peter: You’re saying that we are members of the body of Christ. Is that in a metaphorical sense?
Phillip: Yes, in that we are members of the bride of Christ, which is a metaphorical way of understanding the relationship that the church has with Christ.
Peter: How does that impact our understanding of our physical bodies?
Phillip: My body is symbolic of the relationship between the church and Christ, and it is part of that bride of Christ.
Peter: In Corinth and perhaps even more in our own society, there’s an immense amount of permissiveness around sex; for instance, people don’t think that a sexual ‘hookup’ is all that significant. Is it?
Phillip: Of course a sexual hookup is significant, because the sexual union is that. It is something fundamentally different to all other sins, because it is the connection of one body with another. Within marriage, this is a good and wonderful thing that God has created us for, which is symbolic of Christ and the church, as our prayer book wedding service spells out for us. But outside of marriage, it is an expression of our sinfulness, and it is a sin against our own bodily integrity.
Peter: Thus, the culture which allows for all sorts of sexual relations to occur is damaging to those involved. It’s creating a profound, deep relationship which will later be discarded. It is a travesty, a destruction, a corruption of relationships.
Phillip: It is the abuse of the relationship in the first place, because that is not how the body is to be used. Furthermore, going back to last week, there is an element of slavery too, because the more you commit this act, the more you will be enslaved by it. The very nature of sexual relationships is undermined by their frequency, therefore, as opposed to their loving consistency.
Peter: Verse 17 uses this strange expression, “But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.” You might expect Paul to say “one body”, but instead, it’s “one spirit”.
Phillip: Yes, because in our relationship with Jesus Christ, we are not one flesh in a sexual relationship with him; we are one flesh in that we have his Spirit within us. To be Christian is to be born again by the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, and so we are united to him because we are the temple of his Spirit.
Peter: In this instance, should the word ‘spirit’ have a capital or a lowercase ‘S’?
Phillip: Here’s the problem with our English translation: in the Greek, everything was written in capitals, and so our translators always have to work out whether to use upper case, to indicate that they’re referring to the Holy Spirit, or lower case to indicate that it is our spirit. In the instance when the passage talks about us being ‘one spirit’ with him, I would stick with the lower case.
Peter: That’s interesting. It reminds me of 1 Corinthians 15, which talks about our resurrection body as a spiritual body. That doesn’t mean our bodies are not physical, rather our bodies will be ruled by the Holy Spirit.
Phillip: That’s right, but it’s also an eschatological figure you would like to know. That is, the Spirit is the age to come. The first part of 1 Peter 3:18 tells us, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” It’s a lovely verse, and at that point I would want to end the sentence, but Peter goes on, “Being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.”
This doesn’t mean that Jesus died physically and then spiritually rose, because the Old Testament makes it quite clear that he rose bodily. So what does it mean to say that Jesus rose and was made alive in the spirit? I take it that the flesh is symbolic of this world, while the spirit is symbolic of the world to come. You find the same thing in Revelation 1:10, where John was “In the Spirit on the Lord’s day,” meaning that he’s in the age to come, the age of the Spirit. When we come to chapters 12–14 of 1 Corinthians, we will be dealing with the spirituals, which has this overtone of the age to come that is broken into this world. And Jesus, though dying in this world, was also raised in the world to come.
Peter: You’ve demonstrated a key point in my thinking; that is to say, eschatology, which is the doctrine of the last things, infuses the whole New Testament, particularly as the resurrection in a sense is the beginning of the end. But that’s for another day.
For now, what are the implications? I go back to Christology, pneumatology (the doctrine of the Holy Spirit), and anthropology. “Such were some of you,” he says earlier in the passage, but now they are owned by the Lord Jesus Christ. He owns us through his death for us on the cross, expressed in our union with him and foreshadowed in his resurrection from the dead. That’s the first thing, Christ’s Lordship. Then we come to what it says about the Spirit. We have the presence of the Spirit who brings with him the Father and the Son, and we are temples. We all know about Solomon’s temple, one temple in one place at one time; but we are temples indwelt by the living God, the Spirit being the gift of God. That’s an astonishing thing to say of any human being, and it’s true of all Christians. Therefore, both in the present and in the future, we don’t own our bodies. This is our anthropology. When we repent, we don’t just have remorse; we have repentance. In repentance, you turn to the Lord Jesus Christ and you trust him, and he becomes Lord of your life, as this passage says. Our bodies are his domain. Of course, the law is still important in the Christian life: “Love God, love your neighbor,” is the summary of the law. But at the heart of it is a relationship with God. It is because of the grace of God, and all the things that he has done, that our aim in life is to glorify him in our bodies.
Another way of saying it is found in 2 Corinthians 5:9, “We make it our aim to please him.” The aim of your life is to please God. To find out what pleases God, you read his Word. So we express our freedom by an obligation to love God and to love others. Here, and here alone, is purpose, meaning, hope and joy of true freedom. Here is a doctrine of humanity which goes to the heart of the truth. It’s about relationships, not legalism, important though the law may be. Nor is it about anarchy, doing whatever we want. Our aim in life is to please him and express that in our love for others; particularly our other brothers and sisters, but not only them. So if those are the implications, what does this mean for Christians living in the age of permissiveness?
Phillip: That’s the background in our thinking and understanding, which is so important to stop us from just being rule-keepers. But the trouble with just the theological reflection is that people can have their reflection and still ignore the rules. Here, there are two commands which are made absolutely clear: flee from sexual immorality, and glorify God in your body.
What do we mean, “flee from sexual immorality”? I always think of Joseph; when he was in Egypt and his master’s wife sought to seduce him, he ran away naked. Like Joseph, we must flee. We tempt ourselves by our discontentment in our relationships, but if we’re in a relationship, we must walk a country mile away from any physical intimacy with anybody else. If we’re lonely, we need to keep our minds on what is pure and what is holy. If we’re in the company of people, we must beware of the adulterer, as the book of Proverbs warns us of. If we’re already in adultery, we need to get out of it, and we need to get out of it now, not in the future. We will say more on that later, when we come to 1 Corinthians 7.
We must glorify God in our body, because our body, being the temple of the Holy Spirit and members of the bride of Christ, symbolises something so important. I think of 2 Corinthians 11 where Paul, talking about heresy and about people moving away from the Lord Jesus Christ, uses the language of betrothal, which was a legal contract. 2 Corinthians 11:1–4
I wish you would bear with me in a little foolishness. Do bear with me! For I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.
Here’s a great error: we’ve been betrothed to Christ, and so we must glorify God in our bodies as members of the bride of Christ, and as the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this sermon from St Matthias Evening Church called The Gospel and Sexual Liberality.
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