1 Corinthians 5

Today’s Passage: 1 Corinthians 5

Paul has spent four chapters pleading with a divided church to stop boasting in men and to come back to the cross. Now he turns from their quarreling to something far heavier. Word has reached him that a man in the Corinthian church is living with his father’s wife, a thing so far outside the bounds that even the pagan city around them would not stomach it. What staggers the apostle is not only the sin but the mood of the congregation about it. They are proud. They ought to have been in mourning. So Paul, absent in body and present in spirit, tells them what he has already decided: this man is to be handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the Day of the Lord. Notice the aim before you flinch at the means, because the goal the text itself names is the man’s salvation. Then he reaches for two pictures the whole church knew by heart. A little leaven works through the whole batch of dough, so clear out the old leaven. And Christ, our Passover lamb, has already been sacrificed, so keep the feast with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. The chapter closes by clearing up an earlier letter they had badly misread. Paul never told them to withdraw from the immoral people of the world; you would have to leave the world to manage that. He told them to deal with a so-called brother who lives that way while wearing the name of Christ. Those outside are God’s business to judge. Those inside are the church’s.

As you read, hold this: Because Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed, the church grieves over sin instead of boasting, clears the old leaven out of the house, and even in its hardest discipline is aiming at a man’s rescue.

1 Corinthians 5:1–2 (BSB)

¹ It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is intolerable even among pagans: A man has his father’s wife. ² And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have been stricken with grief and have removed from your fellowship the man who did this?

Read that first sentence slowly, because there is real grief in it. “It is actually reported” is the sound of a man who wishes the report had not been true. And notice what Paul does not do. He does not name the man, he does not describe the sin beyond the bare fact of it, and he does not linger over the scandal the way people love to linger. He says it once and turns immediately to the church. The word he uses for sexual immorality (πορνεία) porneia, pronounced por-NAY-ah. Strong's G4202, sexual immorality of any kind outside marriage. Porneia is the wide Greek word for sexual sin of every sort, used for prostitution, for adultery, for whatever fell outside lawful marriage. The apostles handle it never with a leer, never with a shrug, and never as though it were the only sin in the world. In this chapter it stands in a list beside greed, idolatry, verbal abuse, drunkenness, and swindling, which ought to be a lasting cure for the notion that God keeps one column of scandalous sins and another of respectable ones. Yet Paul does treat porneia as a thing with a peculiar power to spread and to spoil, because it reaches into the body itself, which he will call in the next chapter a temple of the Holy Spirit. Hold both halves. The seriousness is real, and the seriousness is not selective. A church that will discipline a man for sexual sin while it winks at the greedy, the swindler, and the man who savages people with his tongue has not learned this chapter at all. It has only learned to be embarrassed in public. is the broad one that covers every sexual union outside the marriage of a husband and wife, and it is worth saying plainly, once and without heat, what the whole Bible says about that: God made the covenant union of one man and one woman the single place where such love belongs, and He made it good, and He guards it. That is no rule the church invented to be difficult. It is the shape of a gift.

But look at the second verse again, for that is where Paul’s astonishment actually falls. “And you are proud!” Somehow this congregation had turned even this into a mark of their broad-mindedness, perhaps priding themselves that grace had freed them from small scruples, perhaps simply unwilling to confront a man of standing among them. And the apostle names the response that should have come first, before any procedure or vote: “Shouldn’t you rather have been stricken with grief.” Keep your hand on that note all the way through the chapter. The first Christian reaction to sin in the household of God is not outrage and not amusement. It is mourning. There is a way of being hard on sin that is really just enjoying oneself, and a way of being soft on sin that is really just cowardice. Grief is the door out of both.

1 Corinthians 5:3–5 (BSB)

³ Although I am absent from you in body, I am present with you in spirit, and I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did this, just as if I were present. ⁴ When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, along with the power of the Lord Jesus, ⁵ hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the Day of the Lord.

Now Paul acts, and every word here is weighted. He is a thousand miles away, yet as their apostle he says he has “already pronounced judgment on the one who did this,” and he tells them to carry it out when they are gathered, “in the name of our Lord Jesus,” “along with the power of the Lord Jesus.” Do not miss how carefully this is fenced. It is no private grudge and no whispered campaign. It happens with the church assembled, under the name and authority of the Lord Himself, which means it is His action through His people or it is nothing at all. Discipline belongs to Christ, who bought the church with His own blood, and it may only ever be done in His name, by His power, along the lines He has given.

Then comes the sentence people stumble over: “hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the Day of the Lord.” To be handed over to Satan is to be put outside, out of the sheltering fellowship of God’s people and into the world where the enemy still runs loose. Honest readers have long differed over “the destruction of the flesh.” Some take it as the breaking down of the sinful nature, now starved of the cover the church had been giving it. Others take it more literally, of bodily affliction permitted by God to bring a man to his senses. The text does not settle it, and we will not pretend to a certainty Scripture has not given. What the text does settle, out loud, is the purpose: “so that his spirit may be saved on the Day of the Lord.” The severity is not the point. The rescue is the point. This is a surgeon’s knife and not an executioner’s axe. The church puts a man out in the hope of getting him back, and the Lord who disciplines the ones He loves is well able to use even that hard mercy to bring a straying child home.

1 Corinthians 5:6–8 (BSB)

⁶ Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven works through the whole batch of dough? ⁷ Get rid of the old leaven, that you may be a new unleavened batch, as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. ⁸ Therefore let us keep the feast, not with the old bread, leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and of truth.

“Your boasting is not good.” Having dealt with the man, Paul turns back to the congregation’s strange pride and reaches for the plainest thing in any kitchen: “Do you not know that a little leaven (ζύμη) zumē, pronounced ZOO-may. Strong's G2219, leaven, yeast worked through dough. Zumē is simply leaven, the lump of sour, fermented dough held back from the last baking and kneaded into the next one to make it rise. There was nothing sinful about it in itself; it was the ordinary way bread was made. What made it a picture of corruption was Passover, when Israel was commanded to hunt every crumb of it out of the house, because the bread of their deliverance was made in haste, without leaven, by a people who had left Egypt behind. Jesus used the same image when He warned about the leaven of the Pharisees, a hypocrisy that works quietly through everything it touches. A very small thing, hidden in a very large thing, changes all of it. That is why Paul will not let the Corinthians treat this as one man’s private business. Sin left alone in a congregation is not contained. It is working. And the honest question the image puts to any of us is not only what the church tolerates, but what small permitted thing we have kneaded into our own week and told ourselves would stay in its corner. works through the whole batch of dough?” Every woman in that assembly who had ever made bread knew it. A pinch of old fermented dough, worked into a fresh lump, will quietly change the entire mass, and it will do it slowly, invisibly, from the inside. That is Paul’s whole argument against the comfortable notion that tolerated sin stays where you put it. It never does. It spreads by permission. What one member is allowed to do openly, the whole body slowly learns to consider normal, and the congregation that thought it was being generous discovers it has been reshaped.

So the command comes: “Get rid of the old leaven, that you may be a new unleavened batch, as you really are.” Hold on to that last phrase, “as you really are,” for it is the engine of the whole appeal. Paul does not tell them to clean themselves up in order to become God’s people. He tells them to become in practice what God has already made them in Christ. Then he gives the reason, and the sentence is so short and so glorious it can go by before you feel it: “For Christ, our Passover (πάσχα) pascha, pronounced PAS-khah. Strong's G3957, Passover, the paschal lamb. Pascha is the Greek form of the Hebrew word for Passover, the night in Egypt when the blood of a lamb was struck on the doorposts and the LORD said, “when I see the blood, I will pass over you.” Every year afterward Israel kept that feast, ate that unleavened bread, and told the story to their children. And here Paul says in a single line that the whole ancient rite was pointing at a Person: Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Not will be. Has been. The tense is settled and finished, and the word “our” quietly gathers in a room full of Gentile Corinthians who had never kept a Passover in their lives. This is why the New Testament calls Jesus the Lamb of God. The blood that turns away judgment is His blood, the sheltered house is His church, and the exodus He leads is out of the whole country of sin and death. Everything this chapter asks of a congregation stands on that finished sacrifice. He was slain for us. That is the first fact of the Christian life and the last one. lamb, has been sacrificed.” There is the ground of everything. The lamb has been slain. The blood has been applied. The judgment has passed over the house, and it passed over because it fell on Him. Praise God for the finished work of His Son, offered once and never to be repeated. The church does not clear out its old leaven in order to earn a deliverance. It clears out the old leaven because the deliverance has already been won, at a cost we will be thanking Him for through all eternity.

Then the invitation, for the chapter’s severity opens out into a feast: “Therefore let us keep the feast, not with the old bread, leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity (εἰλικρίνεια) eilikrineia, pronounced i-lee-KREE-nay-ah. Strong's G1505, sincerity, purity, unmixed transparency. Eilikrineia is a beautiful word for a plain thing. It means purity, sincerity, the quality of being unmixed, and the old picture behind it is of something held up to the sunlight and found to have nothing hidden in it. In the ancient marketplace a cracked pot could be patched with wax and sold as whole, and the wax would not show until the light or the heat found it. To be eilikrinēs is to be the same thing all the way through, with no wax in the cracks and nothing that survives only because no one has looked closely. Paul pairs it with truth, and the pairing matters. Sincerity without truth is only earnestness, and plenty of people are sincerely wrong. Truth without sincerity is only correct information held by a divided heart. Together they describe the bread the redeemed are meant to eat, a life and a congregation with nothing kneaded in secretly that would change the whole lump if the light ever reached it. and of truth.” Notice what Paul names as the old leaven here. Not sexual sin, which is where the chapter began, but malice and wickedness, the sour, spiteful stuff that creeps so easily into a congregation handling a scandal. It is possible to remove a man and keep every crumb of the leaven. Paul wants a church unleavened all the way through, and he describes it in two words: sincerity and truth. Nothing hidden, nothing performed, no double life in the pew and none in the pulpit. And he calls it a feast, which is worth sitting with, since we do not usually think of purity as a celebration. But a people passed over by judgment and led out of Egypt are a people at a table, and keeping the house clean is part of keeping the feast.

1 Corinthians 5:9–11 (BSB)

⁹ I wrote you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people. ¹⁰ I was not including the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. ¹¹ But now I am writing you not to associate with anyone who claims to be a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a verbal abuser, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.

Here Paul turns to a misunderstanding, and it is one the church has repeated in every generation since. He had written them earlier, in a letter that has not survived, telling them “not to associate with sexually immoral people,” and the Corinthians had taken that to mean the immoral people of Corinth. So Paul corrects them with something close to a smile: “In that case you would have to leave this world.” He never meant the pagans, the neighbors, the customers, the men at the docks and the women at the market. A Christian is supposed to be out among them, eating with them, working beside them, loved by them and loving them, because how else will they hear? The Lord Himself was called a friend of sinners, and the name was meant as an insult and stands as a glory.

What Paul actually meant was the man who “claims to be a brother” and lives that way anyway. And notice the list, which is not a list of shocking sins but of ordinary ruinous ones: sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a verbal abuser, a drunkard or a swindler. The man who cheats in business is on it. The man who cuts people to pieces with his tongue is on it. Any church that reads this chapter as being about sex alone has cut it in half. The issue is always the same: a person who wears the name of Christ, whose life openly and settledly contradicts it, and who will not be turned. “With such a man do not even eat” is not a licence for contempt. It is the withdrawal of a signal, so that a man might feel the loss and come to himself.

1 Corinthians 5:12–13 (BSB)

¹² What business of mine is it to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? ¹³ God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked man from among you.”

And now the sentence so many of us have exactly backwards. “What business of mine is it to judge those outside the church?” Paul asks, and the answer expected is: none. “God will judge those outside.” The world’s sin is real and God will deal with it, and He needs no help from us in the meantime. Sit with how thoroughly that reverses our instinct. We are forever tempted to be lenient with ourselves and severe with the world, running a tireless commentary on the sins of people who have never claimed Christ while going gentle on what is tolerated in our own pews. Paul says the severity belongs inside and the patience belongs outside. To those who do not yet know the Lord, the church is to be a house with an open door and a set table, no sneer, no posturing, no sense of being anybody’s moral betters. It is a room full of forgiven people and has nothing to be proud of. But inside, where the name of Christ is worn, there is a real accounting, done with grief, done in His name, done for the good of the one accounted for.

The chapter ends by borrowing Israel’s own words: “Expel the wicked man from among you.” That line comes from the law of Moses, where the refrain runs, “So you must purge the evil from among you,” and Paul lays it on a Gentile congregation as their own charge. It sounds hard because it is hard. But hear it in the light of the twelve verses before it. It is spoken by a man who grieved over the report, refused to publish the details, told the church to mourn rather than boast, and stated the aim of the whole painful business in advance: that his spirit may be saved on the Day of the Lord. Clear, and not cruel. That is the narrow road this chapter walks, and it takes more love to walk it than either of the ditches on the side.