1 Corinthians 6

Today’s Passage: 1 Corinthians 6

Paul has just finished pressing the church about a scandal it would not confront, and now he turns to two more rooms of the same house. In the first room, believers are suing one another before the pagan courts of the city, hauling brother against brother in front of judges who do not know God, and the apostle is plainly astonished at it. Do they not know, he asks, that the saints will judge the world, and that we will judge angels? A people appointed to that can surely settle a quarrel over money among themselves. Then he takes away even the ground of the argument. The lawsuits themselves are already a defeat, he says, no matter who wins, and he asks two of the most disarming questions in all his letters: “Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?” From there he sets down a sober list of the kinds of life that do not inherit the kingdom of God, and then, in a single sentence, he tells that church who they used to be and who they now are: washed, sanctified, justified. The second room is the body itself. Somebody in Corinth was going about saying, “Everything is permissible for me,” and treating the body as a thing of no consequence, a bit of passing machinery with appetites to be fed and then discarded. Paul answers that the body is made for the Lord, that God raised Jesus bodily and will raise us also, that our bodies are members of Christ and a temple of the Holy Spirit. And he brings the whole chapter to rest on a price that was paid.

As you read, hold this: The saints who will one day judge the world were themselves washed, sanctified, and justified out of the very sins the world excuses, and the body God bought at such a price is now a temple where He is to be glorified.

1 Corinthians 6:1–3 (BSB)

¹ If any of you has a grievance against another, how dare he go to law before the unrighteous instead of before the saints! ² Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? ³ Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life!

Hear the astonishment in that first line. This is a church that could not bring itself to discipline a man living in open sin, and yet it has no difficulty at all dragging its own members into court. Paul is not saying that a civil court is a worthless thing or that a Christian may never stand in one. He is saying that the sight of two brothers in Christ on opposite sides of a pagan courtroom, asking men who do not know God to settle what the family of God should have handled at its own table, is a scandal and a grief.

Then he lifts their eyes off the floor. “Do you not know that the saints will judge the world?” That question rings through this chapter six times, and every time it has the sound of a father asking his children why they have forgotten who they are. These bickering believers had been caught up into a destiny larger than they could hold: they will share in the reign of Christ when He judges the world, and they will judge angels. Sit with the size of that for a moment. The people squabbling over a plot of ground or a sum of money are the people God has appointed to sit in judgment over the angels themselves. If that is what is coming, then surely they are competent for the trivial cases of this present life. The trouble in Corinth was never a shortage of ability. It was a shortage of memory.

1 Corinthians 6:4–6 (BSB)

⁴ So if you need to settle everyday matters, do you appoint as judges those of no standing in the church? ⁵ I say this to your shame. Is there really no one among you wise enough to arbitrate between his brothers? ⁶ Instead, one brother goes to law against another, and this in front of unbelievers!

So the question turns blunt. If everyday matters need settling, why hand them over to people who have no standing in the church at all, no share in Christ, no stake in the peace of His body? And then Paul says the hard thing straight out: “I say this to your shame.” He is not being cruel. He is doing what a loving man does when gentler words have failed, holding up a mirror and asking the church to look. Remember that this congregation was proud of its wisdom. They had been lining up behind their favorite teachers and boasting of how much they understood, and here they are, unable to produce one person wise enough to sit down between two brothers and settle a dispute.

The last stroke falls in verse six: “and this in front of unbelievers!” That is what makes it unbearable. Corinth was being given a demonstration of what the gospel does to people, and what the city saw was two Christians clawing at each other before a magistrate. There is a sober word here for any congregation. The world reads us long before it reads our doctrine, and the first thing it reads is how we treat one another when we have been wronged.

1 Corinthians 6:7–8 (BSB)

⁷ The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means that you are thoroughly defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated? ⁸ Instead, you yourselves cheat and do wrong, even against your own brothers!

Now Paul cuts underneath the whole argument. Before he ever asks who is right, he announces the outcome: the very existence of the lawsuits means they are thoroughly defeated already. Whoever wins, the church has lost. The believer who walks out of that courtroom with the judgment in his hand has still lost, because the thing he was defending was smaller than the thing he sacrificed to defend it. That is worth carrying into every quarrel we will ever have, in a family, in a business, in a congregation. There are victories that cost more than the loss would have.

Then come the two questions. “Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?” They are among the most disarming sentences the apostle ever wrote, because they do not tell you how to win. They ask whether you have to. And they are not Paul’s invention. They are the mind of his Master, who said the same thing on a hillside in Galilee.

"But I tell you not to resist an evil person. If someone slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also; if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well;" Matthew 5:39–40 (BSB)

This is not a counsel of weakness. It is the freedom of people who are not afraid of losing, because everything that finally matters to them is held somewhere no court can reach. A man who knows he is an heir of the kingdom can afford to be cheated out of a sum of money. He has already been given the world. Then verse eight lands with a sting, for Paul will not let them play the injured party: they were not merely enduring wrong, they were doing it, and doing it to family.

1 Corinthians 6:9–11 (BSB)

⁹ Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who submit to or perform homosexual acts, ¹⁰ nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor verbal abusers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. ¹¹ And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

Read that slowly, and read all of it. Paul is not describing people who stumble and grieve over it and come limping back to Christ, because this whole letter is written to people who stumble. He is describing a settled way of life, a road walked with the face set forward and no intention of turning. And his warning, “Do not be deceived,” tells us that someone in Corinth was busy telling them otherwise, that grace had made the shape of a life a matter of indifference. It never has.

Now notice who stands in the list. The sexually immoral are there, and idolaters, and adulterers, and men who submit to or perform homosexual acts. And then, in the same breath and under the very same verdict, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, verbal abusers, swindlers. The grasping heart and the cruel tongue are standing in the same line as all the rest, which is exactly why no one gets to read this list from a safe distance and shake his head at somebody else. On the sexual sins named here Scripture is not vague, and it is no kindness to pretend that it is. God made us male and female, and He gave the union of the body one home, the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman, and He gave that home His blessing. Every use of the body outside it the apostle names here as sin. He says so plainly, without heat and without a raised voice, and so should we, with no mockery in it and no relish, because Paul himself does not linger. He has one more sentence to write, and the whole chapter has been leaning toward it.

“And that is what some of you were.” Were. Past tense, and God be praised for the tense. The church at Corinth was not gathered out of the respectable people of the city. It was gathered out of that list, and God called them and they came. Then look at what happened to them: three verbs, none of them things they did, all of them things done to them. They were washed, the filth of the old life taken off them in a cleansing they did not perform. They were sanctified, set apart as holy to God and made His own possession. And they were justified (δικαιόω) dikaioō, pronounced dee-kai-OH-oh. Strong's G1344, to declare righteous, to justify, acquit. The verb Paul reaches for here is a courtroom word, which is fitting in a chapter full of courtrooms. Dikaioo does not mean to make a person gradually better, and it does not mean to overlook what he has done. It means to hand down a verdict, to declare a defendant righteous in the sight of the judge. It is the word used when the tax collector went home from the temple justified while the proud man went home empty, and it carries the whole argument of Romans and Galatians on its back. That is why this sentence is such astonishing news for people whose names appear in the list two verses earlier. God does not say that they have improved. He says that they stand acquitted, and He says it while the memory of what they were is still fresh in the room. The verdict is not a reward at the end of a long climb; it is a gift announced at the beginning, resting on a righteousness that belongs to Another and is reckoned to them. And notice that Paul puts it in the past. The word has already been spoken over them. Whatever the accusations of their own hearts, the sentence has been handed down and there is no appeal against it, because the Judge Himself gave it in the name of His Son. , declared righteous at the bar of heaven. All of it “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God,” which is to say, on the ground of what Christ has done and by the power of the Spirit who applies it. Nothing in that verse is the achievement of Corinth. All of it is the work of God.

There is a place where the apostle says the same thing of himself and of us all, and it is worth hearing beside this one.

"For at one time we too were foolish, disobedient, misled, and enslaved to all sorts of desires and pleasures—living in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not by the righteous deeds we had done, but according to His mercy, through the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit." Titus 3:3–5 (BSB)

We too. That is how Paul speaks of it, standing inside the mercy and not above it, and that is how the church must speak of it. Verse eleven is the hinge of this chapter and of a great many lives. It says that no history disqualifies a person from that washing, and it also says that the washing changes what a person is, so that the old name no longer fits. Whatever the list would have called you, the same hands are open. He washes, He sanctifies, He justifies, and He does it in the name of Jesus Christ. Praise Him for that, and never grow used to it.

1 Corinthians 6:12–14 (BSB)

¹² “Everything is permissible for me,” but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for me,” but I will not be mastered by anything. ¹³ “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food,” but God will destroy them both. The body is not intended for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. ¹⁴ By His power God raised the Lord from the dead, and He will raise us also.

Here Paul picks up their slogan and turns it over in his hands. “Everything is permissible for me” was going around Corinth, and it may well have begun as a garbled echo of his own preaching about freedom. He does not simply shout it down. He answers it twice, and both answers are worth keeping. First, not everything is beneficial: the question of whether a thing is allowed is not the same as the question of whether it does you or anyone else any good, and a life that only ever asks the first question has stopped growing. Second, and sharper, “I will not be mastered by anything.” That turns the slogan inside out, for the man who congratulates himself that all things are lawful usually ends up owned by the very things he was so free to take up. Freedom that leads into slavery was never freedom at all.

Then Paul lets us hear the argument they were building. “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food,” they said, meaning that appetite is appetite, that the body is a bit of plumbing with cravings to be satisfied, and that none of it touches the soul. Paul grants the small point and denies the large one. Yes, food and the stomach are passing things and God will do away with them both. But the body is not in that category: it “is not intended for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” Read that last phrase again, because it is startling. Not only is the body meant for the Lord; the Lord is meant for the body. He is not indifferent to it. He took one Himself. And verse fourteen tells us why the body can never be treated as disposable: “By His power God raised the Lord from the dead, and He will raise us also.” The Christian hope has never been the escape of a soul from its shell. It is the raising of the whole person, body and all, on the pattern of Christ’s own empty tomb. What God intends to raise, we have no business degrading.

1 Corinthians 6:15–17 (BSB)

¹⁵ Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! ¹⁶ Or don’t you know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” ¹⁷ But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with Him in spirit.

Now the argument reaches its most searching point. “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” This is not poetry. Paul means that a believer is so truly joined to Christ that his body is part of a body belonging to the Lord, and therefore a believer never goes anywhere alone. Christ goes where he goes. That is why the next question is unbearable once you actually hear it: “Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute?” And the answer is a single word of horror. Never. In Corinth this was no hypothetical put for the sake of argument. It was a familiar street and a habit some of these men had carried into the church without ever thinking to leave it at the door.

Then he shows them why the thing can never be trivial, and he does it by reaching back to the garden and the first marriage.

"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh." Genesis 2:24 (BSB)

That word was spoken over a covenant. It describes a man and a woman given to one another for life, in a joining God Himself performs. And the terrible logic of Paul’s argument is that the act carries its meaning with it whether or not the covenant is there. A man who thinks he is buying an hour with his body and giving nothing away is mistaken about what he is. The union is real even when the promise is absent, which is precisely what makes it a wound. Over against it Paul sets the union a believer already has: “he who unites himself with the Lord is one with Him in spirit.” There is the deepest reason of all. You are already joined, and joined to Christ, and every other joining must now answer to that one.

1 Corinthians 6:18–20 (BSB)

¹⁸ Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a man can commit is outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. ¹⁹ Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; ²⁰ you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body.

“ Flee (φεύγω) pheugō, pronounced FYOO-go. Strong's G5343, to flee, to run away from danger. Pheugo is the ordinary Greek word for running from danger, the word for a soldier abandoning the field or a man getting clear of a fire, and our word “fugitive” comes down from the same root. It is not a dignified verb, and that is exactly why the Spirit chose it here. Paul uses the present imperative, which carries the sense of a settled practice rather than one dash for the door: keep on fleeing, make it the habit of your life. There is no honor to be won by standing and trading blows with this particular enemy, and the man who lingers to prove his strength has already begun to lose. The New Testament pairs the word often enough with its opposite that the pattern is plain. Flee this, pursue that. Run from what would master you, and run toward righteousness, faith, love, and peace, in company with everyone who calls on the Lord from a pure heart. Fleeing is not cowardice. It is the good sense of a man who knows both what he is made of and what he is worth, and who has somewhere better to run to. from sexual immorality.” Notice that Paul does not say resist it, or reason with it, or take its measure and see how close a man can safely stand. He says run. It is the one battle in the Christian life where the command is to turn and go, and Scripture had drawn the picture long before Paul wrote the word: Joseph in Potiphar’s house, leaving his cloak in her hand and getting himself out the door. He looked ridiculous, no doubt. He was also free. There is great mercy in the plainness of that command, because it asks nothing clever of us. It asks only that we go.

Then Paul gives the reason the Corinthians least expected. “Every other sin a man can commit is outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.” He is not saying that no other sin touches the flesh, for drunkenness surely does. He is saying that this sin reaches into the very thing that has been joined to Christ and made a dwelling place, and turns it against itself and against its Lord. Which brings him to the sentence that ought to be written over every Christian life: “Do you not know that your body is a temple (ναός) naos, pronounced nah-OSS. Strong's G3485, the inner sanctuary of a temple, the room where God dwells. Greek had a broad word for the whole temple complex, the courts and colonnades and outbuildings where the crowds moved about. Naos is the other word, and it is the narrow one. It means the shrine itself, the inner house, the holy place where the god was believed to dwell, the room the crowds never entered. That is the word Paul chooses, and he chooses it deliberately. He does not say the body is a courtyard on the edge of holy ground. He says it is the sanctuary, the room where God Himself has come to live. Think what that meant to a Jew reading this letter. The naos in Jerusalem was the place where the glory had descended, where the high priest went once a year with blood and trembling, screened off by a curtain from everyone else alive. And now the Spirit of God has made His dwelling in the bodies of freedmen and dockworkers and slaves in a harbor town in Achaia. There is no higher dignity that could be given to a human body, and it is not a dignity we manufactured. It was received, “whom you have received from God.” What we do with these bodies is therefore never a private matter of appetite. It is a question of how the sanctuary of God is being used. of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God?” The Corinthians lived in a city full of temples with gods who were not there. Paul tells them that the true sanctuary of the living God in that city is a company of ordinary people.

And then the last two lines of the chapter take away the final excuse. “You are not your own; you were bought at a price (ἀγοράζω) agorazō, pronounced ag-or-AD-zo. Strong's G59, to buy in the marketplace, to purchase as one's own. Agorazo is a market word, built on agora, the public square where goods changed hands. It simply means to buy. But in a city thick with slaves and freedmen, everyone knew what it meant when the thing purchased was a person: money counted out, a name transferred on a document, one master’s claim ending and another’s beginning. Paul says that is what happened to us. We were not rescued in the abstract. We were purchased, and the transaction was public and costly. He uses a strengthened form of the same verb elsewhere to say that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, and he says here simply that we were bought at a price. Two things follow, and they belong together. The first is comfort past all telling, for a man who has been bought at great cost has had his worth settled by what was paid for him, and no accusation and no memory can lower it. The second is that he is not his own. Being owned by Christ is the sweetest servitude in all the world, for the Master who bought us laid down His life to do it, and the one thing He asks of the body He purchased is that it be used to show how good He is. .” That is the sentence the slogan could never survive. “Everything is permissible for me” assumes that the “me” in question is the owner, free to do as he pleases with what is his. Paul answers that the ownership has changed hands. Someone came and paid, and paid in full, and the body that once belonged to its own appetites now belongs to the One who bought it. Notice that he does not name the price here. He does not need to. Every believer in Corinth knew what it had cost.

“Therefore glorify God with your body.” That is where the chapter comes to rest, and it is a wide and glad command rather than a narrow one. It reaches into the hours nobody sees, the hands and the eyes and the tongue, the way a man works and eats and sleeps and speaks, and it makes all of it worship. The body is not a shameful thing to be managed and apologized for. It is the temple God has bought, and the whole use of it is to display the goodness of its Owner.