Expel the Immoral Brother!
1It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father's wife. 2And you are proud! Shouldn't you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this? 3Even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. And I have already passed judgment on the one who did this, just as if I were present. 4When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, 5hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.
Dig Deeper
While in college, I found myself getting into a great deal of unbiblical behavior. It wasn’t that I didn’t know any better, because I certainly did. Many of my behaviors wouldn’t have even seemed related at a glance, yet the fact was, they all had one common underlying source. The source of all of this unruly behavior was my arrogance. Once we give into arrogance, it will surely be the cause of all kinds of ungodly and unseemly behavior. This is the key to understanding Paul’s line of thinking here. He has been dealing with the ‘puffed up’ attitudes of the Corinthians to this point. At a surface level, he appears to have changed subjects rather abruptly. A closer look, however, reveals Paul’s train of thought. Rather than changing subjects, he has moved into specific examples of their arrogance causing other problems.
It is clear that, although Paul is certainly disturbed by the specific immoral behavior, he is more concerned with dealing with the underlying root cause. He wants to deal with the disease not obsess over the symptoms, which is evidenced by the fact that he never directly addresses the offending party in this case. Of greater concern, is the attitude and arrogance of the entire church.
There is even a deeper underlying cause that spurs on their arrogance and their deep and ongoing commitment to the values and things of this world. Paul will only hint at this root cause in chapter six and won’t fully address it until chapter 15 but it has to do with their lack of proper understanding in the doctrine of resurrection. Because they lacked a proper understanding of resurrection, they had a wrong understanding not just of the future hope of Christians but also our present relationship with the world in which we live. For Paul, a proper understanding of the resurrection was not just some side doctrine but was, in fact, the foundational leg of the gospel itself (1 Cor. 15:1-11; Romans 1:3-4; 2 Timothy 2:8-12; Colossians 1:21-23). As we go on through the remainder of this letter, we will see that Paul’s underlying thought that ties everything together is his understanding of the resurrection. If the Corinthians don’t have a good grasp on it they will fall prey to many wrong-headed ideas including the type of arrogance that he addressees in this passage.
There are two main aspects of their incredible arrogance that are on display here. The first is that they have come to believe that in becoming Christians they no longer need to be restrained by any standard of moral decency. The act of a man marrying his step-mother (most likely the situation going on here is that a Christian man had married the widow of his deceased father, his step-mother, who was most likely not a Christian, since Paul never suggests how they should deal with her) was against both Roman and Jewish law. The Corinthians believed that throwing caution to the wind and not being bound by the standards of the world around them was a sign of their spiritual maturity. Paul, however, believes that it is a sign of their spiritual arrogance. Rather than grieving about the situation, they have actually become proud of it. Arrogance has a way of twisting things in our mind so that we become proud of things that should make us feel ashamed, calling evil good and good evil (Is. 5:20).
The second aspect of their arrogance is shown in the fact that they have not disciplined the man involved in this scandal. Western churches today rarely engage in church discipline and most Americans get a little queasy about the topic. Yet the Church must maintain discipline. To not do so does not demonstrate kindness, but arrogance and a lack of regard for God’s standards. It exalts man’s preferences over God’s holiness. The questions that Paul wants the Corinthians to understand is where are the lines of godly behavior to be drawn and what kind of discipline is appropriate in cases of severe misbehavior.
It is not entirely clear what Paul means when he says that he is with them in spirit. He may mean be referring to the Holy Spirit which would be ensuring that his apostolic discipline was enacted. He may mean that he is spiritually present with them through this letter. Or this may just be a figure of speech, meaning something like he is with them in his thoughts. Regardless of what he meant, precisely, it is clear that Paul expects his authority to recognized and enforced. When they enact the type of discipline that this case calls for, they have the authority and blessing of both Paul and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul wants this man treated in a manner fitting his behavior. He has engaged in behavior that could very well lead to his spiritual death, and so, he should be treated like an unclean corpse and be removed. Paul says that they should hand this man over to Satan. In Paul’s theology, the Church is an alternate reality to the realm of the world, which is in the grip of Satan. They should already be living in a manner worthy of the reality of the resurrection life. Once a man enters into the body of Christ, he comes to life spiritually and enters the age to come, he is freed from the power of evil. He has been liberated in the power of the Spirit. If this type of behavior is tolerated or even encouraged within the confines of what is supposed to be the place of freedom from the slavery of sin, then this man is hopeless and the entire body is endangered. The charge of the church is to be responsible in discernment and disciplining those whom God has entrusted into the life of the church. To fail do so is to arrogantly deny the very function with which God has charged them. Within the Church, God trusts the Spirit-empowered body to deal with and correct one another. The work is His outside of the Church.
In expelling this man, the Church would be humbly confronting their own failure to live up to their responsibility. They would also be putting this man back into to realm of the present world where they can no longer fail him, he cannot further infect the body, and where his only real hope would be in the saving grace of Jesus Christ. This may seem like a harsh act, but Paul hopes that this will, in the end save both this man and the Church. He hopes that the act of expulsion would shame this man into right behavior (in a culture where shame was viewed as a fate worse than death), and that it would lead him to repentance and ultimate salvation. The situation had come to a point, though, where the Church could no longer facilitate this, only God could do it.
Devotional Thought
Pride is different from arrogance. Pride is our tendency to put ourselves first, often without even thinking about it. Arrogance is an outcropping of our pride. It is the belief that we know better and have the solution to everything by doing it our own way. As we saw in this reading today, arrogance often is the root cause to many other symptomatic behaviors. Do you struggle with arrogance in your life? What other problems might that be causing in your character? How can you go about defeating arrogance in your life in a biblical way?
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