Sexual Immorality
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 meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. 15Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! 16Do you not 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." 17But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit.
18Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. 19Do 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; 20you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.
Dig Deeper
While teaching a class years ago for pre-teens, I was trying to explain to them that they were made for God’s glory; that’s the purpose for which God made them. They should, I told them, use themselves properly. To make this point clear, I first took a wrench and began to use it to hammer a nail into a piece of wood. The wrench worked well enough for a couple of nails, but eventually it broke. We can use things outside of their intended purpose for a time, and they may even function fairly well, but eventually they will break. The number one cause of tools breaking is use outside of their intended function.
Paul will now address an extremely important example of his overall argument against the Corinthians: they have arrogantly not realized what kind of people they are supposed to be in Christ. An extremely important part of that issue, especially in a port town like Corinth, was sexual immorality. Paul has a question here that lies just beneath the surface of his writing from here all the way through to chapter 15. The question is simply: what is the body for?
We have to stop and ask ourselves, though, why would that question be important? We live in a religious world that has largely rejected the early church view of the physical world and the body, buying into the Greek philosophical society that the physical (material) world is hopelessly corrupt while the spiritual world is what we hope to enter into. When our bodies die, according to this line of thought, our souls are released from the evil physical world to enter forever into a non-physical, spiritual existence. The early church of the first, second, and third centuries argued vigorously against that view but it has now been embraced by the majority of Christians. Plato would be proud. The early Christians, however, saw death and the existence of the soul in heaven as a temporary state awaiting the great hope of physical resurrection and the restoration of the physical universe (cf. Matt. 19:28; Acts 3:19-20; 1 Peter 1:3-5).
It is only with this proper understanding of Paul’s belief in the physical resurrection of those in Christ that we can truly understand his logic in this section. The Corinthians had clearly bought into the Greek idea that what they did in the physical realm didn’t matter or effect their soul (the words “God will destroy them both” should surely also be in quotes as it almost assuredly something that Paul was quoting from them rather than his own comment). Paul’s argument here is that Christ has purchased their bodies. The bodies of those in Christ belong to him and he plans on resurrecting them one day so we can’t just go around treating them however we wish. They no longer belong to us but they do matter a great deal.
In verse 12, Paul begins an imaginary dialogue with the Corinthians. Their imagined utterances are in quotes in the NIV, while his responses follow the words in quotes. Paul repeats a couple of sayings which were evidently popular in Corinth at the time, and that the Church had actually started using and living by. Paul takes advantage of these little sayings because they clearly capture the deceived mindset of many in the Corinthian Church at the time.
The first saying is that everything is permissible. There is a sense in which Paul agrees with this because Christianity is about freedom, but they were forgetting that there is always a balance in the Christian life. Many things are technically permissible, but are they beneficial? This is a question we must always ask. In claiming their ‘Christian freedom’ they were actually signing up to a new master. Paul wants them to realize that precisely because Christianity is about freedom, they must be careful to never allow something outside of Christ to give them orders, whether it be appetites, habits, culture, or the desire for pleasure and comfort.
The second saying was being used as an excuse for immorality. If “food is for the stomach and the stomach for food”, then it only follows logically that sex is for the body and the body for sex. Although he is addressing sexuality here, the core subject is still the nature of Christian freedom. Sex is an important aspect of that, however, because it is one of the biggest ways that Christians corrupt their freedom Understanding the purpose of the body has everything to do, as we have seen, with the Resurrection. Because Christ was raised, so will those who are in Christ. At baptism, we became Him and took His life. Our bodies are the Lord’s, no longer ours. To take the body of Christ and unite it to anyone outside of the body of Christ is a category mistake (Paul uses the example of a prostitute as the worst possible scenario, but any sex outside of its intended use is no better). This does not, of course, mean that sex with anyone within the body of Christ is acceptable, God has created sex for marriage and marriage alone. Paul quotes Genesis 2:24 in verse 16 to make the point that sex is a union of two bodies. Christians, though, are resurrection people whose bodies belong to Christ now. What we do with our bodies now matters, because there is a correspondence between our bodies now and in the ‘age to come’ (Paul will explain this in chapter 15).
The believer is united with Christ and cannot rightly be united with anyone else. Although this is a spiritual unity, it is still impacted by what we do with our bodies, because the body and the spirit are intertwined. It is simply not true that one can do something with their body that does not effect their spirit. This can all be boiled down to one principle: does what you are doing with your body glorify God? Every relationship we have and everything we do with our bodies should glorify God. If it does not then we have wandered outside of our intended purpose.
What is interesting is that Paul does not simply lay down a hard, fast rule in this area. The problem with laying down rules is that people follow them for a short time and then began to think of ways that they can slowly get around them. Instead, Paul wants them to be Kingdom people. This takes thought and effort, and a willingness to wrestle through the issues. He wants them to learn to think in a Kingdom way so that they will make the right decisions all of the time.
Paul offers the advice to cut and run when it comes to sexual immorality. There is no point in playing with fire. The wise thing is to follow the example of Joseph in the Old Testament and flee. The next statement is a bit difficult to understand, partly due to the fact that the NIV has added the word ‘other’ that does not appear in the original language. It would appear then, that Paul’s point is that immorality is like all sin and is something even more. The reason that sexual sin is something more is that it is the act of uniting our bodies, which belong to Christ, with something that is outside of the body of Christ. Just as the Church is the Temple of God, so is the individual body of the Christian. There simply cannot be impurity in the Temple. To make this point clear, Paul gives them another important reminder. Just as they should be constantly celebrating the final Passover, so should they always remember that the freedom they have comes at the extremely high cost of the blood of Christ. Our lives should be an eternal Passover celebration that honors God.
Devotional Thought
Paul uses a fantastic technique of identifying the little catchy slogans and sayings of his day and answering them with concise, and easily remembered responses. What are some of the valued, but wrong slogans and sayings of our culture? How could you respond to them in the same way that Paul responded to those of his day.
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