1 Corinthians 6

1 Corinthians 6:1-7

Section 2. (1 Corinthians 6:1-7.)But with no exaction, even of one’s right’s. We come, now to matters between the saints. The Corinthians were going to law with one another, bringing in the world to witness their sad condition and to set right amongst them the things which it was a shame should be wrong. He asks them if they do not know that the saints shall judge the world. That is, of course, in the coming day of the Lord’s rule over it, but it is for this that we are being trained and educated now, and how could it be possible that those who were on their way to such a place as this could be unfit or unworthy to judge these small matters, matters in the apostle’s estimation of such very small account? Do ye not know, he asks, that we shall judge angels, how much more then matters of this kind? Still, i f judgments were needed as to the things of this life, those practically of no account in the assembly were sufficient for such things as that.

He does not, of course, literally mean that they were to choose persons of that character, but that these were matters that did not require even any extraordinary spirituality and were of too little importance to require any great ability of this sort to decide them; but they were exposing their shame before the world. They had better suffer wrong; they had better suffer themselves to be defrauded.

There was to be no exaction even of their rights. Grace does not exact. One may say, can we suffer the wrong to go on in the assembly? That is another matter. The question here is entirely of seeking our own things. If the matter is grave enough to touch the assembly, Matthew 18:1-35 has given us the rule with regard to it. There the first effort is that which is to be characteristic of our whole course; it is to gain one’s brother. That is, as already said, that which discipline aims at.

It may be, in fact, for the moment, impossible to be attained; and then we have the steps needed to place any matter that requires it in the hands of the assembly. Put in their hands, it is to be left there. It is for them, to say as to what will set things straight. Just because they are our own things, we are not to be judges of them. No man was ever thought to be a rightful judge in his own cause, or could take the law, as people say, into his own hands. These are principles which are surely as good for us as they can be in the world at large. They are the result simply of the knowledge, alas, of our poor fallen nature.

1 Corinthians 6:8-20

Section 3. (1 Corinthians 6:8-20.)The holiness of those whose bodies are temples of the Spirit. The apostle proceeds now to speak of the holiness which befits those whose bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. They were, in fact, acting in utter forgetfulness of this. They were not only not suffering themselves to be defrauded, they were doing wrong and defrauding their own brethren. “Do ye not know,” he asks, “that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?” and then gives a catalogue of evil works, samples only, after all, of what was in the world at large, and which certainly God would never tolerate in His kingdom. Here it is of no use pleading grace in any wise. Grace is that which breaks the dominion of sin, sets the soul right to go on with God; and if this be not the result of it, grace has not been learned at all, nor can it be pleaded as availing in behalf of those who, whatever they may profess, show themselves uninfluenced by it. This was indeed the character of some of these Corinthian saints, in a city which was proverbial for its immorality.

God had brought them out; they were “washed, sanctified, justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the. Spirit of our God.” The order and connection of these things is to be noted. The washing comes first, which is, of course, but the removal of the positive evil with which they were connected. Sanctification carries this on to the full setting apart to God Himself, so that the life shall be His. Justification as it is put here is evidently that which is implied in the Spirit of God taking possession of the believer as His temple. This is indeed the most wondrous justification, and could only be the result of the Lord’s work in their behalf.

Thus it is said “in the name of the Lord Jesus,” and this applies to the whole three things. The washing was on the authority of the name of Hui who is our Saviour Lord. One need hardly say that the reference which some here find to baptism is a mistake as to one essential character of Christianity. No external washing can affect the soul. The “washing of water,” as the apostle himself has told us, is “by the word.” God never uses things out of the place which He has given them. This is magic, not mystery. It is a perversion of things, it is essentially evil and of Satan. The parent it has surely been of a multitude of evils. The washing of baptism is at the hands of disciples, and no disciples hands can cleanse the soul; but this is an error which has gone far and wide in Christendom. Sanctification is here both positional and practical, as “in the name of the Lord Jesus” it implies, first of all, the power of His blood to set apart to God; but it is also by the Spirit, therefore practical and internal, the making good in inward reality what the blood has made positionally ours. As to justification in the sense in which we have it here, we find it once again in the first epistle to Timothy, where it is said of Christ that He was justified in the Spirit, the Spirit of God as coming upon Him being the witness to His absolute perfection. His was an anointing without blood; ours, on the contrary, is because of the value of that precious blood with God. Thus, then, the soul is brought into freedom. The law has not accomplished this, and therefore he speaks for a moment here of the entire liberty from law which thus results. “All things are lawful to me” does not, of course, for a moment change eternal moral conditions, but has reference to restrictions which were ceremonial merely. “Meats for the belly,” as he says, and “the belly for meats.” As to these things, there was the fullest and most absolute freedom; and yet even here there might be things inexpedient, and the apostle refuses to be brought under the power of things that are lawful. This is an important matter for our own guidance, for it may well be that that in which we loosely allow ourselves within the range of things entirely lawful may nevertheless have a sorrowful effect upon us. We have to use everything with the wisdom of God, and in our conduct with regard to others in an especial way are not to maintain our own rights, but to seek to minister to the needs of others.

These were all things, as he shows us, of a merely temporary nature. Food was necessary in the meanwhile for the life that is, but it will come to an end and that which sustains it.

On the other hand, there were things, -and the Corinthians needed the warning, -things which for the heathen in his darkness had little of real evil, but which, brought once into the light of Christianity, were seen in their true character; yet, after all, the power of bad habits might revive, even in the Christian. and thus he has to warn them that the body is simply for the Lord and the Lord for the body. God has already raised up the Lord, and we are to be raised up. In the meanwhile the body will betray us, if we do not take care to govern its appetites. But how wonderful that it is in the body of the believer that the Spirit of God has His abode! “Your bodies,” says the apostle, “are members of Christ.” This is a different mode of speech from that which we find elsewhere. It is not that believers simply are members of Christ, members of His body, but that our bodies are His members. They belong to Him and are to be used for Him.

The body is in the world, that by which we maintain our connection with external things, and in which, therefore, the mind of the human spirit is manifested. Now it is the Spirit of God that has control; the body, as we have been taught in Romans, being simply to be offered up to God as “a living sacrifice, acceptable to Him through Jesus Christ.” Our members are to be His members, expressing His mind in lives devoted to Him. “Shall I then,” he says, “take away,” as the word is, “the members of Christ, and make them the members of a harlot?

Far be the thought!” He refers to the Lord’s words in Genesis to show how really this would be taking away the body from the Lord. Every other sin, he says, that a man may practise is without the body, does not compromise it in the same way. Gluttony, for instance, or any kindred thing, evil as it is of course, yet after all does not take the body away from Him, and put it in the hands of that which is contrary to Him. With the sin in question, this was in fact what was done. The man sinned, therefore, against his own body. “Know ye not,” he says, “that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have of God, and,” as the result of it, “ye are not your own, for ye were bought with a price? Glorify God, therefore, in your body.” There are readings here which evidently have come from the thought that this was, after all, altogether too meagre a statement; but if the body be indeed kept in this way for God, if He be glorified in it, if this be really carried out, the whole life must of necessity be His.

Our life is in the body; and to have control of the body is to have the life governed for Him. Thus it may be that the body is spoken of as the temple of the Holy Spirit, and not the spirit as His temple, which one would rather expect.

It is a triumph of divine grace indeed that here where even as yet the power of redemption is not known, for “we wait for the adoption, that is, the redemption of the body,” yet, through the work of Christ, the Spirit of God can dwell in us. How thoroughly that shows He is the witness to Christ’s perfection, to the perfection of His blessed work, and not to any perfection of our own; and here, where the contact with the world is seen in the fullest way, the Spirit of God is found to deliver us from the evil influences of that contact. The anointing oil, as we may say, flows from the head down to the hem of the garment. In the Lord Himself we remember; also, that it was His body of which He expressly spake as the temple which, if men destroyed, would be raised up; and it is the Church as the body of Christ in which, therefore, the Spirit dwells. Here the same thoughts are found connected, in whatever different spheres. The Church is that which is to express the mind of Christ as here in the world, the Spirit of God ruling for Him, and the absent Christ thus being, as it were, manifested before the eyes of men; as the apostle says in another place, we are “the epistle of Christ, read and known of all men.” Thus we can understand, also, why it is that the Church is not looked at as people so commonly look at it, as partly now in heaven (in those who are its members there) and partly upon earth.

The Spirit is in the Body and the Body is upon earth, -in our bodies, and that makes it decisive that death must of necessity for the time interfere with this. He that is joined to the Lord is indeed one Spirit.

Through the body is the present expression of this in the world.