Bible Commentaries
1 Corinthians 5

Verses 1-20

IMMORALITY OF CHURCH MEMBERS;
LAWSUITS AMONG CHRISTIANS;
CHURCH DISCIPLINE

1 Corinthians 5:1 to 1 Corinthians 6:20

Every counselor and every psychiatrist knows that very often the person who comes with a problem actually is troubled by some deeper problem that he does not mention. It was so with the church at Corinth. They had written Paul a letter (as we have noted) asking his advice on sundry problems. But none of the problems they mentioned involved the questioners in down­right sins. They must have shown up in that letter as puzzled people, eager to know what was right. But before Paul gets to the problems they mention, he deals with some they do not men­tion. And these do involve sin, any way you take them. One, we have seen, was the quarreling spirit so many of them showed. Another was a very serious case of adultery and incest combined, a man living with his stepmother.

The points Paul makes are two: first, this is a serious wicked­ness, so bad it would shock respectable pagans. Second, and just as bad, the church at Corinth has done nothing whatever about it. He condemns them severely on both counts.

It does not excuse the Corinthians but it may help to explain this bad state of affairs if we keep remembering when all this took place. Keep in mind the date, well before A.D. 60, and the place, a city that even in the easygoing Roman Empire was notorious for sex perversions and sex crimes. Keep in mind also what Paul has said about the membership of that church. "Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth" (1:26). The church members were not only Corinthians, they were low-class Corinthians. They had been Corinthians for many years before they became Christians. All missionaries have found that when a convert comes out of a pagan background he generally brings some of that background with him, especially its moral standards.

Explain it as we may, it is not to excuse what Paul found in­excusable. There were enough people in that church, he felt, to realize that this particular kind of thing was wrong, so wrong that the guilty person ought not to be kept in the church any longer. Further, the church had the authority to expel this offender. Drive out the wicked man! Paul does not use soft words about it.

Let us look at one difficulty in this chapter, and then consider some problems it raises for our own situations. Nearly everything in this section is straightforward, needing little if any explana­tion; all but the second paragraph (vss. 3-5) and possibly a bit of the third (vss. 6-8). The meaning of verses 3-5 may be this: "If I were with you I know just what I would do. I have thought about it so much I can picture myself at your meeting. So when you do meet, just leave a vacant chair and think of me in it. Then you are to put this man out of the church, solemnly and for his own good. You are to put him back in the kingdom of Satan where he came from. I do not think this will doom him for all eternity. Indeed, you will be doing this to save the man’s soul." But how would putting a man out of the church, simply turning your back on him and leaving him to the Devil—how could that help a man who had sinned? Paul does not say, and gives no hints. We may guess that what he meant was that such rough treatment would bring the man to his senses; that being put out of the fellowship of Christians would make him appreci­ate the Church as never before; that the kingdom of Satan would shock him as it never used to when he was a real part of it; that he would truly repent and be glad if the day came when the Christians could take him into their midst again.

Have these bygones any practical meaning for us today? At this point we ought to stop and consider a problem which meets us over and over again as we read Paul’s letters. Do these long­-dead-and-gone problems mean anything to us in our twentieth-century churches? First Corinthians is one long letter about prob­lems. The first one we discovered was the business of church quarrels. This is plainly for us—not that Paul literally had us in mind when he wrote about the factions in Corinth, but as we (so to speak) eavesdrop on some confidential remarks Paul is making to his quarrelsome friends, we are struck by the fact that his analysis of church quarrels, their cause and cure, is remark­ably modern. So long as churchmen squabble, so long will Paul’s words about squabbling Christians be strictly up-to-date.

But what about such problems as this one of the man who lived with his stepmother? It surely would be a rare church that had that particular problem on its hands today. As we proceed through Paul’s letters, and especially First Corinthians, we shall discover other problems that no doubt kept that Apostle awake nights, but they would be most uncommon today. Shall we just skip those parts of the letter? What can we make of these out-of-date worries?

We can find every part of Paul’s letters helpful if we use the principle of analogy. That is, the problem before us may not be exactly the same as any we have today. But if we have the same kind of problem, we can obtain valuable help from Paul on how to deal with it.

Again, we can often identify a principle on which Paul oper­ates to solve his problem. Since Paul’s principles were always lofty ones—indeed, the Church has always taken them as re­vealed to Paul by God himself—we should never hesitate to use those same principles in solving the difficulties of our own experience.

It is safe to say that the Church would never have preserved these letters of Paul to Corinth if they had not been convinced, down the Christian centuries, that Paul’s words reached far be­yond his day and time, and that in his reactions to the troubles of the church in Corinth (and churches elsewhere too) he was illuminating not only those specific problems but also those of the long road ahead, the road of which we do not yet see the end.

Then what about this case of incest? What Paul says about it throws light on two perennial problems. The first of these is the problem of moral standards in the Christian Church. Paul was plagued by people who twisted his words (as Peter said) to their own destruction. Readers of Romans will remember how care­fully Paul laid it down that we cannot earn the favor of God, that we are saved by grace, not by our own merits or goodness. Faith is the acceptance of God’s acceptance, of his taking us, each one, just as we are. No doubt Paul had preached this in Corinth as he wrote it to Rome. Many would misunderstand this. They would say, "Then it makes no difference what I do; God accepts me regardless. As God’s loving child I can do what I please." You have to stop reading each of Paul’s letters long before you reach the end of it to get notions like that. In every letter Paul writes he makes it clear, just as our Lord did, that a Christian is not only not exempt from the moral law, he is held to a higher stand­ard than anyone else. As a child of God he should be growing into God-likeness. Paul was interested, furthermore, in the repu­tation of the Church outside, in the world. Some religions of that era were morally bad; they had no decent person’s respect. It would be a tragedy if the new religion of Christ should be con­fused in men’s minds with these wild "religions." Evangelism becomes a very bad thing if it invites people into a kind of club whose members are, so to speak, licensed practitioners of wick­edness!

The second problem is that of the authority of the Church. But who is going to be responsible for keeping up the moral stand­ards of the Church? This is the responsibility of the whole Church, Paul tells us. It will not do to leave the Church in the kind of mess it becomes when everybody does as he pleases. Standards must be maintained, and high ones; and the Church as a whole must maintain them. One way, a last resort perhaps, is to excom­municate; that is, to remove from its fellowship persons who de­liberately and stubbornly refuse to live as Christ’s men and women. Perhaps such persons have never really been converted; then they had no business in the Church to begin with. Perhaps they are Christians at heart; in that case being shut out of the fellowship of Christ’s people for a time will bring them to them­selves.

One interesting and important point here concerns the authority of the Church. This act of punishment and discipline, expelling a wicked man, is not to be done by one person (not even by Paul himself), nor by committee action. It is the affair of the whole Church. The authority of the Church does not come from the top down; it comes from the ground up. The authority of the Church is not in a hierarchy; it is in the people. If a minister or a session or a board or council or classis or presbytery—whatever it may be called—acts in cases of discipline or otherwise, it is action representing the Church as a whole. The authority of the Church is in the Church, in all its parts. Paul does not complain that some committee failed to act in the case he is discussing. He does not excuse them for failure to act on the ground that no Apostle could be present and therefore no action could be taken. He lays the blame on the people to whom he was writing, the whole congregation of Christians in the local church where the outrage had occurred. The disgrace had come to the Church as a whole, and the Church as a whole had the right and duty to deal with the case.

Paul comes back to the question of morals (6:9-11) after dealing with the lawsuit problem. Taken in the context of all his teaching, we can be sure he does not mean: (1) that anyone who ever commits one of these sins is thereby shut out forever from the Kingdom; or (2) that a converted person never can commit any of these sins. What he does mean is that one who commits these sins (and, doubtless, others not spoken of here) by that act steps out of the Kingdom; and to keep on committing them is to stay out of the Kingdom.

Still on the theme of morals, Paul comments (6:12) on the expression, "All things are lawful for me [because I am saved]." We shall return to this later. He then singles out sexual sin as especially evil, because it is a sin (1) against one’s own body, (2) against one’s spirit (vss. 16-17), (3) against the Holy Spirit (vs. 19), and (4) against the God who actually suffered to win men back to himself. This is a perfect illustration of how Paul never solves problems by trivial ways or by appealing to trivial motives. "You are not your own." That is the high and sufficient answer to all the twaddle about "All things are lawful for me"—that is, to the idea that I can do as I please. As God’s own, the Christian is free—to do what God pleases. Christian freedom is in God and under God; it is not freedom from God.

The section on lawsuits (6:1-8), which has been passed over, is plain enough without commentary. It provides a good illustra­tion of the fact that very few Christians take all that Paul says literally, as if he were laying down exact rules for life today. He assumes that all law courts are operated by heathen persons, that judges, officers, lawyers, are all non-Christian and perhaps anti-Christian. Most courts in America, and in many other countries, are presided over by Christian judges, who may even be officers in the Church. If you lived in a country where the Christian Church was extremely small and where law courts were strongly non-Christian, you would have a situation like the one in Corinth, and would be right in following Paul’s advice literally. But this is not advice that is followed by American Christians; it does not fit our situation. A great many questions at law are so complex anyway that it would be absurd to expect a church meeting to settle them.

However, the context of Paul’s thought is not the complexities of our industrial age. He is speaking to a group of people, small and closely knit, all of whom know all the others. In a family group like that, going to law anywhere, at any time, is out of line with true Christian relationships. Disputes arising between Chris­tians in the same church family ought never to arrive at the law court stage. If we cannot settle peaceably our differences—and Christians have always had them—we have no moral right to lecture "the world" for its lack of love.