1 Corinthians 6:9-14
Paul begins this section very abruptly with a warning, with the statement that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God. One of the final messages of the Bible parallels this: “He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son. But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.” (Revelation 21:7-8) There is a promise to the overcomer that they will inherit all things, but the unrighteous shall not inherit; they will be left out.
In a previous article, we look at 2 Corinthians 6:17: “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.” This is one of the key ideas of the Corinthian letters—the idea of separation, the idea that there is and must be a sharp distinction between the church and the people of the world.
This is an idea that has run through all of our study up to this point. In the first few chapters, Paul drew out the distinction between God's way and man's way—that is, between the way of the church and the way of the world. In chapter 5, he showed the necessity of church discipline, of making sure that a sinner—one of the unrighteous who shall not inherit the kingdom—is not allowed to act as an accepted church member. There must be a separation. This comes through again in the opening verses of chapter 6, where Paul admonishes the church to work out its own problems without appealing to help from the world. There is clear sense of distinction.
In this passage, Paul draws out this distinction again. He uses the phrase “be not deceived” to draw attention to the importance of what he is saying. This is something important, something that has to be heard and understood, something where it is essential that no mistakes be made.
He goes on to make a list of sins, showing that these are things that cannot be part of God's kingdom in the future and, therefore, should not be part of the church in the present. This is one of several places where the Bible lists off a catalog of sins. The attempt here—as in the other places—is not to list every single sin that can be committed but simply to give a general picture of sin and its various forms. However, in this case, these may be especially the sins that were most current or characteristic in Corinth. You'll notice that many of the items here repeat the list Paul gave at the end of chapter 5.
For convenience's sake, we can break this list up into three categories, though these are not hard-and-fast, and there is considerable overlap.
First, we have religious sins—specifically, idolaters, those who worship other gods or who use idols. This was a common problem in the first century world—most people were idolaters and idolatry was woven into the fabric of society. (Remember that—it becomes important a few chapters later.) When Paul is describing the fall of man's civilization into sin in Romans, he points to idolatry as the starting point: “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.” (Romans 1:21-23) Idolatry leads to all other sins because it means turning away from the true God.
Next, we have social sins. We have thieves and extortioners, which both refer to those who illegally take the property of others. However, the word extortioner may refer more to the attitude which leads to theft—the attitude of greed and a desire to grasp at any chance of gain. Barclay says the word was used for the grappling hooks that were used to hook onto ships. An extortioner is a man who will use any means to grasp unto that which does not belong to him.
Along with these, we have the revilers; that is, the insulters, the slanderers—those who use their speech to hurt others. The NET Bible translates it: “the verbally abusive.”
Finally, we have the personal sins. And yes, many of these also have an interpersonal element and could be listed as social sins, but I am grouping them together because they all share a common idea—the idea of self-indulgence, pleasing one's own desires without concern for what is right or how it will affect others.
Chief among these are the covetous, those who are governed by an insatiable desire for more. RSV and the NET Bible translate it “greedy.” Next, we have the drunkards, fornicators, and adulterers, all of which should be fairly self-explanatory.
Then we have a class Paul refers to as the effeminate. In Luke 7:25, Jesus is reminding people of the kind of man John the Baptist was; He ask this rhetorical question: “But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they which are gorgeously apparelled, and live delicately, are in kings' courts.” The word translated there as 'soft' in 'soft raiment—that is, comfortable, rich, luxurious clothing—that is the same word that is translated here as effeminate. Barnes says “it denotes those who give themselves up to a soft, luxurious, and indolent way of living; who make self-indulgence the grand object of life; who can endure no hardship, and practise no self-denial in the cause of duty and of God.” William Barclay says “It describes what we can only call a kind of wallowing in luxury in which a man has lost all resistance to pleasure.” Barclay translates it 'sensualist”; TCNT render it “licentious”.
However, the Greek word can have another meaning as well. And that connects us to the final item of this list: what the KJV calls abusers of themselves with mankind, that is, men who participate in homosexual relationships. The word translated 'effeminate' can also have connections to homosexuality; the NET Bible argues that these two terms refer to the two participants in a homosexual relationship.
I mentioned before Paul's description of the descent into sin described in Romans 1. It began with idolatry. And that led to a catalog of sins such as what we see here, including: “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.” (Romans 1:26-27) I bring these verses up specifically since they mention female homosexuals as well as male. This is an equal opportunity prohibition.
Later in Romans, Paul will paint this picture of the world: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” (Romans 5:12) The picture painted throughout the Bible is that sin is something universal. Not every sinner commits every sin on this list, but everyone is a sinner and so is part of this general picture.
No sin is committed in the abstract. No one wakes up with the determination: I'm going to go commit a sin today. The actual situation which leads an individual to commit a particular sin may be very different than someone else's. Often these sins are a corruption of an inoccent desire or even a positive good. Idolatry is a corruption of the desire to worship. Fornication is a corruption of the desire for marriage. People are often led into drunkenness from a desire for fellowship and camaraderie. A desire for personal gain is not necessarily wrong, but unchecked it become covetousness and that can lead to theft or extortion. But none of these facts change the basic picture of sin.
Some might argue that some of these sinners—like idolaters—hurt no one but themselves by their sin. You could say that being covetous is just an identity—it's just how some people are. You could argue that we are born with the desire for gain that leads to theft and extortion; you could argue that we are born with the drive that leads to fornication and adultery—and that people should not be judged for being born a certain way. But the Bible makes it clear that all of these things are sin, they are wrong, they are contrary to the way things ought to be, regardless of the exact genesis of a person's individual sin. (And any attempt to apply these excuses solely to the last sins on the list is logically doomed.)
This is a picture of sin, of the unrighteous who will not inherit the kingdom of God. This is THEM—those who are outside of the church, those who must be separate from US.
And yet--while all of that is true, there is another truth. This is the triumphant explosion of verse 11: “And such were some of you.” This distinction between US and THEM is real, but it is not exactly what you expect. The Corinthian Christians were not of some different species from the sinful people around them. Many of them had taken part in these exact same things. All of them had been sinners of some kind. And this isn't just them. Paul himself had been part of things arguably far worse than anything on this list. It wasn't that these people were just bad and these other people were good. It wasn't that there was any intrinsic or natural superiority in the Corinthians. It wasn't that these people had always been saved, and those were forever doomed to damnation. The difference between them was by GRACE.
Paul says that what makes the difference is being washed. Most commentators think this refers to baptism. By choosing to be baptized, Christians symbolically declared a break from their old life and the beginning of a new one. Paul saw baptism as representing a very stark change—just how stark we see from Romans 6:3-4: “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” Paul saw baptism as representing the death of our old life and the beginning of a new one.
Not only were they washed, but sanctified. To be sanctified means to be made or declared holy. To be holy has the idea of that which is pure and clean and that which is separated or set apart for God. There had been a change to these people; they had been taken from the world and set apart to God, cleansed from sin to holiness. Even if they weren't everything they ought to be yet, they were far away from where they had once been.
And they had been justified, that is, they had had a change in their legal standing before God; they had been accepted by God; they division between them and God had been removed.
All of this had happened to change THEM into US; to change sinners into saints; change members of the world into members of the church. And it was all done in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.
There had been a great change because there had to be a great change. Verse 11 is a far more triumphant and comforting verse than verse 9, but it doesn't contradict it. The unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God. There is hope for the sinner, but it is by escaping sin. The only hope for THEM is to become US, but that is a great hope because anyone can make that transition by grace. The door is open to everyone, but you still have to go through the door.
Dr. Mike a YouTube influencer known for making videos on medical topics. He was criticized by a Reddit user who wrote: “I really want to like Dr. Mike on YouTube, but he really has some fatphobic tendencies. He's actually a fan of intermittent fasting, which is unbelievable to me considering he's a medical professional. In his most recent video, he talked about gastric bypass surgery being good for long-term weight loss. And just in general, he's talked about obesity and quote-unquote, 'watching what you eat.' ”
Dr. Mike made this response on his Facebook page which reads in part: 'Our culture demonizes people for their weight, from rogue marketing pushing “ideal bodies” in media to a lack of representation for large bodied people on stage and on screen. That being said, I am a doctor, and my job is to help people live longer, healthier lives, and often those results can be achieved through a variety of tactics that will reduce the weight of people who suffer from obesity.' A doctor doesn't diagnose a patient out of hatred or fear, but out of a desire to help people find a cure.
You can't make an exact comparison between physical problems and sin—since sin (if not sinners) do deserve hatred and fear—but in a sense, usually when the Bible talks about sin, it talks like a doctor. The point of pointing out sin is not just to show how terrible it is but to help people escape from it or avoid returning to it. Sin is hated, but the main point is not to hate the sin but to save the sinner. A doctor tries to help people live longer, healthier lives. The Bible tries to help people live eternal lives.
If there was no salvation for sin, then maybe it would be better to let people enjoy their sin while they can. But there is a possibility of something better. If the boat is sinking and there is no escape, people might as well spend their last moments dancing. But if there are still some lifeboats available, it is a pity to waste time—and it is good sense to tell people so.
Paul doesn't list off these sins out of some sort of irrational hatred of thieves; he was not motivated by idolatraphobia. He recognized things as things that would destroy the soul—things that the people of Corinth had escaped.
So, the main point of these verses is that there are sins that must be avoided. There is grace to save from them, and the Corinthians had experienced that grace. And yet there was still the danger of returning to such sins; I think Paul is reminding them of that possibility—this is where you were, this is where you are, and this is where you could be again.
I said at the beginning that this section is transitional. But it does have a point. And the point is to answer a question: why, as Christians, does it matter how we live? The entirety of 1 Corinthians up to this point (and most of it after this point) is aimed at showing how we should live as Christians. And the question is, why? Why does it make a difference?
In these verses, Paul gives us several answers: on one hand, because the path of sin leads to destruction; on the other hand, because we have been given grace—we have been given a second chance. Once we were on that path; once we were THEM. Now, we have been changed and given new life. Therefore, we ought to live in a new way. There should be a carefulness in the Christian life because of this difference—a difference that is not just between US and THEM, but between US and who we once were.
And then with verse 12 we have another very abrupt shift in thought. Paul drops this little bombshell: “All things are lawful unto me.” What does this mean? Does this really mean that there is no such thing as right and wrong, at least for some people? Is this really a contradiction of the idea of morality and ethical imperatives?
Now, let's forget for a moment that we believe the Bible to be divinely inspired. Even assuming that Paul is merely a human writer, we have enough of his writing to know that he was a man of great intelligence and philosophical understanding. I submit to you that it is not credible, even on a human level, that a man like Paul would make such a contradiction—that he would make a clear statement for morality in verse 9 and then, in a few verses, make a clear stand against it. We have to assume that Paul meant this statement to be taken in some sort of different way.
The way I see it—and the way several of the commentators do—is that Paul is giving this statement as an assumption, as something taken for the sake of the argument, as a thought experiment. We might say: “What if all things were lawful...” The NET Bible puts quotation marks around the phrase and suggests that it was actually a slogan used by some within the Corinthian church and that Paul is here examining it.
Because that is the point—even assuming that all things were lawful, even assuming that verse 9 wasn't true, and that a Christian could safely sin without fear of consequence—still, there are things that wouldn't be a good idea. Paul says that all things are “not expedient.” The word translated expedient means “to bear together (contribute), i.e. (literally) to collect, or (figuratively) to conduce; especially (neuter participle as a noun) advantage:--be better for, bring together, be expedient (for), be good, (be) profit(-able for).” Other translations render it: "helpful" (NKJV), "profitable" (TCNT), "wise" (BBE), "good for me" (MNT), "beneficial" (NET). We can say that this means that just because something is allowable, still doesn't mean it's a good idea.
As I said, it seems like Paul is throwing this out as a hypothetical, but it does work in a more concrete way. There are some things that are clearly unlawful. Imagine a circle--everything within that circle is unlawful, intrinsically sinful. Therefore, everything outside the circle is, by definition, allowed, is lawful. But that doesn't mean that everything outside of the circle is good. Some things are not sins that still should be avoided by a Christian, at least in certain circumstances. Paul will apply this to the issue of marriage and the issue of food in the next several chapters. Even though both marriage and eating are good things that God created for us to enjoy, there may be specific situations in which a Christian would be better off avoiding them. This connects back to the first few verses of the chapter. It doesn't seem that Paul is saying that all lawsuits are sinful, just that the church would be better to avoid them if they can. George MacDonald said that the great thing about rights is that you can give them up.
However, there a sense in which giving up rights is wrong. This brings us to the second half of the verse—there is a liberty in Christianity, and one of the things a Christian should avoid is anything that will take away that liberty. In the next chapter, Paul actually gives a concrete example of this principle: “Ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men.” (1 Corinthians 7:23) It's easy to think of that in a metaphorical way, but in context Paul seems to mean it literally—this a warning for a Christian to avoid slavery, if possible, because even though it is possible for a slave to be a Christian (as Paul says a few verses before), it easier to be a Christian while free.
That is a point we will come back to when we get to chapter 7; for the moment, the point is this: we have another principle here. The reason a Christian should live differently is because of wisdom—we shouldn't be living merely to do the bare minimum, what is good for us and for the church, and to make it to heaven. We should be doing what is good; what is good for us and for the church—and, especially, we should avoid anything that will take away our liberty and make it harder for us to serve God.
Obviously, all of this could apply to anything. But Paul's main thought seems to be regarding sexual ethics—that is going to be the main subject of the rest of chapters 6-7, and as we've seen before, this is something that was an issue in general in Corinth.
In verse 13, we have this phrase: “Food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, but God will do away with both.” That is from the NET Bible, and they also place this phrase in quotation marks, arguing that this was a catchphrase used by some in the Corinthian church to justify self-indulgence in physical things. After all, the body is just a temporary dwelling place for the spirit; what does it matter how we use it? How can there be a moral component in mere physicality? We're just born this way.
There is a plausibility to this argument and even an element of truth to it. Paul will say similar things regarding food elsewhere. From my limited understanding, this was a position taken by some of the Greek philosophers—that because the body was a temporary, transitory thing, it really didn't matter what one did with it. The spirit was all that mattered. It's easy to see how some, even among the Christians at Corinth, would have bought into this philosophy.
But Paul gives his final argument—and while this is about fornication, it has a wider application. “Now the body is not fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.”
What does this mean? To answer that, we have to go back to Genesis 2:7. “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” We see this—from the very beginning, when God created man, He created him as a physical being, made out of the same elements that compose the physical universe.
The fact that we exist in physical bodies with the appetites and desires that entail is not an accident. This isn't some trick of Satan's, though the introduction of sin did cause corruption for the body. This is always was God intended us to be.
But this is more interesting if we go back to the first, more brief account of creation in Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” In the beginning, God created man as male and female and, more specifically, as husband and wife. The first command was to start a family.
God had a plan for a man, and specifically for man's physicality. This is not a side matter to unimportant for God to care about. To be a Christian means belonging to God fully, body as well as spirit. As Paul will say in a few verses: “For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.” (1 Corinthians 6:20)
Our body belongs to God as much as our spirit. But this is not a one-sided relationship. God also cares about and has plans for our bodies. Paul says that the Lord is for the body. Albert Barnes explains Paul's argument, saying, “The Lord is, in an important sense, for the body; that is, he acts, and plans, and provides for it. He sustains and keeps it; and he is making provision for its immortal purity and happiness in heaven.”
The body belongs to God and is not a temporary thing—in verse 14, Paul points to the fact that God will use his power to raise the body, just as He raised the body of Christ. This foreshadows the discussion of the resurrection in Chapter 15. But this points back to the fact that our physical existence is intentional and will in some way be eternal.
This is the final argument. The final reason given regarding why a Christian should live a careful life, especially concerning the body. Our physical life and what we choose to do with it is something of great importance because it was made by God, made for His purposes, and made to prepare us for eternity.
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