I Corinthians 5:1-13
Welcome!
Today we continue our series in I Corinthians, looking at Chapter 5. Today’s
passage is a challenging one, hard to hear, but I think its message was never
more applicable than it is today. In previous chapters in I Corinthians, Paul has
focused primarily on divisions in the church and on their immaturity as a
whole. Through all this, however, he has also reminded them of who they are in
Christ. But now he moves on to an additional issue in their church, sexual
immorality.
Now
when we began this series on I Corinthians about two months ago, we emphasized
that the book was written to the body of believers as a whole in Corinth and
also to all believers, each in their local bodies, everywhere. It is important
when looking at today’s passage to remember that this letter was written to the
church corporately; that is, it
contains many instructions on how a local body of believers, working together,
led by elders but also individually equipped by the Holy Spirit, were to act
and behave.
We
have a tendency, I think especially in America, to only look at how verses
apply to us individually. This is a mistake. We should, when reading scripture,
simultaneously think about how it applies to us individually and how it applies
to us in our togetherness, as a body of believers. Our highly individualistic
culture affects each one of us more than we know. But the reality, abundantly
clear from nearly countless verses of scripture, is that God speaks to us
individually and corporately, He
blesses us individually and corporately, and He chastises us individually and
corporately. This corporate view is essential in understanding today’s passage.
Here is how I Corinthians 5 begins:
It
is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind
that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife.
And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into
mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this?
– I Cor. 5:1-2
The Greek term for “sexual immorality”
here is porneia. It refers to any
kind of sexual sin, anything outside of the husband-wife relationship. The root
word, porne, referred to a
prostitute, but the full form was quite general. We get our word pornography from this word; the
“-graphy” part originally referred to writing, but of course today the word
primarily refers to viewing illicit images or videos.
Note that Paul in the first sentence is
expressing an emotion – what is that emotion? Shock. Sadly, our increasingly
perverse culture is making us harder and harder to shock. Worst of all, there
have been so many publicized episodes of outrageous behavior and hypocrisy in the church that people aren’t shocked
about what goes on in the church either. Obviously, this should not be, and one
of the reasons Paul is addressing this so bluntly here is because it must not be, because it destroys the
credibility of the church. Jesus told His disciples in John 13:35 that outside people
would come to know that the disciples were true disciples of Christ by the agape love, the self-sacrificing,
abiding-in-Christ love they had for one another. This type of love is pure.
It’s not blatantly disobedient to God. Yes, there is grace and forgiveness for
the sinner, and yes, we are all sinners, but that grace and forgiveness is for
the sinner who repents, who admits their sin, and who asks for help from God
and from the local body to help change.
Grace and forgiveness is not tolerance,
our favorite buzzword of today. In some ways, tolerance is the opposite of
grace and forgiveness. Tolerance isn’t actually love, because it encourages the
sinner to just keep on sinning even though to do so is to be blatantly opposed
to God Himself, and that is not going to work out well. The wages of sin is
death, and worse than death. If your friend was addicted to something that
would certainly kill him, to be “tolerant” of him is not to love him; instead, it
is to condemn him to death!
And in fact, as you look at what Paul is
saying here, he is precisely accusing them of, well, tolerance! And they are
proud, Paul says. They feel good about themselves because they are so tolerant. Paul is giving the
written equivalent of a slap in the face here, saying, “Wake up! What in the
world are you doing?!”
Now I hate to say it, but all across
America you can find churches that are remarkably similar to Corinth. Their
current emphasis is on welcoming the homosexual community, not so that they can
come to Christ, be saved, and begin the process of healing, but on letting them
come and remain just as they are.
This is the latest unfortunate chapter in these churches’ experience, but it is
important to understand that these types of churches have been extremely broken
for a very long time. There is a book called Christianity and Liberalism written in the early 1900s that sounds
like it was written today. The root problems of liberalism include not taking
the Scriptures literally or seriously; the emphasis is often on feel-good
pop-psychology and self-help. (Note, for clarity, that this religious meaning of liberalism has
almost nothing to do with the political
meaning; I am not at all talking about politics here.)
Now, note that what so shocks Paul is
not so much that this sin is going on, but that they are doing nothing or even
condoning it. The Greek wording for “the father’s wife”, rather than using
“mother”, means that the father has remarried, and the inappropriate
relationship is between the man and his stepmother. This was in fact a taboo
relationship even for the lascivious Greeks; it was condemned strongly in
writings by the orator Cicero, the playwright Euripides, and even by the
love-obsessed poet Catullus. (One reason in homeschooling Latin with our
children that we used a specifically Christian curriculum is that we didn’t
want our children to be reading the R-rated poetry of Catullus that is often a
part of secular Latin courses.)
And so, again, at this point in the
letter, Paul is not specifically focusing on the sin of the individual
committing this sin, but on the sin of the church in, at best, doing nothing
about it, or at worst, condoning or even celebrating it. Paul tells them how they should instead have
responded – by mourning that such a thing could be going on their body and by
removing the man from their fellowship.
Now a good question to ask is “Where is
the woman?” Apparently she was not a part of the church. That doesn’t mean she
went to a different church; this letter is addressed to the church in Corinth, not the First Baptist Church of Corinth or
Corinth Community Church. Most likely she was an unbeliever altogether, one who
worshiped some combination of Greek and Roman gods to the degree that she
worshiped anything at all beyond herself. (It is also possible she was
nominally Jewish.)
For
my part, even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. As
one who is present with you in this way, I have already passed judgment in the
name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this.
So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the
power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over
to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on
the day of the Lord. – I Cor. 5:3-5
What is Paul saying here? First, he is
saying, “What are you waiting for?” Paul, from the report he has received,
doesn’t need to conduct extensive interviews or take a multi-month “let’s wait
and see” attitude. He is saying, look, the guy is unrepentant; he even probably
takes pride in his actions. He is not open to correction.
Now Jesus spoke about disciplining those
in unrepentant sin in Matt. 18:
“If
your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two
of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.
But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so
that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three
witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the
church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you
would a pagan or a tax collector.” – Matt. 18:15-17
Now in preparing for
this message I‘ve really wrestled with this passage, because at the time Jesus
said this, there was no church yet. He hadn’t yet talked about the Holy-Spirit
empowered church that would arise after His death and resurrection; He had
barely talked about His death and resurrection at all at this point. So what
was He talking about?
Well, if you look at
the beginning of the chapter, it seems that everything Jesus is saying here is
directed to His disciples whom He repeatedly calls adelphos which the NIV translates somewhat awkwardly but correctly as
“brother or sister.” The word translated “church” here is ekklesia which literally means “called-out ones,” and normally it
does refer to the New Testament church. But prior to being used in this
specific Christian sense, it simply meant a public gathering of people called
out to hear something, and so what I think Jesus meant is that they were to
call out the other disciples in their locality together and tell them.
Now I firmly believe
Jesus’ instructions in Matthew 18 were both for His disciples at that time and for the New Testament church too,
because we are called what? His
disciples! The Great Commission in Matthew is to go and make disciples
throughout the earth; so this is what we are. So I do think this passage
applies to us, but it’s not just a “church discipline” sort of thing; I think
it applies more broadly. If you met with a bunch of co-workers to study the
Bible together, and one of the married attendees is in an affair with his
secretary, this passage absolutely applies to you even if you all attend
different churches.
Now some might say,
“Well, yeah, he’s sinning, but he’s not sinning against me,” so it’s not my responsibility.
It’s interesting that the NIV and NASB simply say to do this if he or she
“sins,” whereas the KJV says “sins against you.” Which is it? Well, this is one
of the very few places where the earliest manuscripts and some later
manuscripts disagree; the earliest manuscripts simply say “sins.” In any case,
if you combine the message of Matthew 18:15-17 with that of today’s passage in
I Corinthians, the question is moot, because nothing in what Paul says implies
that you should only act if the sin is personally against you; in fact, in the
next few verses Paul is going to explain why
it is so important to act. This is another example of something that goes
deeply against the grain of our culture; the idea that “Let people do whatever
they want as long as it hurts nobody else” has been a part of America’s psyche
for a very long time. The Bible does not agree with this view!
Before we go back to I
Corinthians, let me comment on the “Treat them as you would a pagan or tax
collector.” Now by pagans what Jesus meant was simply non-Jews, those who
worshiped foreign gods, the gods of the Greeks and Romans, and these were the
people of the prevailing culture. As for tax collectors, because they listed
separately from pagans, it is likely Jesus meant Jewish tax collectors. Tax collectors at that time were almost
universally corrupt, involved in extortion and bribery. Some commentators have
suggested that even with regards to the pagans Jesus may have meant Jewish pagans, people of Jewish
background and heritage that had completely forsaken the God of their
ancestors, the true God, to worship the false gods of the people around them. I
think this view has some merit. In any case, when Jesus says to treat those who
would not listen about their faults, their sins, as one would a pagan or tax
collector, what did He mean?
Well, there are two
schools of thought here. The first school of thought, the one you hear more of
today, would ask how Jesus would have
treated pagans or tax collectors. Well, how did
Jesus treat them? Well, you might
want to ask Matthew, the author of this passage, because he was himself a
former tax collector! The answer of course, is that Jesus spent time with
people like this, the very people society loved to hate, and He shared the gospel,
the good news, with them. He showed His love for them to them, but at the same
time He didn’t treat them as disciples. He went to them; not condoning their
sin, but calling them to Him, to leave their past lives behind and learn what
it meant to live for Him. And so, the first school of thought is to treat them
like all other unbelievers, who, first and foremost, need to hear about Christ.
The second school of
thought, the one you rarely hear today, would point out that, Jews would not be
neutral to such people, particularly Jewish pagans and tax collectors; instead,
they would have as little to do with them as possible. This second view is that
Jesus meant to basically treat them as people to avoid. This doesn’t mean you
would need to be rude or anything, but these would be people you don’t make
friends with. You wouldn’t invite them to your parties, or friend them on
Facebook, or otherwise act as if they were fine upstanding people, because they
weren’t.
If they approached you
as a friend, you would maintain politeness, but do nothing to encourage the
relationship to grow; you would not reciprocate the actions. In this second
school of thought, the idea is that because these people have refused to
respond appropriately, to acknowledge what they have done or to make wrongs
right again, they are like those who have kept their Jewishness in name only,
like those Jewish pagans or tax collectors, and you treat them as you would
these others.
Where do I fall on this
question, School 1 or School 2? I think we should do a little of both. Unless
they are open to freshly thinking about the gospel, I think you lean towards
the second approach; but if they are genuinely open, then by all means spend
time with them. But this is not “lifestyle evangelism,” where you take 10 parts
friendship to 1 part gospel-sharing. Rather than 10 to 1, it should be more
like 1 to 10, because otherwise the person won’t actually feel expelled at all.
This is all very difficult, but you don’t want to send a mixed message.
Coming back to our I
Corinthians passage:
For
my part, even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. As
one who is present with you in this way, I have already passed judgment in the
name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this.
So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the
power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over
to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on
the day of the Lord. – I Cor. 5:3-5
Paul is arguing that
the man should be expelled from their fellowship. Does that mean he is ignoring
the steps of Matt. 18? We can’t say with certainty, because this letter is a
response to a report Paul had already received from Corinth, a report we don’t
have access to today. It’s possible that the process was started by some of the
faithful in the church in Corinth, but it obviously didn’t finish. Whether the
church had started the Matthew 18 process or not, it had botched things very
badly by allowing things to come to the place that the church was notorious
even to outsiders for its tolerance or even promotion of sexual deviancy.
The Matt. 18 process
did not (and does not) need to take a long time. It could move very quickly to
the point of expelling him from their assembly. Obviously if, in that process,
he were to repent, that would change everything. Again, we don’t have the
report Paul received, but I suspect it was already clear that this man was not
going to repent.
What does Paul mean by
“handing this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh”? This is another way of saying to remove him
from your fellowship. Recall that the world is still Satan’s; he lost his right
of ownership when Jesus gave Himself up for us in obedience to the Father and
then rose from the dead, but Jesus hasn’t yet collected the “keys to the
house.” Handing this man over to Satan means expelling him from your fellowship
back into the “world.” It doesn’t mean to ignore him or be rude to him when you
see him on the street, but it does mean to treat him as someone who has been
expelled for a serious sin.
Will this be hard? Will
this be awkward? Absolutely! But it is critical to understand that none of this
is about hate. It’s actually about love. This man’s problem is that his fleshly
lusts control him. These fleshly lusts need to die. He may need to experience
the worldly consequences of his sin, “hit bottom,” to use the terminology of those
who treat addicts, so that he can finally repent and turn away from his sin.
The goal is that his spirit be saved; that he return to Christ or that he genuinely
come to Christ for the first time, as the case may be.
Your
boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole
batch of dough? Get rid of the old
yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ,
our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let
us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and
wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. – I Cor. 5:6-8
They were a boastful
church. I don’t know if they were wearing t-shirts that said “My Church is
Great” or what exactly, but they were ignoring the seriousness of their problem
with immorality. To use a term quite popular today, they had great self-esteem.
I am reminded of the tests that show that Americans are number one in the whole
world in math – did you know that? – well, when it comes to self-esteem, that
is. We are number one in feeling that we are good at math. In terms of our
actual performance, as of the 2012 PISA study (program for international student advancement), our rank is
31st. (In 2009 we were 25th.) The Corinthians had a problem like this – they
felt good but were blind to the seriousness of their actual situation. And this
is a warning for all churches, all local bodies of believers – we need to look
honestly at what is going on among us.
Paul uses yeast as a
powerful illustration of the problem that results from allowing this person’s
sin to continue in the church without taking action. Yeast is a living organism
that essentially burps up carbon dioxide bubbles as it feeds on the sugar in
bread dough. It also causes fermentation, resulting in a somewhat sour flavor.
When making sourdough bread, you keep a little of the old batch of dough as a
“starter” for the new batch, and before long it permeates the entire new batch
of dough. What Paul is implying is that immorality, like yeast, can multiply if
it is not removed. People in the church observe this person’s behavior, see
there are no consequences, and, perhaps, even without making a deliberate
choice, start to adjust their own standards.
Ask anyone who spends
time with toddlers whether this is profoundly true for toddlers –the answer is
“absolutely!” Furthermore, and unfortunately, toddlers seem to only pick up bad habits from fellow toddlers, never
good ones! Are we “old” people immune from this? Unfortunately, no. Furthermore,
those few who don’t adjust their
standards may get so disillusioned that they start to “tune out” or even leave
the church.
Notice that this is
actually Paul’s third reason for
putting the unrepentant person out; the first was the tarnished reputation of
the church to outsiders, the second was that it is for the person’s own good –
they might as a result actually repent, and now the third is that this sin can
corrupt or infect the entire church.
Paul ties in the
practice of Passover, where one would hunt down and remove all leavened bread
from one’s home (every crumb!) and eat only unleavened bread with the Passover
lamb. The analogy he makes is that in the “new” Passover ceremony (what he
calls the Festival), the lamb is Christ, and the bread should be us. That is, we should be “unleavened,”
without “yeast,” or in other words, without allowing continued unrepentant sin
in our midst.
I
wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at
all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and
swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.
But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with
anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy,
an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such
people. – I Cor. 5:9-11
Here we see evidence that this is an
ongoing problem and that I Corinthians is not the first letter they have
received from Paul dealing with this area. Here Paul makes a clear distinction
between sinners inside the church and
sinners outside the church, between
those who claim to be Christians and those who do not make such claims. He
makes it clear that he is talking only about believers, or those who claim to
be believers. He is not addressing conduct to those outside the church except
to say that yes, you associate with them. From elsewhere in Scripture, and as
we have already talked about, we know this includes reaching out to them,
befriending them, and sharing the gospel with them as opportunities arise.
But for this divisive person unrepentant
in their sin, Paul is saying no, do
not even eat with them. Going back to our Matt. 18 passage, this is consistent
with our second interpretation of what it means to treat them as a pagan or tax
collector. Also, Paul expands his list of who to put out of the church,
including the greedy, idolaters, slanderers, drunkards, and swindlers. The
context should be understand in the same light as our sexually immoral person
discussed at the beginning of the chapter; in each case, we are only talking
about people who essentially boast in their sin, who are unrepentant, who,
because of this, are a corrupting influence on the rest of the church. This is
not at all talking about someone struggling with sin who has agreed that what
they have done is wrong, who has repented, who is taking steps to change. For
example, this would not apply to an alcoholic who is trying to get sober but
for whom it is a mighty struggle.
Now the verses do not go into particular
detail about how to ascertain where to “draw the line.” In my opinion, the
questions to ask are: (1) Does the person agree that their behavior is wrong?
(2) Are they trying to change? (3) Are they open to reasonable and appropriate
recommendations from the leadership (or from their friends, depending on who is
involved) about practical steps to take? (For example, if the issue is
alcoholism, practical steps might include joining an AA group or receiving
counseling from someone trained – hopefully someone with a Christian approach
to counseling – in helping people overcome addiction.) I use the words
“reasonable and appropriate” because in my opinion sometimes churches can
overprescribe a course of action. For
leaders and others to know how to appropriately proceed requires much wisdom,
prayer, and grace from God.
Paul ends this subject of corporate
response to sin within the church with the following words of summary:
What
business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge
those inside? God will judge those
outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.” – I Cor. 5:12-13
I
think these verses are pretty self-explanatory. They are not pleasant to think
about, but they are important: vitally so. I believe that, every day, local churches
are being destroyed by Satan from within because their members do not practice
the teachings of this chapter. We at Clemson Community Church pray that we
would not have to do what this chapter teaches, but we stand ready to do so if
we must.
As
a practical note, unfortunately what often happens today is that a person
continuing in sin chooses to voluntarily leave the church before the public
declaration of expelling the person takes place, much like how a non-performing
CEO “steps down for personal reasons” to avoid being fired. I personally
wrestle with the question about whether such voluntary leaving negates the
responsibility of the leadership to still inform the church of the situation;
my feeling is that in many cases the responsibility remains, because the body
still needs to know so that outside of church they can know not to “associate”
with the person, as Paul describes in verses 10-11.
Again,
the reason for doing this is not to be mean, but to hopefully help the person
to come to their senses and repent. And Fred and others in the church can tell
you of wonderful instances where a local church followed these steps, put the
person out of the church, and later the person repented and was sincerely thankful that the church did this,
because it led to his repentance before God and the restoration of his
relationship with Christ.
I
want to end today by saying a bit more about the Passover analogy Paul brings
up. The stated reason the Israelites were to use unleavened bread, matzah, at
Passover, was that yeast-based bread takes time to rise, and they were to
remember the haste at which they left Egypt. The one thing I want to point out
is that the root word behind matzah means to drain out or suck in the sense of
greedily devouring for sweetness. Growing up Jewish, I tended to dislike
Passover, and particularly I disliked matzah. I think a big part of the reason
I disliked matzah was that I had to bring it to school and I hated all the
attention it drew to me; because of it, everyone thought I was truly weird.
But,
with our kids, on the rare occasion that Mimi and I have had matzah in our home
(for example, after using matzah for a communion this past spring), our kids thought
it was terrific, and they seemingly “greedily devoured it for sweetness.” Upon
reflection, I realized that it actually does taste sweet, and the reason is
that there isn’t any yeast in there to digest all the sugar and make it taste
relatively sour. (There is a reason sourdough bread is called sourdough.)
My
point is that the world teaches us that the “unleavened life” (the life of a
Christian who sincerely seeks to follow God) is the sour life, and the “leavened
life” (the life of a non-Christian allowing himself to satisfy every whim and
desire) is the sweet life. In reality, this is completely backwards. It is the
unleavened life that is the sweet one, and the leavened life that is sour. As
Paul says, let us keep the Festival. Let us be the unleavened church, the sweet
church, God made us to be.
And
finally, if you are struggling with sin, remember that Jesus has already won
the victory for you; you still have a role to play, but the power is in Him,
victory over sin is in Him, and because He never sinned, there is no one
“sweeter” than Him. Taste and see that the Lord is good! Devour Him for
sweetness!
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