1 Corinthians6chapter 6

1 Corinthians 6:1-3

Paul opens with astonishment that Corinthian believers would carry disputes before pagan magistrates, before the unjust, rather than settling them within the church, before the saints, the very people Scripture says will one day judge the world. The saints shall judge the world draws on a strand of Jewish and Christian expectation that the redeemed will share in Christ's own judgment of the age to come, an idea verse 3 pushes further still to include the judgment of angels. If believers are destined for that scale of judgment, Paul reasons, the smallest matters of ordinary Corinthian business ought to be well within the church's competence now.

1 Corinthians 6:4

The verse can be read as command or as irony, and the bench favors irony, Paul mocking the practice by suggesting the Corinthians would rather trust their disputes to men the church itself esteems least than settle them among believers of any standing. Either reading lands on the same rebuke, that a congregation with real wisdom in its own ranks is instead handing its quarrels to outsiders who share nothing of the church's values. The bench reads verse 4 as continuing rather than answering verse 3's question, the absurdity still building toward the direct challenge of verse 5.

1 Corinthians 6:5-6

Paul names the shame directly, asking whether not one wise man exists in the whole congregation able to arbitrate between brothers, a pointed question to a church that had just prided itself on its wisdom in chapters 1 through 4. But brother goeth to law with brother states the concrete scandal plainly, a family dispute, believers bound by the same Lord, carried before the unbelievers for judgment. The bench notes the double wound in the practice, the loss to the brother wronged and the witness lost before a watching pagan court, which now sees Christians unable to govern themselves.

1 Corinthians 6:7-8

Paul locates the real defeat before any verdict is reached, the fact of litigation between believers already being utterly a fault, regardless of who wins the case. Why do ye not rather take wrong, why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded, presses toward the standard the Sermon on the Mount had already set, that forgoing one's own rights can serve the kingdom better than securing them. Verse 8 turns the accusation around bluntly, nay, ye do wrong, and defraud, and that your brethren, suggesting some at Corinth were not merely litigating but actively wronging fellow believers.

1 Corinthians 6:9-10

The wrong just named leads Paul to a broader warning, be not deceived, since a pattern of unrepentant sin, not any single failure, is what excludes a person from inheriting the kingdom of God. The list running through verse 10 names fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, and the sexually immoral alongside thieves, the covetous, drunkards, revilers, and extortioners, deliberately mixing categories Corinth might have ranked as respectable sin with categories it already condemned. The bench reads the list as representative rather than exhaustive, its force lying in the warning that habitual, unrepented sin of any of these kinds is genuinely incompatible with the kingdom, not in a ranked catalogue of the worst offenses.

1 Corinthians 6:11

Verse 11 answers the list's severity with the gospel's own reversal, and such were some of you naming the Corinthian congregation's own past among exactly those sins. The threefold but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified traces conversion's full shape, washed from the guilt and practice of sin, set apart as God's own, and declared righteous, all three grounded in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. The bench treats this verse as the letter's clearest single statement that no sin named in verse 9 or 10 is beyond the gospel's reach, since the very people Paul addresses had once stood inside that list.

1 Corinthians 6:12

Paul appears to quote a Corinthian slogan, all things are lawful unto me, evidently used to justify indulgence, and answers it twice with the same qualifying but, lawful is not the same question as expedient or beneficial. I will not be brought under the power of any states Paul's own personal rule, refusing to let any lawful thing master him even where it is technically permitted. The bench reads the verse as governing the argument that follows on sexual immorality, since the same slogan was apparently being stretched to excuse fornication as a mere bodily appetite like any other.

1 Corinthians 6:13-14

Paul concedes the Corinthian analogy only to overturn it, food and the stomach existing for each other temporarily, both destined for destruction, while the body's true purpose runs in a wholly different direction, not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. The parallel construction insists the body is not neutral machinery like digestion but belongs to Christ in a relationship that is mutual, the Lord likewise given for the body's sake. Verse 14 grounds the claim in the resurrection itself, God having raised up the Lord and promising to raise believers by the same power, so that the body's future glory rules out treating it as disposable now.

1 Corinthians 6:15-17

Paul presses the union just described into its practical consequence, the believer's body being a member of Christ himself, so that joining it to a harlot would make Christ's own member one with her, a thought Paul rejects with his strongest negative, God forbid. For two, saith he, shall be one flesh quotes Genesis 2:24 to establish that sexual union creates a real one-body bond regardless of any professed detachment, the act itself doing something no intention can undo. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit sets the believer's union with Christ as the deeper, governing bond, the standard against which every other union, sexual or otherwise, is measured.

1 Corinthians 6:18

The command is fight or flight rather than argument, flee fornication giving no room for negotiating with the temptation the way one might reason with a lesser appetite. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body draws a contrast many read as Paul's own summary rather than a Corinthian slogan, most sins being committed through the body as an instrument while sexual sin uniquely involves the body as its own object. The bench notes this is the theological ground for the flee rather than resist, since a sin against one's own body carries a uniquely internal damage no other transgression matches in Paul's argument here.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20

The chapter's climax names what the believer's body actually is, the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, applying to the individual believer the same sanctity 3:16 had applied to the whole congregation. Which ye have of God, and ye are not your own strips away the assumption behind the Corinthian slogan of verse 12, since a temple does not belong to its own occupant but to the God who indwells it. For ye are bought with a price recalls the redemption price paid at the cross, and therefore glorify God in your body closes the whole discussion of chapters 5 and 6 with the positive command every prohibition has been serving.